The Human Rights Press Awards for Asia yesterday hosted its annual ceremony in Taiwan for the first time, celebrating journalism and human rights in a nation ranked best in Asia for press freedom.
Taiwan boasts freedom of the press and has become an important hub for international media, being home to 176 correspondents from 86 media outlets from 22 countries as of last month, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said at the event in Taipei.
However, authoritarian regimes are constantly attempting to influence the nation’s media environment and democracy, and polarize Taiwanese society through disinformation campaigns and propaganda, Tsai said.
Photo: Screen grab from the Presidential Office’s Flickr page
It takes all sectors of society to act together to combat disinformation with timely and transparent clarification, research on authoritarian information manipulation and media literacy lessons, she said.
“Taiwan will continue to stand up for democracy, freedom and human rights,” she said.
Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club president Thompson Chau (周浩霖) called on the government to “remain committed to press freedom, provide more access and ease regulations on foreign media workers.”
The winners and runners-up this year were announced on Thursday last week — to mark World Press Freedom Day the following day.
The organizers — Human Rights Watch, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism, and the foreign correspondents’ clubs in Taiwan and Thailand — present the awards to “increase respect for people’s basic rights and to focus attention on threats to those freedoms.”
The awards were given in seven categories: Investigative Writing (English), Investigative Writing (Chinese), Photography, Multimedia, Documentary Video, Podcast and Newsroom in Exile, with the final two being new additions this year.
Winners included the Guardian , which earned the Investigative Writing (English) award for its reporting on alleged trafficking of workers at Amazon.com warehouses in Saudi Arabia; and Singapore-based Initium Media, which won the Chinese-
language award; and al-Jazeera, which won in the Multimedia category for its “If I die, I die: Pakistan’s death-trap route to Europe” report.
Zan Times and Frontier Myanmar — which was also honored in the Podcast category — won in the Newsroom in Exile category for their “Despair is settling in: Female suicides on rise in Taliban’s Afghanistan” and “Religious minorities persecuted in Myanmar” reports.
In the Photography category, Agence France-Presse won for its images of women fighting Myanmar’s junta.
In the Documentary Video category, BBC Chinese and Deutsche Welle were recognized for their films on anti-extradition bill protesters in Hong Kong and an elite police unit in Bangladesh.
“In an era in which rising authoritarianism generates autocratic leaders and mass disinformation, the role of journalists in exposing the truth is more critical than ever,” Human Rights Watch executive director Tirana Hassan said.
Many winners “are examples of brave journalism from Afghanistan, Hong Kong and Myanmar, places where reporting has become increasingly difficult and dangerous,” Chau said, adding that “Taiwan is an extraordinary place for a growing number of Asia-focused correspondents to live and work.”
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