For the second year in a row, 7News has taken home the top prize for the Investigative Journalism Award. If you're an avid news watcher, then you were probably following along with the gun licenses investigative series. It started with a whistleblower who told us how he paid for his gun license and ended with the responsibility for issuing firearm licenses being taken out of the hands of the Commissioner of Police for the first time in Belize's history. It is now controlled by a Firearms and Ammunitions Control Board.
The success of that series was recognized at the award ceremony which was held on Saturday night at the Government House. Courtney Menzies has a recap.
This year's Belize Prize For Investigative Journalism Award saw 19 submissions and 3 finalists, but only one winner. Our newsroom here at Channel 7 submitted seven stories, "Guns and Graft: Exposing the Licensing Racket" took home the top prize.
The story focuses on the corruption within the former gun licensing regime, and the government's ultimate decision to change it.
At this year's ceremony, the team behind the story, Jules Vasquez, Brian Castillo, Codie Noralez, and Denver Fairweather were awarded a prize of $10,000.
In his speech, Vasquez explained the importance of journalists who go the extra mile to uncover injustices.
Jules Vasquez, Guns & Graft, 7News Belize
"We as journalists have to do more, I spoke last year about having to frighten people and I don't think they're frightened, that's the bad news. I think people in authority have to be scared of us, I don't think they're scared, I think they take us as just annoyances and that annoys me. So I really think that we as journalists have to do more."
"Today, May 4th is an important and auspicious day, May 3rd was World Press Freedom Day and the little known fact that we discovered today was that May 5th 2024 is the 30th anniversary of the Freedom of Information passing into law in Belize, Belize was prescient, Belize was the first country in the Caribbean and Latin America to pass Freedom of Information legislation in 1994. And so May 4th falls perfectly between those days. But we as journalists have not used this legislation properly."
"I didn't write it into 25 years into my practice, it's under utilized and I don't thin people utilize it enough, yes it can be an exercise use in futility because you know the government, how they operate, however, it's important legislation and we need to use it more and again today we made a step forward in that."
And the BPIJ will be seeing major growth the next time around - on Saturday night, the organizers signed an MOU with the University of Belize, officially making them the institutional host of the award. The hope is that one day, journalism will be professionally taught in Belize:
Jules Vasquez, Guns & Graft, 7News Belize
"We don't teach journalism in schools and I know this is a first step towards that and William said a very important thing, people drift in and out of the media, it's not a very high paying job, it's very rough in terms of the hours, the stress, the constant, I mean, WhatsApp has changed the game a lot, because people are reaching out to you round the clock and I think we really need to develop the professional core of journalists so I'm very encouraged by the University of Belize's involvement here and I hope that with the help of Holly we can start to build some school of journalism, somewhere that journalism is taught, and it is taught as a noble profession, a reputable profession, an important profession, and a sacred profession where we get to live by words."
The two finalists were Channel 5's Hipolito Novelo, along with his team, and Andre Habet and Marco Lopez.
Each team of finalists took home $5,000 dollars.
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