BROOKVILLE, N.Y., April 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Long Island
University's 71st Annual George Polk Awards will recognize the
winners of the prestigious honor in a video ceremony that will be
posted on April 30th on
www.liu.edu/polk. The presentation will be hosted by
award-winning journalist Charlayne
Hunter-Gault introducing videos submitted by the winners
about their award-winning journalistic pieces. This year, the
George Polk Awards is honoring 15 winning entries in 14 categories
for outstanding work done in 2019.
"For the last 71 years, Long Island
University's George Polk Awards have honored the
influential, investigative, thought-provoking work of reporters
throughout the nation," said Long Island
University President Kimberly R.
Cline. "While we could not present these awards in person
this year, these exceptional journalists deserve to be recognized
for their tenacious and fearless pursuit of the truth."
As we have seen over the last several weeks during the COVID-19
public health crisis, journalists provide the public with necessary
information and updates from around the world. Now more than ever,
it is important to recognize the role journalism plays in telling
the stories that impact our society. The outstanding work of this
year's winners sheds light on a range of deceit and corruption –
with profound and sometimes deadly consequences – foreign countries
as well as federal agencies, corporate offices and local
governments in the United
States.
"Every year we look forward to hearing from the
winners, who tell us how they got their stories and
what impact the stories had," said John Darnton, curator of the awards. "And this
year -- thanks to video -- we can do so again, despite the
tribulations of isolation."
The George Polk Awards recognize sacrifice, virtue and truth.
Long Island University is proud to
honor these journalists and recognize their exceptional work as
part of this iconic annual tradition. This year's
award winners were announced in the First Amendment Lounge at
the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on February 19, 2020.
"The stature that the George Polk Awards in Journalism has
gained is a testament to the outstanding journalists who have
been honored, our dedicated panel of judges, and the growing
national reputation of Long Island
University," stated Long Island
University Chairman of the Board Eric Krasnoff. "Today we
are proud to honor these remarkable journalists and
their stories that took tremendous courage and hard work
to tell."
This year's winners chosen from over 551 submissions
include:
Azam
Ahmed of The New
York Times, received the award
for Foreign Reporting for risking his safety time
and again to portray the reality and impact of violence perpetrated
by gangs, drug cartels and even police in firsthand dispatches from
Brazil, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, where he is stationed as the Times
Bureau Chief.
The award for National Reporting went
to Lomi Kriel of the Houston
Chronicle for revealing previously unreported aspects
of the Trump Administration's immigration policy and tactics that
extracted a heavy and sometimes lethal toll on Latin American
refugees, including the continued separation of some families
without apparent reason.
The staff of Newsday received the award
for Metropolitan Reporting for "Long Island
Divided," a series three years in the making that exposed an
endemic pattern of discrimination by suburban realtors steering
homebuyers of color away from white enclaves in violation of
federal and state law. It drew promises of action from officials at
every level of government.
The award for Local Reporting went
to Brian M. Rosenthal of The
New York Times for
unearthing a pernicious scheme by unscrupulous lenders to drive up
the price of taxi medallions and turn huge profits by selling them
to unsophisticated cab drivers with loans they could never repay,
leading borrowers into financial ruin so devastating at least nine
committed suicide.
Mark
Scheffler, Malachy
Browne and the Visual Investigations Team
of The New York
Times were honored
for International Reporting for using local
plane spottings, satellite imagery, cockpit recordings
and Google Earth tools to map and geolocate the
attacks to establish that Russian pilots in Syria bombed four hospitals, a busy commercial
street and a refugee camp, killing scores of civilians. It was one
of a number of wide-ranging coups the team pulled off combining
advanced technology with ground level reporting in Venezuela, Afghanistan, Libya, North
Korea and Hong Kong.
The award for Financial Reporting went
to Noah
Buhayar, Caleb
Melby, David Kocieniewski and
Lauren Leatherby
of Bloomberg News for groundbreaking
stories on how wealthy, well-connected individuals perverted the
stated intention of "opportunity zone" incentives in the 2017
federal tax code for their own profit. The program was aimed at
spurring economic growth in depressed areas, but some developers
reaped tax breaks by using it for such high-end projects as a
long-planned $4 billion luxury North
Miami development and the construction of a Ritz-Carlton hotel in
downtown Portland, Oregon.
Dominic Gates, Mike Baker, Steve
Miletich and Lewis
Kamb of The Seattle
Times were honored in the Business
Reporting category for first exposing the cooperative
arrangements between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration
that led to approval of design changes in 737 Max jets blamed for
two crashes, killing 346. Times reporters traced FAA
approval of the flawed flight control system to its decision to
defer to Boeing's own safety analysis, which they attributed to
pressure from leaders of the company and the agency to speed
production and avoid adding costs.
Helena Bottemiller
Evich of Politico won the
award for Environmental Reporting for describing
how a politicized Department of Agriculture ignored its own climate
action plan, devoted a miniscule portion of its budget to climate
change, which it acknowledges is the gravest threat to food
production, and buried a study warning of lost nutrients in rice,
the leading source of nutrition for 600 million people, provoking a
highly regarded scientist to quit in disgust.
