Abstract
The Sky News special correspondent Alex Crawford (pictured with the BJR co-chairman Bill Hagerty) received the British Journalism Review Charles Wheeler Award for outstanding contribution to broadcast journalism and the BBC creative director Alan Yentob delivered the annual Charles Wheeler lecture at the University of Westminster in London.
In his address, Yentob defended the BBC licence fee: “There is so much goodwill towards us both at home and abroad. That is not something that we should put at risk, and that includes the goodwill of the licence-fee payers themselves. Forty-eight per cent of them think the licence fee is the best way to fund the BBC, up from 31 per cent a decade ago.”
Alex Crawford was the sixth winner of the Charles Wheeler Award, named after the late, distinguished broadcast foreign correspondent and presented by Lady Dip Wheeler in front of journalists, university staff and students and London mayor Boris Johnson, husband of the barrister Marina, daughter of Sir Charles and Lady Wheeler.
Crawford has been awarded an OBE for her work and named the Royal Television Society journalist of the year four times. Currently based in South Africa, she joined Sky News in 1989. Her broadcasting coups include arriving in Tripoli with Libyan rebels in 2011 and reporting from Liberia alongside recovery teams collecting the bodies of dead Ebola victims.
She paid tribute to her family and those with whom she works: “This is for all of them, too, particularly the camera crews who have consistently been brave, innovative and loyal.”
The presentation and lecture were held at the university's historic Regent Street Cinema which which has been beautifully restored and re-opened to the public.