The New York Times and The Washington Post received three Pulitzer Prizes each on Monday for a wide array of journalism that spanned conflict and injustice around the globe, including the plight of child migrant workers in the American Midwest, the lethal consequences of war in the Middle East, and the brutal repression of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The prize for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, went to ProPublica for exposing a web of questionable financial entanglements involving Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. The series, which revealed that Justice Thomas failed to disclose lavish gifts he had received from wealthy supporters, prompted the court to issue a new ethical code of conduct.
The prize for investigations went to Hannah Dreier of The Times, for an exposé of migrant child labor in the modern United States, and the governmental blunders and disregard that have allowed the illegal practice to persist. This was the second Pulitzer awarded to Ms. Dreier, who won the 2019 feature writing prize for her coverage of the criminal gang MS-13 for ProPublica.
The Times received the international reporting prize for its coverage of the war in the Middle East. The newspaper’s foreign staff produced an array of stories that encompassed the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, the errors by Israeli defense forces that left its citizens vulnerable, and the consequences for Palestinian civilians of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza.
The Pulitzer board also issued a special citation for journalists covering the Middle East, noting that “under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza.” The citation comes at a moment when the Middle East reporting of many media outlets, including The Times, has become a focus of criticism from activists on all sides of the conflict.