The award for Military Reporting went
to Craig
Whitlock of The Washington
Post for forcing the release of interviews conducted
about the Afghan War as part of a five-year, $11 million federal "Lessons Learned" project.
After Whitlock received more than 2,000 documents, including some
initially withheld, he puzzled out key redactions before
producing "The Afghanistan Papers," which demonstrated that "senior
U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in
Afghanistan throughout the 18-year
campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and
hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Lisa Gartner of The Philadelphia
Inquirer received the Justice
Reporting award for "Beaten, Not Silenced," which exposed
a pattern of violent physical abuse of boys housed at the
Glen Mills Schools, a 193-year-old
reformatory in suburban Delaware
County. Gartner's reporting was so devastating that within
days state officials ordered Glen
Mills closed and pledged to do a better job of monitoring
conditions at juvenile justice facilities across Pennsylvania.
The award for Political Reporting is shared
by Chance
Swaim, Jonathan
Shorman and Dion
Lefler of The Wichita
Eagle and Luke
Broadwater and the staff of The
Baltimore
Sun for turning journalistic intuition into
deep dives into public records that revealed municipal misconduct
leading to the ouster of mayors in both cities.
Eagle reporters determined that Mayor Jeff Longwell steered a $524 million contract for a desperately needed
water treatment plant to friends and supporters, rejecting the
unanimous choice of a selection panel. Longwell lost his reelection
bid after a campaign that turned on the Eagle's
investigation of an ad falsely connecting his opponent to sexual
harassment allegations.
An offhand remark set Broadwater and his Sun colleagues
off on an investigation that determined Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh had gleaned $800,000 in payoffs disguised as bulk purchases
of her "Healthy Holly" children's book by a hospital network and
health insurers. As a result, Pugh resigned and pleaded guilty to
federal charges, the network's board and CEO departed, and the
state and city toughened ethics laws.
Lizzie
Presser of ProPublica and The
New Yorker won the award for Magazine
Reporting for "The Dispossessed," an account of how
speculators use legal loopholes associated with "heirs' property"
laws in the South to seize black-owned ancestral lands, uprooting
lifelong residents who assume their homes and property have been
passed down to them. Especially poignant was Presser's portrait of
two brothers in a North Carolina
coastal town jailed for nearly eight years for refusing to
leave.
The award for Television Reporting went
to John Sudworth of BBC
News for "Inside China's Hidden Camps," which
documented the reality of camps authorities established in Xinjiang
province to indoctrinate hundreds of thousands of Muslims in an
effort to erase their religion and culture. Allowed by authorities
to visit one camp depicted as a model of agreeability, Sudworth
used satellite photos, leaked documents and interviews with forlorn
parents separated from their children to paint a very different
picture.
A Special Award was presented to Nikole
Hannah-Jones of The New
York Times and contributors to "The 1619
Project," a supplement published on the 400th anniversary of the
advent of American slavery, using essays by journalists and
scholars to explore the role of slavery in history and its enduring
effects in contemporary American society. A powerful introduction
by Hannah-Jones, the project's
creator and driving force, examined efforts of black Americans to
advance the nation's expressed ideals of democracy, liberty and
equality in the face of centuries of oppression and exclusion.
History of the George Polk Awards
In 1949, Long Island University
established a new journalism prize to memorialize George Polk, a CBS correspondent who was killed
while covering the civil war in Greece. The mission of the George Polk Awards,
as distinguished from other journalism honors, focused on
recognizing not the news organizations or publishers, but
investigative reporters themselves.
Much about journalism has changed in the seven decades since the
inaugural Polk Awards, including the rise of the Internet and the
technological disruption it has caused. But one constant has
endured and even thrived: intrepid, courageous reporters committed
to doing whatever it takes—even at risk of their own life and
liberty—to uncover matters of critical importance to an informed
public and the very foundation of democratic society.
As the only major American journalism prize that has always
honored work across all media platforms, the Polk Awards has
consistently been at the fore of the changing ways we access news
and information. The list of Polk winners includes some of the
biggest names in journalism. Seymour
Hersh, Christiane Amanpour,
Jimmy Breslin, Walter Cronkite, Thomas
Friedman, Edward R. Murrow,
Bill Moyers, A.M. Rosenthal,
Jane Mayer, Sidney Schanberg, Pete
Hamill, I. F. Stone, Studs Terkel, and the teams of Woodward
and Bernstein and Barlett and Steele are all Polk laureates.
About Long Island
University
LIU, 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 nearly
400 accredited programs, with a network of 265,000 alumni that
includes industry leaders and entrepreneurs across the
globe. Visit liu.edu for more information.
View original content to download
multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/winners-of-long-island-universitys-71st-annual-george-polk-awards-to-be-honored-301050726.html
SOURCE Long Island University