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READ THE WASHINGTON POST’S 2024 PULITZER PRIZE WINNERS

Three projects honored with top awards while three are named finalists

By Washington Post staff
May 6, 2024 at 3:27 p.m. EDT

From left to right: Imprisoned columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza, The Post's project
on the AR-15 and the "Annals of Autocracy" series.

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The staff of The Washington Post won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for national
reporting for a series of stories examining the rise of the AR-15, while David
E. Hoffman’s series on autocracy was recognized for editorial writing and
Vladimir Kara-Murza received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.



Additionally, The Post’s AR-15 series was a finalist in the public service
category and there were also finalists in the following categories:

 * International reporting for “Rising India, Toxic Tech”
 * Illustrated reporting and commentary for “Searching for Maura”

The stories submitted to the Pulitzer Board for the winning entries and each of
the finalists are included below:


2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR NATIONAL REPORTING

THE STAFF OF THE WASHINGTON POST

“American Icon:” A visceral, innovative examination of the AR-15, a lethal
weapon with a singular hold on a polarized nation.

In a nation numb to tragedies such as the 2022 slaughter of 19 children and two
adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., journalists who cover gun
violence at The Washington Post concluded that the conventional ways of covering
mass shootings were no longer sufficient. The Post considered how to disrupt the
nation’s stalemated gun debate: Could fresh reporting and new approaches to
storytelling compel readers — of all ideologies — to confront the causes and
consequences of gun violence directly, in a way they haven’t before?

The result was “American Icon,” a series of penetrating stories examining the
rise of the AR-15 — the most commonly used gun in the country’s deadliest
shootings. Drawing on the work of more than 75 journalists, the series revealed
with deep reporting and arresting visuals the AR-15’s capacity to kill. The Post
obtained previously unpublished crime-scene photos, body-cam footage and
investigative files; reviewed company records, court files and autopsy reports;
and interviewed industry insiders, first responders, survivors and victims'
families.

To depict the devastating effects of AR-15 fire in unsparing yet respectful
ways, The Post relied on inventive storytelling formats rooted in exclusive
reporting — including never-before-released photos and other investigative
material from Uvalde and the 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex., as
well as documents obtained through 30 public-records requests.

“The Blast Effect” distilled autopsy reports and expert interviews into an
innovative, immersive experience, with 3-D animations showing the entrance and
exit wounds of two shooting victims killed by multiple bullets. And while
“Terror on Repeat” was unusual because it included photos and videos that U.S.
news organizations typically don’t publish, it was the careful presentation of
such imagery that made it a truly novel endeavor. Multiple warnings empowered
readers to control their own experiences. The oral-history format, weaving
accounts from 11 shootings into one cohesive chronology, emphasized how this
recurring nightmare transcends time and place. This approach continued with a
44-page Sunday print insert.

The Post embraced an unusual degree of transparency, publishing two letters from
our executive editor explaining our decision-making process. “We recognize that
this presentation may disturb readers,” Sally Buzbee wrote, “but we determined
the information it contains is critical to the public’s knowledge.” The Post
took extraordinary care to be sensitive to those affected by the violence,
publishing animated depictions of wounds suffered by two school shooting
victims, but only after receiving the consent of both families.

The relevance of the series was tragically affirmed five hours after the first
stories published, when an AR-15-wielding assailant killed six at a Nashville
school.

Read the stories

 * The blast effect
 * Terror on repeat
 * The gun that divides a nation
 * After Sandy Hook, they voted no. Now these senators want new gun laws.
 * A tragedy without end
 * The radicals’ rifle
 * A Southern town embraces its AR-15 factory
 * The policing paradox
 * Why do Americans own AR-15s?
 * Flannel, muddy girl camo and man cards. See the ads used to sell the AR-15.
 * High-capacity-magazine bans could save lives. Will they hold up in court?
 * As mass shootings multiplied, the horrific human cost was concealed
 * Why we are showing the impact of bullets from an AR-15 on the human body
 * Why we are publishing disturbing content from AR-15 mass shootings
 * EDITORIAL: No one needs an AR-15 — or any gun tailor-made for mass shootings


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2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR EDITORIAL WRITING

DAVID E. HOFFMAN

Today’s dictators harness digital techniques to crush dissent — creating a new
type of political prisoner. We expose the dictators’ methods and explain how to
fight back.

