The three journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian are among the recipients of the prestigious 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras will receive the award for national security reporting, along with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post. ...Guardian
The Polk prize isn't just about reporting.
“In the tradition of George Polk, many of the journalists we have recognized did more than report news,” said John Darnton, the curator of the Polk Awards, referring to the CBS News correspondent who was killed while covering the civil war in Greece in 1948. “They heightened public awareness with perceptive detection and dogged pursuit of stories that otherwise would not have seen the light of day.” ...NYT
And particularly stories that the government in question would prefer to keep out of the hands of the people to whom government must answer. Not just federal government. State governments can be just as corrupt and self-serving.
Two entries that looked into treatment of the mentally ill shared the award for medical reporting. One, by Meg Kissinger of The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, looked at the Milwaukee County mental health system in articles the Polk judges called “a definitive study of a system that barely functions.” The other entry, by Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee, looked at a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital’s practice of discharging patients. Their articles said that the hospital put the patients, sometimes heavily medicated, on Greyhound buses bound for other cities and that many of them were later arrested in connection with serious crimes. ...NYT
