Palestinian journalists have swept the board at this year’s Rory Peck Awards at London’s BFI Southbank. For the second successive year, coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza won all four open categories, with the Channel 4 team based in Gaza winning the inaugural ‘Freelance Journalist of the Year’ award.
This year’s Awards were hosted by CNN anchor Christina Macfarlane and paid tribute the man who presented the very first Rory Peck Awards 30 years ago, ITN newscaster Sandy Gall.
Sandy helped establish the Trust in 1995. He died in July. He was 97. His children, including New York Times senior foreign correspondent, Carlotta Gall, were in the audience to hear the Chief Executive of ITN lead the tributes to the former News at Ten presenter. On stage, Rachel Corp read a profile of Rory written by Sandy for those first awards three decades earlier.
The BBC’s Chief International correspondent, Lyse Doucet, presented the first Rory Peck Fellowship to the team from BBC Persian. She told of the harsassment both the service’s journalists in London had faced, as well as their families back home in Iran. No journalist, she said, should face that sort of intimidation simply for doing their job.
Opening the Awards, the Executive Director of the Rory Peck Trust, Jon Williams said the news industry was “in a war for truth itself” and he urged colleagues to stand together: “Press freedom never collapses in one dramatic moment. It erodes — piece by piece — as fear replaces truth, repression becomes routine, and silence is normalised” said Williams. “Take on one of us, you take on all of us. We need to stand together: across the industry and across borders.”