The New York Times won three George Polk Awards on Monday, including two for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war. The awards were among five that honored journalism on 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 submissions made in 2023.
“As horrifying as the outbreak of war in the Middle East and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine has been, we have had no shortage of wonderful, high-risk reporting to choose from,” said John Dardon, longtime editor of Polk Awards. he 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 recipients. Sixteen will be honored as George Polk Lifetime Laureates, including Dean Baquet, former executive editor of The New York Times. Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer at The Times Magazine; Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent. and former Washington Post executive editor Martin Barron. The awards are named for CBS reporter George Polk, who was killed in 1948 while covering the Greek Civil War.
The New York Times staff received the foreign reporting award for their coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, which included extensive reporting on Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s aggressive military response in Gaza. The Times reporters showed that Israel knew of the Hamas attack plan for more than a year, but ignored 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 inside Gaza, documenting the horrific toll of Israeli airstrikes on civilians, including the deaths and injuries of many children.
The Times also shared an award for podcasting. Daniel Guillemette of Serial Productions, owned by The Times, along with WPLN Nashville’s Meribah Knight and ProPublica’s Ken Armstrong 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 their expose of lavish gifts and luxury travel given to Justice Clarence Thomas by a billionaire Republican donor, Harlan Crow. The ProPublica team also looked at 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 a seven-month investigation into New York’s underground market for temporary license plates that drivers use to avoid tolls and tickets and avoid liability for more serious crimes.
The state reporting award went to Chris Osher and Julia Cardi of The Gazette, a Colorado Springs newspaper. The pair examined Colorado’s child custody system, showing that advice from unqualified parenting evaluators had led to four deaths of young children. Their report prompted 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 that revealed a series of workplace injuries as well as a death at SpaceX, mistreatment of lab animals at Neuralink and cheating about chronic vehicle breakdowns at Tesla .
The medical reference award was given to two different entries. CBS News’ Anna Werner, along with KFF Health News reporters Brett Kelman, Fred Schulte, Holly K. Hacker and Daniel Chang, won for “When Medical Devices Malfunction,” an annual survey of medical devices such as hip implants and heart pumps that the Food and Drug Administration had labeled as safe but are suspected of contributing to the patient’s 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 their series “With Every Breath,” which revealed that Philips Respironics, which makes popular breathing machines, continued to market its products for years despite internal warnings of a dangerous flaw.
Brian Howey won the justice reporting award for his investigation into a California police practice of collecting information from families of people killed by police before relatives were informed of the death. The report, which Mr. Howey began as a student in the investigative reporting program at the University of California, Berkeley, was published by the Los Angeles Times and developed into a podcast by Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The New Yorker’s Luke Mogelson won the magazine reporting award for “Two Weeks on the Front in Ukraine,” his account of the war from the trenches, where he was embedded with a Ukrainian battalion in the Donbass. The TV 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 her essay “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” which examined German Holocaust memory and compared the situation in Gaza to Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The Sydney Schanberg Award in long-form journalism went to Rolling Stone’s Jason Motlagh, who embedded with rival gang lords in Haiti to cover the brutal gang war that is forcing thousands of Haitians to flee the country as it spirals into violence and lawlessness.
