NEW YORK, Feb. 24, 2021
/PRNewswire/ -- Long Island University (LIU) has announced the winners of the 73rd annual
George Polk Awards in Journalism, honoring journalists in 18
categories for their reporting in 2020.
Almost half of the awardees
won for reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic, which
dominated the judging process, accounting for one quarter
of all submissions. This year saw a record total of 592
entries, work that appeared in print, online or on television or
radio and was nominated by news organizations
and individuals or
recommended by a national panel of advisors.
"As always, we strive to identify individual reporters who do
significant work, not just the news organizations themselves," said
John Darnton, curator of the awards.
"We have never seen a story on the scale of the pandemic. In large
part it fell to the press to inform the public about it and the
press performed admirably. Our eight Polk winning entries represent
the best of the best."
Four of the 2020 George Polk Award winners reported on the
deaths of George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor at police hands in
Minneapolis and Louisville. Others detailed President
Donald Trump's controversial tax
returns, delved into the complexities of the elections in
Georgia, and revealed highly
questionable practices by Facebook. Still others exposed racial
discrimination at the Virginia Military
Institute, documented how federal land grant universities
were created on land taken from Indigenous peoples, and completed
the investigation of a Mexican drug cartel that was started by a
reporter assassinated in 2012.
The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 by LIU to commemorate George
Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering
the Greek civil war. The awards, which place a premium on
investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and
achieves results, are conferred annually to honor special
achievement in journalism.
Long Island University Board of
Trustees Chair Eric Krasnoff stated,
"Now in its 73rd year, the George Polk Awards in Journalism
chronicles an unbroken chain of journalistic excellence, integrity
and bravery. Honest and independent reporting is our best hope to
nurture and sustain an equitable democratic society. LIU is proud and humbled by its role in curating
these proceedings."
Beijing-based reporter
David Culver, producer
Yong Xiong and photo
journalist Natalie Thomas of CNN
receive the award for Foreign Reporting for giving much of the world its first on-the-scene
look at the dangers posed by the coronavirus and the Chinese
efforts to control its spread. Tapping into independent
sources they developed during a trip to Wuhan that was cut short when the
government ordered a lockdown of the city, the CNN crew did much of
its early reporting from an enforced 14-day
quarantine site.
Ed Yong of the
Atlantic has won the Science Reporting award for his
clear and insightful analysis of factors behind the spread of
Covid-19 and failed efforts to bring it under control. Yong's
March 25 account, "How the Pandemic
Will End," correctly predicted its inordinately severe impact in
the U.S., a circumstance his August 4
story, "How the Pandemic Defeated America," explained in
devastating detail.
The award for Medical Reporting goes to Dan Diamond of Politico for multiple
accounts of Trump Administration interference with the Centers for
Disease Control and other sources of medical and scientific
expertise. Among the actions he revealed were efforts to reduce
Covid-19 testing, pour $300 million
into a celebrity ad campaign, send seniors $200 drug discount cards, ignore a "pandemic
playbook" inherited from the Obama Administration and install a
spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services with
orders to withhold or revise reports that did not hew to the
official line.
Helen Branswell of the
Boston-based science and medical
news site STAT wins the award for Public Service
for relentless coverage of all aspects of the pandemic that became
must reading for the medical community and the general public.
From her first posting January 4
alerting readers to a "growing cluster of unexplained
pneumonia cases"in Wuhan to her
December 31 take on experts'
frustration over how little they knew about a new variant of the
virus, Branswell tracked the spread of the virus in 161 articles —
more than three a week —that were almost uniformly timely and
astute.
The award for Health Reporting goes to ProPublica
for two series examining the pandemic's disproportionate impact on
Black Americans and meatpacking workers. Using data and anecdotal
evidence, a team of reporters revealed high rates of infection in
Black communities because of limited access to proper medical care.
In another series, reporters Michael
Grabell and Bernice
Yeung found global corporations exposed low-wage food
handlers to conditions that caused widespread Covid-19 outbreaks,
even lobbying the federal government to declare them essential
workers.