This series started when David Hoffman learned that Danuta Perednya, 21, a
university student in Belarus, was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison
for the simple act of reposting her boyfriend’s message against the war in
Ukraine. The punishment was so arbitrary and severe that it led him to probe
other, similar cases — and discover hundreds of young people jailed for
exercising freedom of expression on social media. Hoffman’s investigation showed
that autocrats are modernizing and using new tactics: manufacturing and
spreading disinformation, brazenly snatching foes from abroad, and turning
social media into a weapon against the users. Today’s dictators do this in the
shadows, without a free press or open debate to hold them to account. In each
piece, Hoffman excavated examples of how modern autocracies function, using
deception, censorship and subversion. His main challenge was to unearth their
dirty work and verify the truth. Hoffman showed how Russia manufactured and
propagated a huge lie about biological weapons in Ukraine. In the case of the
pandemic, he showed how China’s leaders concealed news about the fact of human
transmission as the coronavirus spread, eventually leading to 7 million deaths.
To illustrate the fear and risks involved with transnational repression, he
brought to readers the hitherto unknown story of an émigré Cambodian journalist
in Washington who had received death threats from Cambodia for his work.

Hoffman wanted readers to see the faces of the political prisoners, to grasp
that so many innocent young people have been jailed, so he conducted a
painstaking, global search to find photographs of them, and we published them.
The Wuhan account is based on a number of highly sensitive documents from China,
which Hoffman obtained, verified and translated, with the help of sources. This
included a hospital’s internal report on events that took place during the
critical early weeks as the coronavirus was spreading — a document that
contradicts the timeline the authorities gave. These two editorials, on the
prisoners and on the pandemic, ranked in the top five by article traffic for the
entire year for The Post. The Wuhan piece was translated and published in
Mandarin, attracting thousands of readers, 73 percent of them outside the United
States. In Myanmar, the Telegram app was being used by allies of the military
junta to identify dissidents and cause them to be arrested. Hoffman used the app
to reverse-trace this pernicious process and expose it. These cases all involved
patient, shoeleather reporting. An important innovation was using the long form
for these editorials, allowing greater narrative opportunities than in the past.

At the dawn of the digital age, it was widely assumed that information would run
free, undermine authoritarianism and unleash a new age of democracy. But this
hasn’t happened. The autocrats are on the march and democracy is in retreat.
Hoffman’s work showed a major reason why: Dictators have learned to harness the
digital world, crushing freedom of speech and assembly, subverting elections,
and using digital pathways to spread blatant disinformation. Modern dictators
are increasingly arresting people and sending them to prison for nothing more
than their words on Facebook or Telegram. These editorials show readers the
extent of this danger through extensive reporting. They highlight a deepening
conflict that will determine if the majority of the world’s population will live
by the whims and demands of dictatorship. This is a profoundly moral choice. The
editorials call on democracies to wake up and fight back, showing what a clear
and actionable response to autocrats should look like.

One target audience was young people, for they are the victims of the autocrats’
new methods. We also wanted to reach leaders in democratic countries who can
develop and deploy tools to fight back. The strategy was to use the long-form
format to present overwhelming examples and evidence — and make exceedingly
clear the dangers of expanding dictatorship, one of the most consequential
stories of our time.

