Washington Post, New York Times win Pulitzers for work on Trump, Putin

NEW YORK: The Pulitzer Prizes on Monday honoured The Washington Post for hard-hitting reporting on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and The New York Times for revealing Vladimir Putin’s covert power grab, praising their probing of powerful people despite a hostile climate for the news media.

The Daily News of New York and ProPublica, a web-based platform specialising in investigative journalism, won the prize for public service journalism for coverage of New York police abuses that forced mostly poor minorities from their homes.

Other winners included an international consortium of more than 300 reporters on six continents that exposed the socalled Panama Papers detailing the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens used by the high and mighty.

The Pulitzers, the most prestigious honours in American journalism, have been awarded since 1917, often going to famed publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

But they are also won by smaller, lesser known publications across the country whose work does not always gain national attention when it is published.

Reporter Eric Eyre of Charleston Gazette- Mail in West Virginia took the prize for investigative reporting for exposing a flood of opioids in depressed West Virginia counties with the country’s highest overdose death rates.

The staff of the East Bay Times of Oakland, California, won the breaking news award for coverage of the ‘Ghost Ship’ fi re that killed 36 people at a warehouse party, exposing the city’s failure to take actions that might have prevented the disaster.

While the Pulitzer ceremony highlighted the news media’s importance to democracy, it has been challenged by so- called fake news, which once referred to fabricated stories meant to influence the US election but has become a term used by Trump to dismiss factual reporting that is critical. Trump has frequently excoriated the media and in February called it ‘ the enemy of the American people’.

Operating in the glare of the 2016 presidential campaign, David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post took the national reporting award. The judges said he “created a model for transparent journalism in political campaign coverage while casting doubt on Donald Trump’s assertions of generosity toward charities.”

Fahrenthold found that Trump’s charitable giving had not always matched his public statements. — Reuters