"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" was directed by both Lee and Pollard and was selected for the documentary category of the annual George Polk Awards.

Other Polk honorees this year include: Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) for foreign reporting; NBC News' Lisa Myers and Adam Ciralsky for network television reporting; Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman of the Hartford Courant for military reporting; Robert Little of the Baltimore Sun for medical reporting;

Kenneth Weiss and Usha Lee McFarling of The Los Angeles Times for environmental reporting; Charles Forelle, James Bandler and Mark Maremont of The Wall Street Journal for business reporting; Jeff Kosseff, Bryan Denson and Les Zaitz of The Oregonian for national reporting; Debbie Cenziper of The Miami Herald for metropolitan reporting;

The staff of the Lakefront Outlook, in the Chicago area, for local reporting; Ray Ring of the High Country News in Wyoming for political reporting; and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, American Public Media and Living on Earth for radio reporting.

The journalism awards, named for the CBS correspondent murdered covering the Greek civil war in 1948, are given by Long Island University and selected by a committee of university faculty members and alumni. The awards are to formally be presented April 12 in New York.