Journalists killed while reporting on military conflicts this year were remembered at the 2003 One World Media Awards.
Gaby Rado, the Channel 4 News foreign correspondent who died while reporting from Iraq, won the television news award with the last piece he filed before heading out to the Gulf in March.
Romanian Sex-Slave Trade looked at the plight of young sex workers being exploited by unscrupulous human traffickers. The judges called the report “a piece of great originality and a fitting memorial to the work of Gaby Rado”.
The producer of the report, Chris Boulding, who accepted the award with cameraman Ray Queally, said Rado was one of the finest journalists of his generation, and as such, the award had not been given out of sentimentality. He also thanked the judges “for recognising his work and his memory”.
Award-winning television journalist Saira Shah, still tearful from the tribute to former colleague Rado, took to the stage to praise her friend and cameraman James Miller, who was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip last month while they were filming a documentary about how the conflict there was affecting children.
“It is so cruel that he died before he could show people what he was capable of doing,” she said. She also demanded justice for his death, saying there must be full investigation into his shotting “and not just a military police inquiry”.
“All lives have value. The same could have happened to any of the other nominees, or some version of it. In actually acknowledging what went wrong, perhaps another soldier won’t be so hasty to pull the trigger.”
Judiciously, Promises, a Channel 4 documentary giving children’s perspective on the Arab-Israeli conflict from both sides of the divide, won the children’s rights award.
The TV documentary award went to BBC Two’s Motherland, which was judged to be a “brilliant and unforgettable programme” for its exploration of shared racial heritage and distinct cultural barriers between Africans and white Europeans.
Algeria, a joint report from Radio 4’s The World Today and the World Service, took the radio news award, while the radio documentary prize went to On The Ebola Front Line, produced by Virginia Crompton and narrated by David Dimbleby, also for Radio 4. Judges said the programme “enabled the people to speak for themselves”.
Sarah Boseley, health editor of The Guardian, won the press award for “Saving Grace”, a supplement on Aids for the paper published in February.
The awards were presented by Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow.
By Wale Azeez
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog