Dolkar, a member of RFA’s Tibetan service, received the award at a ceremony held by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) in the Cohen Building in Washington.
“We are proud of Tseten Dolkar, who is deserving of this wonderful honor and high praise, as is the staff of Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service, for their tireless work in breaking this story,” said Libby Liu, President of Radio Free Asia. “We thank the Broadcasting Board of Governors for recognizing the solid journalism that went into covering the Chinese crackdown on Tibetan protestors in March last year and will continue to inform RFA’s listeners of the news happening around them.”
Dolkar is with RFA’s Tibetan service, one of its nine language services that broadcast to audiences in six countries in East Asia. In March 2008, she and the Tibetan service the broke the news that monks in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa had begun staging a peaceful protest. The Chinese government responded by cracking down on protesters with deadly force. The Tibetan service’s continuous coverage led the way for greater international media attention of the situation as it intensified. Wall Street Journal, Agence France Presse (AFP), and Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) were among the major global news outlets that singled out Radio Free Asia’s authoritative coverage of the events. This year, Radio Free Asia’s Tibetan service continued its in-depth, up-close coverage of recent protests and incidents that occurred on the one-year anniversary of last year’s uprising.
Named for former BBG Chairman David Burke, the award recognizes courage, integrity and originality in reporting by journalists within BBG broadcast organizations. In addition to Tibetan, Radio Free Asia’s other services are its Mandarin, Cantonese, Uyghur, Korean, Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese and Lao, which broadcast to audiences in China, North Korea, Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, respectively.