Al Jazeera English Named Broadcaster of the Year At the 2020 New York Festival TV & Film Awards for 4th Year in a Row

Al Jazeera English (AJE) was named ‘Broadcaster of the Year’ by the 2020 New York Festival TV & Film Awards for the fourth consecutive year.

The channel collected an impressive array of gold, silver and bronze medals for its news coverage and programmes.

The Network’s Investigations Unit and the Digital division were also recognized with medal wins.

The awards included entries from over 50 countries, covering a wide variety of U.S and international broadcasters such as NBC, HBO and SBS.

The winners were announced online on 21st April – this year’s ceremony being cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In total, Al Jazeera Media Network won 14 gold, 19 silver and 23 bronze medals.

Among the gold medal winners were the Witness documentary ‘A Thousand Girls Like Me’ about an Afghan woman's fight against the prevalence of rape; the Al Jazeera Correspondent documentary ‘A Moral Debt’ looking at the legacy of slavery in the U.S; and ‘All Hail the Algorithm’, a five-part tech series exploring the impact of algorithms on our everyday lives.

Other medal wins included AJE’s news coverage of violence in the Sahel region in Africa; its environmental series ‘Earthrise’ and the hard-hitting ‘Head to Head’ interview with Erik Prince, the founder and former CEO of Blackwater, the private military company.

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit won a gold medal for its two-part documentary ‘How to Sell a Massacre’, a three-year investigation into the pro-gun lobby while the Digital division earned a gold medal for ‘Bolivia’s Fight Club’, a short film about an annual festival involving street fighting to bring about a good harvest.

“We are honoured to be recognised again for the quality of our content,” said Giles Trendle, Managing Director of Al Jazeera English. “Our journalists and filmmakers come from all corners of the globe and go out of their way to provide coverage that is grounded in impartial reporting and inspired storytelling. I believe our audiences appreciate our coverage of international issues and universal themes which offers a truly global perspective that, in times such as these, is an important affirmation of the inter-connectedness of our lives on this planet.”

Al Jazeera English is a highly-decorated news and current affairs channel. In recent years it has won a Peabody, an Emmy, a NRMA Kennedy award for Excellence in Journalism and a Royal Television Society award. This year one of its documentaries was nominated for an Oscar Academy Award.