Post Picks Up Polks

(say that five times fast)

Three Washington Post reporters picked up George Polk awards, the coveted journalism awards that have been around since 1949. “The George Polk Awards memorialize the CBS correspondent who was murdered while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948. The Awards rank among America’s most prized honors in journalism.”

From the release:

The George Polk Award for National Reporting will go to Dana Priest of The Washington Post for unveiling the existence of secret CIA-run prisons and wrongdoing that included the death of an Afghan detainee and the attempted cover up of the mistaken imprisonment of a German citizen. Priest detailed the elaborate covert operations in a series of 10 articles that unleashed an international furor and raised troubling questions at home about the government’s counter-terrorism campaign.

Also from The Washington Post, reporters Joe Stephens and David B. Ottaway will receive the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Trekking across Afghanistan, they documented that claims of the U.S. reconstruction process in Afghanistan were a sham and a waste of millions of dollars. Shortly after they revealed that the U.S. Agency for International Development had misled Congress and the public, the longtime director of USAID resigned.

(Priest already won a Goldsmith prize for her reporting on the sites).

Considering that the Post didn’t get any Polks last year, the three-fer is a nice pick-up for the paper.

The recipients will receive their awards at a ceremony in New York in April.

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