Winners Of 2007 George Polk Awards

The George Polk Awards were announced this week. The categories change each year, but in foreign news reporting the winners are,

Senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto, producer Angus Hines and cameraman/producer Tom Murphy for the program “ABC World News with Charles Gibson” will share the George Polk Award for Television Reporting. Last fall, Sciutto and the team were able to penetrate Myanmar’s news blackout during the government’s crackdown on peaceful demonstrations involving students and Buddhist monks, which were held to protest a decision to sharply raise fuel prices. During two forays into Myanmar, also known as Burma, the journalists posed as tourists, secretly transmitting video evidence of government repression, sometimes recording with cell-phone cameras while evading security forces.
Leila Fadel, Baghdad bureau chief for California-based McClatchy Company, publisher of 30 newspapers nationwide, will be honored with the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Her work provided a comprehensive array of disturbing, first-hand accounts of violence and conflict by juxtaposing the agonizing plight of families in ethnically torn neighborhoods with the braggadocio of a vengeful insurgent proud of his murderous exploits. link

Established in 1949 in memory of George Polk, a CBS reporter killed during the Greek civil war, the awards are presented annually by Long Island University.