New York Times Leads Polk Awards With 4 Prizes

The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock won the military reporting award for “The Afghanistan Papers,” which showed that U.S. officials’ real-time acknowledgments of failures in the war in Afghanistan had been kept from the public. The Houston Chronicle’s Lomi Kriel won in the national reporting category for uncovering the Trump administration’s border policies.

Three reporters from Bloomberg News won the financial reporting award for a series on how some investors exploited and profited from the “opportunity zone” codicil of the 2017 federal tax law, which was designed to benefit impoverished neighborhoods.

Four reporters from The Seattle Times won in the business reporting category for showing that the Federal Aviation Administration had approved the Boeing 737 Max’s flight control system — later found to be flawed, after two fatal crashes — after its cooperation with Boeing’s own inspectors. One of the reporters, Mike Baker, is now the Seattle bureau chief for The New York Times.

Lizzie Presser won the magazine reporting award for an article published by the nonprofit ProPublica and The New Yorker about legal maneuverings that took land away from black families in the South who had owned it for generations. John Sudworth won for television reporting because of his BBC News investigation into China’s camps for members of the Uighur ethnic minority.

The staff of the Long Island tabloid Newsday won in the metropolitan reporting category for a multimedia investigative series, “Long Island Divided,” that uncovered racial discrimination by more than 90 suburban real estate agents in violation of state and federal law. The project took three years to report.

Several of the winners are expected to participate in a seminar moderated by the journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault at the Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, part of Long Island University Brooklyn, on April 2. A luncheon ceremony in Manhattan is scheduled for the next day.

The awards are given each year in memory of the CBS correspondent George Polk, who was murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

“In an age when much of our most incisive journalism is the product of multi-organization collaboration and team reporting, it is heartening to note that eight of this year’s Polk winners are the work of individual reporters,” John Darnton, the curator of the awards, said in a statement. “This speaks to the legacy of the man whose work these awards continue to honor 72 years after his assassination.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/business/media/polk-awards.html