The New York Times wins three Polk Awards

The New York Times won three George Polk Awards on Monday, including two for its reporting on the war between Israel and Hamas. The awards were among five that honored journalism about that conflict and the war in Ukraine.

Long Island University, home of the journalism awards, announced the winners in 13 categories, which were selected from 497 entries of work done in 2023.

“As horrific as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine were, they provided us with beautiful reporting, done at great risk, from which to choose,” said John Darnton, former curator of the Polk Awards . said in a statement.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Polk Awards, which will be celebrated with an event in April inviting all past winners. Sixteen will be honored as laureates of George Polk's career, including Dean Baquet, former editor-in-chief of the New York Times; Nikole Hannah-Jones, writer at The Times Magazine; Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent; and former Washington Post editor-in-chief Martin Baron. The awards are named after CBS journalist George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while reporting on the Greek Civil War.

The staff of The New York Times received the Foreign Reporting Award for their coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas, including extensive coverage of Hamas' attack on Israel on October 7 and Israel's aggressive military response in Gaza. Times journalists showed that Israel had known about Hamas' attack plan for more than a year, but ignored the warnings and was ill-prepared.

Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud of The Times won the photojournalism award for their photographs of the conflict from Gaza, documenting the horrific toll of Israeli 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 recognized for their four-part podcast, “The Kids of Rutherford County.” The series examined 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 staff of ProPublica for revealing the lavish gifts and luxury trips that Judge Clarence Thomas received from a Republican billionaire, 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 research in New York City's underground market of temporary license plates that drivers use to avoid tolls and tickets and avoid responsibility for more serious crimes.

The state reporting award went to Chris Osher and Julia Cardi of The Gazette, a Colorado Springs newspaper. The pair explored Colorado's child custody system, which found that advice from unqualified parental assessors had led to four deaths among young children. Their reporting led to changes in state law and a criminal investigation by the Colorado Attorney General's office.

Reuters staff won the business reporting award for investigations into companies owned by Elon Musk, which revealed a series of workplace injuries and a death. SpaceXthe mistreatment of laboratory animals Neuralink and deception about chronic vehicle malfunctions at Tesla.

The prize for medical reporting was awarded to two different entries. Anna Werner of CBS News, along with KFF Health News reporters Brett Kelman, Fred Schulte, Holly K. Hacker and Daniel Chang, won for “When medical devices are defective,” a years-long investigation into medical devices such as hip implants and heart pumps that the Food and Drug Administration had labeled safe but are suspected of contributing to patient injury and death.

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 showed that Philips Respironics, which makes popular ventilators, continued to market its products for years despite internal warnings of a dangerous defect.

Brian Howey won the justice prize for this research in a practice by California police to gather information from families of people killed by police before the relatives knew of the death. The exposé, which Mr. Howey began as a student at the University of California, Berkeley's investigative reporting program, was published by The Los Angeles Times and developed into part of a podcast by Reveal, of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Luke Mogelson of The New Yorker received the magazine reporting award for “Two weeks at the front in Ukraine”, his account of the war from the trenches, where he was with a Ukrainian battalion in the Donbas. The award for television reporting went to Julia Steers and Amel Guettatfi of Vice News for their reporting on Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group in Ukraine and the Central African Republic.

The New Yorker 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 in long-form journalism was awarded to Rolling Stone's Jason Motlagh embedded with rival gang lords in Haiti to report on the brutal gang war that is forcing thousands of Haitians to flee the country as it spirals into violence and lawlessness.