Eli Saslow of the
Washington Post has been recognized in a first-time
category, Oral History, for "Voices from the Pandemic,"
25 compelling personal narratives he crafted based
on extensive interviews with individuals deeply affected by
the virus. Saslow chose each to represent a segment of the
American populace coping with grief, fear, guilt,
bitterness, frustration, tension, dejection and other
emotions, relating their stories in their own words
while keeping his role invisible to the reader.
Matthias Gafni,
Joe Garofoli and
Tal Kopan of the San
Francisco Chronicle have been honored with the Military
Reporting award for disclosing the Pentagon's punishment of
Navy Captain Brett Crozier who sought to evacuate nearly 5,000
sailors in tight quarters aboard the USS
Theodore Roosevelt to
protect them from exposure to Covid-19.
The Chronicle story forced the Acting Navy Secretary
to resign and called into question the military's approach to
the pandemic. In the end a crewmember died and a thousand
others tested positive for the virus, including Crozier,
who lost his command, was almost reinstated
and finally lost it for good.
The award for Magazine Reporting goes to Katie Engelhart of the California
Sunday Magazine for "What Happened in Room 10?". Focusing on one room in
the Life Care Center of Kirkland,
Washington, scene of the nation's
first deadly Covid-19 outbreak, which led to 46 deaths,
Engelhart's seamless 17,000-word narrative was at once riveting
storytelling and a deft analysis of
what went so wrong in nursing homes
across the country.
Luke Mogelson of The
New Yorker has received the award for National Reporting
for three magazine articles putting his extensive experience as a
foreign war correspondent to use with firsthand accounts of
domestic upheaval that sometimes turned violent. He produced
probing portraits of Black Lives Matter activists in Minneapolis, anti-lockdown militia members in
Michigan and competing left and
right militants on the streets of Portland.
The staff of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has won the
Local Reporting award for coverage of the death of
George Floyd and its aftermath,
starting with spot-on deadline work by police reporter Libor Jany and then delving into the background
on Floyd and the officers indicted for killing him. Other articles
explored the unsavory history of a precinct, destroyed by
protestors, that was considered a breeding ground for renegade
cops. The articles portrayed an ineffective police disciplinary
process and reported on attempts to rethink the role of police and
pick up the pieces in neighborhoods ravaged in the protests.
"George Floyd's America," a
six-part series by a team of Washington Post reporters
illustrating how uncanny a match Floyd's life and death were for
the national movement he came to symbolize, has won the award for
Justice Reporting. Based on more than 150 interviews, the
Post series detailed how entrenched poverty, structural racism,
inferior education, police intimidation and a rigged criminal
justice system dogged Floyd's life from beginning to end.
The award for Television Reporting goes to correspondent
Roberto Ferdman and his
VICE News Tonight crew for breakthrough coverage of the
shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in a "no-knock"
police raid in Louisville and the
investigations that followed. Their reports revealed a pattern of
over-heavy police enforcement amid a culture that condoned
misconduct and called into question official accounts of the raid
and ensuing probes, including a highly suspect grand jury
investigation.
The award for Political Reporting is presented to
Stephanie McCrummen of The
Washington Post for deftly capturing Georgia's shifting political winds in three
perceptive profiles in the run- up to the election. One highlighted
the conversion of a suburban woman whose turn away from President
Trump presaged his ultimate defeat. Another portrayed the
re-election of a 76-year-old Democrat-turned-Republican sheriff as
a reflection of resistance to change in the rural South. And the
third chronicled the collapse of a Democratic Congressional
campaign against a far-right conspiratorialist whose outlandish
views would soon make her a pariah for many colleagues on Capitol
Hill.
