ABC7 wins Peabody Award for coverage of 2025 January wildfires

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- ABC7, along with ABC News, has been recognized with a Peabody Award for our coverage of the 2025 January wildfires.

The Palisades Fire and deadly Eaton Fire last year upended thousands of lives, turning several communities into disaster zones.

The award, one of the biggest awards in journalism, highlights the work the station did during the firestorm, bringing the community important updates about the fires as they burned and the ongoing coverage of the recovery efforts.

In its announcement, the Peabody Awards committee wrote the following:

"The 2025 wildfires in Southern California redefined the terrain of an American city, upending untold numbers of families' lives, and serving as grim warning of what climate change might bring with increasing frequency. In this, the fires were both a local and national story, and ABC News leveraged its reporting team at every level to cover it with the gravity that the story, and the victims at its center, deserved. ABC's flagship properties Good Morning America and World News Tonight brought their resources to bear on the unfolding crisis and, especially, its aftermath, as Angelenos wondered whether rebuilding would even be possible. But their partners at local affiliate KABC were there from the fire's first moments, demonstrating grit, tenacity, and true humanity. Indeed, KABC showed the continued utility of television in moments of emergency, sharing vital information about the inferno's spread and a deep and abiding interest in how neighbors were making it through. For courage in the most challenging of reporting circumstances, and for an insistence on honoring the community interest over the sensational, ABC News and KABC win a Peabody Award."