The justice reporting award went to Brett Murphy of ProPublica for his investigation into the pseudoscience of “911 call analysis,” which claims to assess a caller’s guilt based on speech patterns. His articles pointed to more than 100 cases in 26 states where the technique was used in criminal cases.
The prize for political reporting went to Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Ana Ceballos, Mary Ellen Klas and the staff of the Miami Herald for their articles examining how refugees were lured under false pretenses onto flights from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, under the direction of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
The foreign television award went to Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Kavitha Chekuru and Laila Al-Arian for “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a segment on Al Jazeera English’s Fault Lines program. The team examined the shooting death by the Israeli military of Ms. Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist who was reporting in the West Bank.
Shimon Prokupecz, a senior crime and justice correspondent for CNN, and his crew were honored for national television reporting for their coverage of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, and of law enforcement’s delay in challenging the gunman.
A special award was given to Theo Baker, a student at Stanford University and a reporter for The Stanford Daily, for uncovering allegations that some research papers co-written by Stanford University’s president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, contained manipulated images. The university is now investigating the allegations. Mr. Baker, 18, is the son of two journalists — Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan B. Glasser of The New Yorker, and is the youngest recipient of a Polk Award, according to Mr. Darnton.
The Sydney H. Schanberg prize, which honors long-form investigative journalism, was awarded to Alex Perry, a freelance journalist who chronicled a 2021 ISIS attack in a remote town in Mozambique for Outside magazine.