The award
for Business Reporting goes to Ryan Mac and Craig
Silverman of BuzzFeed News for a
series demonstrating how Facebook exposes the public to
disinformation, fraud and violence. They found the
$800 billion social media giant was
slow to remove extremist content, fired a whistleblower who
determined it favored right-wing publishers and disregarded
another who detailed how fake accounts were undermining the
democratic process in India,
Ukraine, Spain, Brazil,
Bolivia and Ecuador as well as the U.S. In one egregious
example, Mac and Silverman revealed that Facebook ignored 455
requests to remove an event page urging militants to
bring weapons to a Wisconsin protest where two people were later shot to death.
Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig
and Mike McIntire of The New York Times are honored with the
Financial Reporting award for accessing and analyzing a
trove of Donald Trump's
income tax information, a reportorial coup suggesting why
Trump went to such lengths to hide it from public view. They
reported that in 11 years before 2017, he paid no federal income
tax, benefitting from such questionable write-offs as
$70,000 for hair care, over
$2 million in property taxes on
a family retreat and almost $800,000
in "consulting fees" paid to his daughter. Perhaps their most
stinging revelation was the amount Trump remitted in each of two
years he did pay tax: $750.
Ian Shapira of the
Washington Post has won the award for State Reporting
for laying
bare overt racism at the state-supported Virginia Military Institute.
Among other things, he persuaded aggrieved
Black cadets to open up about their experiences at the hands of
whites. His series of articles led Governor Ralph Northam (an alumnus) to order an
independent investigation. They pressured VMI's board to remove a statue of Confederate
general Stonewall Jackson and forced the resignation of
VMI's superintendent, who was succeeded
by the first Black to lead the
181- year-old institute.
The Education Reporting award goes to Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone of the Colorado- based regional magazine High
Country News for "Land Grab Universities," the result of a
two- year investigation exploring the dark side of a federal
initiative considered a hallmark achievement, the 1862 Morrill
Act. The law transferred nearly 11 million acres to the states
to fund the establishment of 52 land grant colleges. Nearly
all that acreage, now worth an estimated half-billion dollars,
was seized from 250 Indigenous nations, the magazine found. Its
well- documented account sent shockwaves through campuses
across the country where students and faculty demanded that
institutions like MIT, Cornell and Cal-Berkeley find ways to right a
150- year-old wrong.
A Special Award is presented to the late Regina Martinez of Proceso magazine
and Forbidden Stories — a global network of
investigative journalists whose mission is to continue the work of
reporters threatened, censored or killed. Eight years after the
2012 murder of Martinez, journalists following her leads produced
"The Cartel Project," which linked politicians to drug traffickers
in the state of Veracruz and
discovered that she had been preparing to publish an explosive
report about thousands of individuals who had mysteriously
disappeared. Forbidden Stories reporters interviewed sources who
had never spoken on-the-record, revealing how local authorities
sabotaged the investigation into Martinez's death and put a
scapegoat behind bars without proof — a tactic similar to one used
by the Greek government in the aftermath of George Polk's murder.
"This year, the outstanding reporting of these distinguished
journalists told unprecedented stories of the greatest challenges
our society has faced in generations," said Long Island University President Kimberly R. Cline. "Long
Island University is honored to recognize this year's
George Polk winners and their
exceptional work as part of this long-established tradition."
George Polk Award winners are
traditionally honored at a luncheon ceremony in New York in the spring, where each briefly
describes their reporting, following an evening seminar on
LIU's Brooklyn campus that delves more deeply into
some of their stories. Because of the pandemic, this year's
luncheon has been cancelled, though winners will record remarks on
a video that will be available on the Polk site. A Webinar, titled
"The Press & the Pandemic," will be aired at 6 pm on April 8.
Laurie Garrett, the award-winning
science writer, will moderate a discussion with three of the
current Polk winners: David Culver,
Helen Branswell, and Ed Yong.
About Long Island University (LIU)
Long Island
University, founded in 1926, continues to redefine higher
education, providing high quality academic instruction by
world-class faculty. Recognized by Forbes for its emphasis on experiential
learning and by the Brookings Institution for its "value added" to
student outcomes, LIU offers over 250 degree programs, with a
network of 270,000 alumni that includes industry leaders
and entrepreneurs across
the globe. Visit liu.edu for more information.
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