Long Island University announced the George Polk Awards yesterday.
Who are the winners? David Rohde (of the NY Times), 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft, and the anonymous person who recorded the actual murder of Neda Agha-Soltan on a cellphone.

Gawker has an interesting take on it:

“The question of whether or not the video qualifies as “journalism” doesn’t really matter—it exists, it’s a document. Someone made it and now everyone can see it. Maybe it’s journalism, maybe it’s “citizen journalism,” maybe it’s just a video. But when you start handing out awards that were created to “honor special achievement in journalism” with an emphasis on “investigative and enterprise work that is original, requires digging and resourcefulness and brings results” to works that consist of finding yourself next to a horrible thing and pulling your camera phone out of your pocket—well, what’s the point of calling anything journalism anymore?”

Hard to disagree with this assessment, but I view the award as a “statement” in favor of Freedom of Speech more then anything else. The question is, is a prestigious journalism award the appropriate “channel” to be making such a statement?