Coverage of Four Foreign Conflicts Among Winners in 15 Categories
NEW YORK, Feb. 17, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Incisive reports from four areas of bloody conflict — Sudan, the Russian-Ukraine war zone, Israel’s West Bank and Haiti — are among 15 winners of the George Polk Awards for 2024 announced today by Long Island University.
Four other winners dealt with health and medical issues – the exploitive practices of a huge health care provider, the deadly consequences of state abortion bans, the failure of government agencies to respond to a bird flu outbreak and the unauthorized dismemberment and sale of cadavers for research and education.
Also cited were reports on the dangers children face on social media platforms, Baltimore’s lacklustre response to an overdose epidemic, the sale of useless and often damaging solar energy systems to vulnerable Texas homeowners, the unsavory personal history of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, secret deals allowing police in California to hide a history of corruption and criminality, a beloved novelist’s ineffectual response on learning of her daughter’s sexual abuse and the extended incarceration of an aged inmate for refusing to admit to a 55-ycar-old crime he swears he did not commit.
The George Polk Awards were established in 1949 by Long Island University 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. The latest winners were selected from 493 submissions of work that appeared in print, online or on television or radio, nominated by news organizations and individuals or recommended by a panel of former winners.
“Given the range and depth of exceptional reporting before us,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards,”winnowing the list to these 15 meant making some very hard calls. These winners represent the best of the best. The runners-up were all worthy.”
“Long Island University has long recognized the importance of investigative journalism through the George Polk Awards and our George Polk School of Communications, which is helping prepare an international class of the journalists of tomorrow,” noted Dr. Kimberly Cline, President of Long Island University.
The award for Foreign Reporting goes to Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times Magazine for “The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel,” chronicling how a half-century of condoning the terrorizing of West Bank Palestinians by ultranationalist settlers and their supporters became government policy.
Declan Walsh and the staff of The New York Times have won the award for War Reporting for a series of dispatches from Sudan, reported at great personal risk, demonstrating how starvation, indiscriminate destruction and inhuman atrocities were deployed as tools of a civil war. Their reporting exposed the clandestine role played in the conflict by the United Arab Emirates and other nations seeking resources and power. Confronted with Walsh’s reporting, the UAE paused some of its Sudanese operation.
The National Reporting award winner, Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair, revealed how political considerations that prioritized economic interests over public health concerns slowed the federal government’s response to a bird flu outbreak, seemingly ignoring lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Alissa Zhu, Nick Thieme and Jessica Gallagher of The Baltimore Banner have won the Local Reporting award for doggedly amassing data to establish that Baltimore was enduring the most lethal drug overdose crisis of any major city in American history with some surprising victims. Their work, accomplished in the face of city officials’ resistance, was supported by The New York Times Local Investigations Fellowship.
Sara DiNatale of the San Antonio Express-News has been honored for State Reporting for her four-part series exposing the deceptive practices of solar energy contractors who trained door-to-door scam artists to target elderly homeowners with false promises of energy savings that never materialized, rebates that didn’t exist and tax credits for which they didn’t qualify. On top of worthless systems those taken in were often left with damaged roofs.
The Health Care Reporting award goes to Bob Herman, Tara Bannow, Casey Ross and Lizzy Lawrence of STAT for “Health Care’s Colossus,” a penetrating six-part series examining the massive reach of UnitedHealth Group into every aspect of a broken health care system. The series focuses on how the conglomerate milks the system for profit at the expense of taxpayers, patients and clinicians by providing assembly-line care that treats millions of patients as products to be monetized.
Kavitha Surana, Lizzie Presser, Cassandra Jaramillo and Stacy Kranitz of ProPublica have won the Medical Reporting award for mining hospital records and death certificates in Texas and other states that enacted stringent abortion bans in the aftermath of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs decision to uncover a tragic result: the preventable deaths of women denied routine treatment for pregnancy complications as new laws threatened physicians with prosecution.
The award for Political Reporting goes to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker for “Pete Hegseth’s Secret History,” which unearthed a record of financial mismanagement, sexual misconduct and repeated incidents of workplace intoxication that twice cost President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense leadership positions in advocacy groups he ran. Hegseth was confirmed by a single vote but not before an intense Senate examination of issues largely stemming from Mayer’s reporting.
