Since 1986, WFAA's news department has won six Peabody Awards, with a seventh awarded personally to Marty Haag, WFAA's executive news director from 1973 to 1989 and vice president of news operations for Belo Corporation afterward. WFAA was honored with Peabody Awards in 1986 (for an investigative report that led to the Southern Methodist University Mustangs' "death penalty" sanction by the NCAA), 1995 (for "The Peavy Investigation", a "revealing series of reports into insurance purchases involving the Dallas Independent School District[...] centered on the chairman of the Board of Education's Committee on Insurance"), 2002 (for the investigative report series "Fake Drugs, Real Lives", about confidential informants who worked with Dallas police that planted powdered Sheetrock or billiard chalk near unsuspecting Mexican immigrants to "contrive drug cases"), 2004 (for "State of Denial", a long-running series into improprieties in the Texas Workers Compensation Commission, part of the Texas Department of Insurance), 2007 (for four separate investigative stories: "Money for Nothing", about a major U.S. financial institution that made loans to non-existent companies in Mexico; "The Buried and the Dead", on the safety issues of pipelines carrying gas into homes; "Television Justice", about regional law-enforcement officers who collaborated with news crews to produce a prime time television program; and "Kinder Prison", on the deplorable conditions at a juvenile detention facility) and 2010 (for "Bitter Lessons," an investigation into government-funded career schools). The station has also been recognized with several national Edward R. Murrow Awards and eight duPont-Columbia University Silver Batons.