Venelin Petkov's TV documentary A Journey Across Afghanistan: Opium and Roses won the George Foster Peabody award for broadcasting excellence in news and entertainment, the oldest and possibly most prestigious honour in electronic media in the United States.

In April 2007, the crew of Bulgaria's Balkan News Corporation (bTV) took off to a mountain valley in eastern Afghanistan, where poppies are usually grown for opium. Their Afghan driver spoke Bulgarian. The journey was rather dangerous; just weeks before that, the Taliban kidnapped Italian journalist Danielle Mastrogiacomo and his Afghan crew. The reporter is later released, but his driver and interpreter are killed. The first episode of this three-part series shows the daily life of ordinary people in a remote region for whom the growing of poppies for opium is the only source of sustenance. The record-breaking opium production in 2006 and 2007 turn Afghanistan into a narco-economy, but international efforts to extinguish the crops have failed so far.

Opium and Roses shows farmers from the northern parts of Nangarhar, one of the thirty-four province of Afghanistan, who have decided to trade the growing of poppies for growing roses for rose oil.

“Surprising and visually distinctive, this Bulgarian networks' road trip yielded a rare, everyday Afghan perspective on the fighting between Taliban and western troops, while revealing fascinating efforts to supplant the growing of opium poppies with rose bushes to produce rose oil,” wrote the awards program organisers on their website.

Petkov's documentary is in exceptional company; among the 35 award recipients are documentary and investigative pieces from CNN, BBC, Discovery and some of the leading TV stations in the US.

This year's Peabody recipients reflect great diversity in content, genre and source of origination. They included The Colbert Report, Comedy Central's cable-news satire, Whole Lotta Shakin, the Texas Heritage Music Foundation`s rollicking public-radio series chronicling the 1950s heyday of rockabilly music received the award, and Univision`s Ya Es Hora, a public-service campaign that taught legal aliens how to apply for American citizenship.

The Peabody winners were announced by the University of Georgia ahead of a ceremony in New York City on June 16, to be hosted by NBC news anchor Brian Williams.