The New York Times won three George Polk Awards on Monday, two of them for its coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. The awards were among five honoring journalism about that conflict and the war in Ukraine.
Long Island University, home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, who were selected from 497 submissions of work completed in 2023.
“As horrible as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, there was no shortage of great, high-risk reporting to choose from,” said John Darnton, longtime curator of the Polk Awards. . he said in a statement.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April where all past winners will be invited. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk’s lifetime achievement honorees, including Dean Baquet, former executive editor of the New York Times; Nikole Hannah-Jones, editor of The Times Magazine; Christiane Amanpour, CNN chief international correspondent; and former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron. The awards are named after CBS journalist George Polk, murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War.
The New York Times staff received the foreign reporting award for their coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas, which included extensive reporting on Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. The Times reporters showed that Israel had known about Hamas’s attack plan for more than a year, but ignored warnings and was unprepared.
Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times won the photojournalism award for their photographs of the conflict from inside Gaza, capturing the horrific toll of Israel’s airstrikes on civilians, including the death and injury of many children.
The Times also shared an award for podcasting. Daniel Guillemette of Serial Productions, owned by The Times, along with Meribah Knight of WPLN Nashville and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica were honored for their four-part podcast, “The Kids of Rutherford County.” The series explored how hundreds, and possibly thousands, of children were illegally imprisoned in Tennessee, a practice overseen by a powerful judge that had gone unchecked for more than a decade.
The national reporting award went to Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Alex Mierjeski, Brett Murphy and the ProPublica staff for developer the lavish gifts and luxury trips given to Justice Clarence Thomas by a billionaire Republican donor, Harlan Crow. The ProPublica team also examined other relationships between Supreme Court justices and influential benefactors and the ethical questions they raised.
Jesse Coburn, a reporter for the nonprofit Streetsblog NYC, won the local reporting award for seven months. investigation in New York City’s underground market for temporary license plates that drivers use to evade tolls and fines and evade liability for more serious crimes.
The state reporting award went to Chris Osher and Julia Cardi of The Gazette, a Colorado Springs newspaper. The couple looked at the state of Colorado. child custody system, showing that advice from unqualified parental evaluators had led to four deaths of young children. His reporting led to changes in state law and a criminal investigation by the Colorado attorney general’s office.
Reuters employees won the business reporting award for their investigations into companies owned by Elon Musk, which revealed a series of workplace injuries, as well as a death in SpaceXmistreatment of laboratory animals in Neuralink and deception about chronic vehicle failures in tesla.
The medical reports prize was awarded to two different candidates. Anna Werner of CBS News, along with KFF Health News reporters Brett Kelman, Fred Schulte, Holly K. Hacker and Daniel Chang, won by “When medical devices malfunction,” a year-long investigation into medical devices such as hip implants and heart pumps that the Food and Drug Administration had designated as safe but are suspected of contributing to patient injuries and deaths.
Michael D. Sallah, Michael Korsh and Evan Robinson-Johnson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, along with Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica, won the medical reporting award for the series “With every breath”, which revealed that Philips Respironics, which makes popular respirators, continued to market its products for years despite internal warnings of a dangerous defect.
Brian Howey won the justice reporting award for his investigation in a California police practice of collecting information from the families of people killed by police before they were informed of the death. The exposé, which Howey began as a student in the investigative journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley, was published by The Los Angeles Times and developed as part of a podcast by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal.
Luke Mogelson of The New Yorker received the magazine reporting award for “Two weeks on the Ukrainian front”, his account of the war from the trenches, where he joined a Ukrainian battalion in the Donbass. The television reporting award went to Julia Steers and Amel Guettatfi of Vice News for their coverage of the Wagner Group’s Russian mercenaries in Ukraine and the Central African Republic.
New York writer Masha Gessen won the commentary prize for the essay “In the shadow of the Holocaust”, which examined German memory of the Holocaust and compared the situation in Gaza to the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The Sydney Schanberg Prize for long-form journalism was awarded to Rolling Stone’s Jason Motlagh, who Incorporated with rival gang lords in Haiti to cover up the brutal gang war that is forcing thousands of Haitians to flee the country as it descends into violence and anarchy.