In the July 28 editorial on Myanmar, Hoffman showed how Telegram was being used
as a “snitch line” by the country’s military junta. People who expressed
opposition to the junta — usually on Facebook — were being systematically
singled out on a Telegram channel. After being identified, they were arrested
and imprisoned. We used a database maintained by Radio Free Asia to expose this
pattern. The snitch line violated the principles of Telegram’s founder, Pavel
Durov, who had vowed that “Telegram’s mission is to preserve privacy and freedom
of speech around the world.” We asked Telegram about the abuse of the app before
publishing the editorial, and they did nothing. But within days after it was
published, the snitch channel was taken down.

Read the stories

 * They clicked once. Then came the dark prisons.
 * How Russia turned America’s helping hand to Ukraine into a vast lie
 * Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other
 * First came a bloody massacre. Then the junta silenced the mourners.
 * In Wuhan, doctors knew the truth. They were told to keep quiet.
 * They opened the door. The dictators were waiting.
 * How the battle for democracy will be fought — and won



David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to The Washington Post. He joined the
newspaper in 1982 and covered the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush. He was later diplomatic correspondent and the newspaper’s bureau chief in
Jerusalem and Moscow, then foreign editor and assistant managing editor for
foreign news. He is the author of four books including “The Dead Hand: The
Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy” (Doubleday,
2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Hoffman has
also been a correspondent for “Frontline,” the flagship PBS investigative
television series.


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2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR COMMENTARY

VLADIMIR KARA-MURZA

Despite his imprisonment since April 2022, Kara-Murza has continued to use his
role as a Washington Post columnist to provide powerful analysis of Vladimir
Putin's Russia.

Every column included in the entry was written by Kara-Murza in his prison cell.
Kara-Murza did this knowing full well that he might incite the ire of prison
authorities; his persistence offered yet more proof of his extraordinary
courage.

Kara-Murza has always been an incisive and passionate writer, requiring only
minimal interventions by his editor. In these pieces, though, he has done
something remarkable. Working almost entirely without the support of a library
or access to outside media, Kara-Murza summons his wide knowledge of Russian
history and politics to produce commentaries of distinctive power. The one plus
of captivity, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted, is the lack of distractions, and
Kara-Murza’s prison writing achieves an extraordinary clarity.

He doesn’t pontificate about Russian propaganda; he experiences it from the
inside, because it’s being piped into his cell, day and night. He tells the
powerful and under-reported story of the many Russians who — like him — have
paid dearly for opposing the war in Ukraine. In his account of a remote
encounter with fellow dissident Alexei Navalny, he exposes the absurdity of an
autocracy that strives to conceal its crimes under a veneer of legality. And
above all he makes an eloquent case for the virtues of democracy — a hard one to
make, given present circumstances, but which is, he argues, absolutely vital to
the country’s future.

Read the stories (translated from Russian)

 * Many Russians refuse to become silent accomplices to Putin’s war — at great
   cost
 * Vladimir Kara-Murza from jail: What happened when I saw Alexei Navalny
 * Vladimir Kara-Murza: Putin thinks he can bend history to his will
 * Russians are living in a frightening, distorted reality
 * Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine makes a mockery of law
 * Vladimir Kara-Murza’s last statement to Russian court: A reckoning will come
 * Change will come to Russia — abruptly and unexpectedly



Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian politician, author and historian who has been
imprisoned in Russia since April 2022 for speaking out against the war on
Ukraine. A longtime colleague of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, he was a
candidate for the Russian Parliament and served as deputy leader of the People’s
Freedom Party. He is a contributing writer at The Washington Post and hosts a
weekly show on Echo of Moscow radio, and he has previously worked for the BBC,
RTVi, Kommersant and other media outlets.


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2024 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR ILLUSTRATED REPORTING AND COMMENTARY

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CLAIRE HEALY, NICOLE DUNGCA AND REN GALENO

A vividly rendered investigation of the Smithsonian’s brain collection reveals
the story of Maura, a woman from the Philippines put on display at the 1904
World’s Fair.