Katey Rusch and Casey Smith, alumnae of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Investigative Reporting Program working with the support of the program, have won the Justice Reporting award for “Right to Remain Secret,” a two-part series published by the San Francisco Chronicle. A product of five years of research, their stories detailed how dozens of police officers in California arranged to cleanse their records of damaging behavior and retire with lucrative pensions in secret deals that allowed their departments to avoid cumbersome dismissal proceedings.The practice was curtailed following these revelations.
The award for Technology Reporting is presented to Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio of Bloomberg Businessweek for stories about child safety online that revealed how predators have used the Roblox gaming platform to groom and exploit children, how “sextortion” scammers blackmailed teens via Instagram and how drug dealers sold fentanyl to kids using Snapchat. The stories had impact. Roblox rolled out new safety updates for minors, including enhanced parental controls, and Meta removed 70,000 accounts linked to financial sextortionists.
Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker has been honored for Magazine Reporting for “Alice Munro’s Passive Voice,” a stunning 20,000-word opus delving into the late Canadian novelist and short story writer’s dismissive reaction when she was confronted with her romantic partner’s sexual abuse of her daughter, a betrayal only deepened by the revelation that Munro, a 2013 Nobel laureate, used the experience to enrich her fiction.
The award for National Television Reporting goes to Mike Hixenbaugh, Jon Schuppe, Liz Kreutz and the late Susan Carroll of NBC News and Noticias Telemundo for “Dealing the Dead,” revealing that a medical school in north Texas was dismembering the corpses of individuals who died alone. Undertaking little effort to find next of kin, it leased out the body parts for research and education, doubling the pain for relatives who discovered later that a loved one had been parcelled out an arm and leg at a time. The medical school ended the practice after reporters shared detailed findings ahead of their reports on NBC Nightly News and NBCNews.com.
Special Correspondent Marcia Biggs, videographer Eric O’Connor and producer André Paultre of the PBS NewsHour have won the Foreign Television Reporting award for their series “Haiti in Crisis,” which depicted the complete breakdown of daily life in parts of Port Au Prince with chilling interviews of citizens who have come to describe and even participate in unspeakable barbarism at the hand of street gangs in matter-of-fact terms. Biggs, a veteran reporter in global war zones, is a grand niece of George Polk.
The Podcast award goes to Ben Austen and Bill Healy for the Audible Original “The Parole Room,” which followed the 20th effort to gain parole by Johnnie Veal, convicted in the 1970 murder of two Chicago police officers and still in prison nearing 70. Negotiating an anachronistic system — Illinois abolished parole in 1978 so only those convicted before then are eligible — Veal confronted a kind of Catch-22. By steadfastly maintaining his innocence he was deemed unworthy of release for lack of remorse.
The 2024 Sydney Schanberg Prize goes to Sarah A.Topol of The New York Times Magazine for “The Deserter,” a view of the invasion of Ukraine through the eyes of a disillusioned Russian combat officer who defected with his wife and child, one of 18 deserters Topol interviewed in in more than a year of reporting while keeping herself and her sources safe from Russian security services. Her detailed account of the officer’s journey became an epic 35,000-word portrait of an army sent to fight a war with little meaning to them. The Schanberg Prize was established by the journalist Jane Freiman Schanberg to honor long-form investigative or enterprise journalism embodying qualities reflected in her late husband’s legendary career. It comes with a $25,000 award funded by Freiman Schanberg, who stipulated that it honor “highly distinguished, deep coverage of armed conflicts; local, state or federal government corruption; military injustice; war crimes, genocide or sedition; or authoritarian government abuses” of at least 5,000 words “that results from staying with a story, sometimes at great risk or sacrifice.”
The 2024 George Polk Award winners will be honored Friday, April 4 at a luncheon ceremony at Cipriani 42nd Street.
About Long Island University (LIU)
Long Island University, founded in 1926, is a leading research and teaching university that continues to redefine higher education by providing high-quality academic instruction by world-class faculty, serving more than 16,000 students from its Long Island and Brooklyn campuses. Recognized by Forbes for its emphasis on experiential learning and by the Brookings Institution for its “value added” to student outcomes, the University is ranked in the top 7% of national research universities. LIU has a network of over 285,000 alumnus, including industry leaders and entrepreneurs around the globe. Visit www.liu.edu for more information.
SOURCE Long Island University
