Saluting the Best

The third Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism awards,India’s biggest media awards in terms of scale and prize money,were given away by the Chief Justice of India,Justice K G Balakrishnan,at a function attended by policy leaders,journalists,politicians,bureaucrats and industrialists at the Taj Palace,New Delhi,on Monday.

As many as 29 journalists — from across India,from print and broadcast,from English and Indian languages — whose work defined excellence in journalism in 2007-8 were honoured. In a lively debate on ‘Journalist and Politician: Is the Line Blurring?’ that followed,Congress spokespersons Jayanti Natarajan and Abhishek Manu Singhvi and BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley put editors in the firing line. Barkha Dutt (NDTV),Rajdeep Sardesai (CNN-IBN),P Sainath (The Hindu),Rajat Sharma (India TV),

Sanjay Gupta (Dainik Jagran),Shobhana Bhartia (Chairperson and Editorial Director,Hindustan Times) and Shekhar Gupta (The Express Group) participated in the panel discussion.