The New York Times won two George Polk Awards for investigative reporting that exposed corruption and drug traffickers behind the assassination of the Haitian president and revealed details about U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East that killed civilians.
The winners of the Polk Awards were announced on Monday. The curator of the awards since 2009, John Darnton, said that he had received 610 submissions, the most ever, and that they came from far more sources of investigative reporting than ever before.
He said in a statement that this speaks to the vitality and continued promise of a changing journalism landscape and is reason to be optimistic about the future of our craft.
The Washington Post won the national reporting prize for their online series on the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The series relied on thousands of pages of documents and hundreds of interviews, videos, photographs and audio recordings, which were contributed by more than 75 journalists at The Post.
The Post received a second award for technology reporting, along with the Guardian U.S., and a nonprofit organization. The prize was given to The Pegasus Project, a global investigation that revealed that Israeli espionage had been used to hack the phones of journalists, business executives, politicians and human rights activists. A group of news organizations gathered to look into the leaked files.
The business reporting prize was won by the Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files series. The series, based on internal files from a whistle-blower, showed how Facebook executives ignored the company's internal findings on how flaws in its platforms caused harm and were unwilling to fix them.
The staff of The New York Times won the award for foreign reporting for their reports that revealed a plot behind the murder of the Haitian president. The investigation into his death has stopped. The president's life in the months leading up to his assassination was covered by more than 70 people who were interviewed.
The military reporting award was won by Azmat Khan, Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt and the staff of The Times for their investigations that uncovered the true toll of America's air war in the Middle East and Afghanistan. The Pentagon admitted that a drone strike in Afghanistan killed 10 people, including seven children. There was a pattern of errors and deaths uncovered by Ms. Khan.
The local reporting award was won by a group of people for an investigation into a factory that exposed workers to dangerous conditions. Their reporting resulted in a six-figure fine for the company.
Two Miami Herald reporters, Carol Marbin Miller and Daniel Chang, as well as ProPublica, were awarded the state reporting prize for their series on how a Florida law lowers malpractice costs. The fund was supposed to provide for the children but instead turned down many requests. The law was revised after the reports and the director and board left.
Ian Urbina received an international reporting award for his article on the European Union's efforts to keep out migrants. The European Union funded a shadow immigration system in which migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were held indefinitely in Libyan detention centers.
The medical reporting award was won by Adam Feuerstein, Matthew Herper and Damian Garde of Stat, a medical news site.
The environmental reporting award was given to the ABC News anchor, the executive producer, and the producer of The Children of Climate Change.
Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, won the Magazine Reporting award for her work on the exploitation and working conditions of migrant laborers who contract for disaster-recovery firms to clean up the damage inflicted by climate disasters. She traveled to disaster zones and spoke with workers and experts about climate change.
Linda So and the staff of Reuters were awarded the political reporting prize for their examination of intimidation and threats by supporters of Donald J. Trump against officials and poll workers involved in the electoral process of the 2020 election. Nine people who were responsible for a series of threats were tracked down by the team. Two of them expressed regret.
The award for local television reporting went to Dave Biscobing of KNXV, an ABC affiliate in Phoenix, for reports that revealed the Phoenix Police Department and the county attorney's office had lied about Black Lives Matter protesters being members of a criminal street gang.
A.C. Thompson of ProPublica was awarded the national television reporting honor for his documentary on the rise of far-right extremists. The investigative journalism program at the University of California, Berkeley was involved in the production of the documentary.
Clarissa Ward and her crew won the foreign television reporting prize for their coverage of the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Some women were too afraid to leave their houses and many were desperately trying to find a way out of the country, according to Ms. Ward's dispatches.
The Polk Awards are named after George Polk, a CBS News correspondent who was murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.
Long Island University has a new award this year. The prize is named after a long-time journalist at The New York Times. The award is funded by Mr. Schanberg's widow, the journalist Jane Freiman.
The fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s was covered by Mr. Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer Prize. The 1984 film The Killing Fields was inspired by his account of the life of his colleague, Dith Pran.
The first winner of the new award is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, who wrote a 12,000-word account of the unfolding of the Jan. 6.
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