The undertaking, which has been awarded the Polk prize for nationwide reporting, was launched final spring after Congress did not create a bipartisan investigative fee. The three-part sequence “makes clear that the violence that day was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event,” Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee wrote in a letter to readers.
The Post additionally received a Polk Award for know-how reporting, shared with the Guardian U.S. and Forbidden Stories, for “The Pegasus Project,” which revealed how spy ware offered to governments by the non-public Israeli agency NSO Group for the needs of monitoring terrorists and criminals was used to hack cellphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists and others. Those focused embrace two ladies near Jamal Khashoggi, the assassinated Saudi journalist and contributing Washington Post columnist.
That reporting got here out of information accessed by nonprofit Forbidden Stories and human rights group Amnesty International that was shared with and analyzed by news organizations worldwide.
The Polk Awards additionally honored journalism from the New York Times and accuratenewsinfo associated to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and Kabul’s fall to the Taliban; journalists with ABC News and the New Yorker for inspecting local weather change’s far-reaching impacts for essentially the most weak individuals; and the Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster investigation into leaked Facebook paperwork. Notably lacking: reporting on the coronavirus pandemic, which dominated a lot of the earlier yr’s successful journalism.
Housed by Long Island University, the Polk Awards obtained 610 submissions this yr, a document quantity. They got here from “far more sources of investigative reporting than ever before,” awards curator John Darnton mentioned in a press release. “This speaks to the vitality and continued promise of a changing journalism landscape and is reason to feel optimistic about the future of our craft.”
Winners can be honored at an in-person luncheon April 8.
Last week, the Polk program additionally introduced a brand new award in honor of Sydney H. Schanberg, whose work as a reporter, editor and columnist spanned many years. As a New York Times overseas correspondent in 1975, he chronicled Cambodia’s fall to the brutal Khmer Rouge, reporting that impressed the movie “The Killing Fields.”
Schanberg died in 2016 at 82. His widow, journalist Jane Freiman Schanberg, stipulated that the $25,000 prize ought to honor long-form investigative journalism with lasting impression that covers points comparable to authorities corruption or abuse, army injustice, conflict crimes or sedition.
Luke Mogelson of the New Yorker is the primary Schanberg prize recipient. His 12,000-word dispatch (*6*) supplied an on-the-ground account of the siege of the Capitol. In remarks filmed for his acceptance of the prize, Mogelson known as Schanberg “an exemplar of the kind of journalism I aspire to.”
“If this article about the anti-democratic forces in the U.S. and their increasing militarization can have a fraction of the impact Sydney Schanberg’s stories did, I’ll be even more gratified,” Mogelson mentioned.
Other Polk winners embrace:
● State reporting: Carol Marbin Miller and Daniel Chang of the Miami Herald, together with ProPublica, for exposing how an previous regulation meant to shelter medical suppliers from lawsuits impacted mother and father of disabled kids.
● Medical reporting: Adam Feuerstein, Matthew Herper and Damian Garde of STAT News for an exposé of how a drug producer used FDA again channels to get approval for a polarizing Alzheimer’s remedy.
● Business reporting: Jeff Horwitz and the Wall Street Journal workers for “The Facebook Files” sequence.
● Military reporting: Freelancer Azmat Khan and Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times for investigations into intelligence failures surrounding airstrikes within the Middle East, together with a drone assault that mistakenly killed an support employee and seven kids throughout the U.S. army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
● Political reporting: Linda So, Jason Szep and others at Reuters who chronicled widespread efforts by Donald Trump supporters to intimidate ballot employees and authorities officers.