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Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007

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NEW YORK -- Director Spike Lee was named Tuesday as a winner of the annual George Polk Awards for his documentary on life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Lee, the director of "Malcolm X" and "Do the Right Thing," was honored for "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," along with its producer, Sam Pollard. They won the award for documentary television for illustrating evidence of the government's poor performance in the aftermath of the August 2005 storm.

Other 2006 winners included New York Times correspondent Lydia Polgreen, honored in foreign reporting for her reports on the carnage in Sudan's Darfur region, and the staff of the free-circulation weekly Lakefront Outlook in Chicago, cited for its expose on cronyism at the Harold Washington Cultural Center.

The 12 awards, considered among the top prizes in U.S. journalism, were announced Tuesday by Long Island University. The Polk Awards, created in 1949 in honor of CBS reporter George W. Polk, who was killed while covering the Greek civil war, will be presented April 12 in New York.

Lee made eight trips to New Orleans and interviewed about 100 people while filming the documentary, which aired on HBO. Pollard is Lee's longtime collaborator, and the pair worked together previously on "Mo' Better Blues,""Jungle Fever,""Girl 6,""Clockers" and "Bamboozled."

© 2007 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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