“Searching for Maura,” reported by Claire Healy and Nicole Dungca, reveals the
journey of Maura, an 18-year-old Igorot woman who was brought from the
Philippines in 1904 to be put on display in staged villages at the World’s Fair
in St. Louis. After she died, records suggest, Smithsonian anthropologist Ales
Hrdlicka took part of her brain. Over decades, he collected more than 250
brains, and other human body parts, to research his now-debunked, racist
theories about anatomical differences between races.

The Post worked with Ren Galeno, a Filipino visual artist based in Davao City in
the Philippines, to illustrate the story. Every panel in “Searching for Maura”
is an artist’s approximation of history, but each is based on painstaking
research into archival photos, newspaper articles and records from the time. In
her illustrations, Galeno flipped the historical narrative, which until now has
been shaped by the views of White fairgoers and anthropologists. She instead
presented the story through the eyes of Maura and other Filipinos who were
brought to the United States, offering a fresh perspective and deeper
understanding of this historical moment.

The illustrated investigation was also part of a broader examination by The Post
of the Smithsonian’s vast collection of human remains. “Revealing the
Smithsonian’s racial brain collection” traces how most of the remains appear to
have been gathered without consent, by researchers preying on the vulnerable.
The Post documented how the Smithsonian has neglected to take steps to
repatriate the vast majority of remains. The Post also shared publicly, in a
searchable database, the most extensive accounting to date of the 30,700 body
parts in the Smithsonian’s possession.

The illustrated investigation “Searching for Maura” was published on The
Washington Post’s website and on YouTube as an animated video. Post print
subscribers received a 44-page tabloid insert of “Searching for Maura” in
graphic-novel form with their Sunday paper. A book version of the story was made
available for purchase on the Post website. The Post translated the story into
Filipino to ensure access to Filipino speakers worldwide.

Read the story

 * Searching for Maura

About the reporters: Claire Healy is a newsroom copy aide, and Nicole Dungca is
a reporter in The Post’s investigative unit. Ren Galeno is a visual artist from
Davao City, Philippines.


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2024 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST FOR INTERNATIONAL REPORTING

THE STAFF OF THE WASHINGTON POST

India’s Narendra Modi and his allies are in the global vanguard of using
technology to advance their extreme ideology and cement control. The Post
revealed the vast and often covert effort.

As a Post correspondent in Beijing, Gerry Shih witnessed how the Communist Party
controls the internet through blunt force and blanket repression. When Shih
became The Post’s New Delhi bureau chief, he learned that the Indian government
and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party also seek to dominate the online realm,
but through different means, including coordinated hate speech, covert
state-sanctioned disinformation, censorship and coercive relationships with
large tech companies. These efforts have been far less documented than China’s
approach. Modi and his Hindu nationalist allies must operate within the
constraints of a democracy, the world’s largest, even as they are subverting it.

Recognizing the huge stakes for India, The Post decided to launch a series
examining how Modi and his allies are using social media and other technologies
to advance their extreme agenda and tighten their grip on the world’s most
populous country. The Post thought it vital to do this work, because the Indian
media is largely unable or unwilling to do it themselves.

Read the stories

 * Inside the vast digital campaign by Hindu nationalists to inflame India
 * Under India’s pressure, Facebook let propaganda and hate speech thrive
 * He live-streamed his attacks on Indian Muslims. YouTube gave him an award.
 * India uses widespread internet blackouts to mask domestic turmoil
 * How India tamed Twitter and set a global standard for censorship
 * Covert India operation seeks to discredit Modi’s critics in the U.S.
 * India targets Apple over its phone hacking notifications




THE POST’S PULITZER PRIZE HISTORY

2024: Washington Post wins three Pulitzer Prizes, including for AR-15 series,
editorial writing and commentary | Read the stories

2023: Washington Post wins three Pulitzer Prizes, including for abortion
coverage, feature writing | Read the stories

2022: Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for public service for Jan. 6 coverage
| Read the stories

2021: Reporting about racial justice and pandemic dominates Pulitzer Prizes |
Read the stories

2020: Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for series that detailed environmental
devastation in global hot spots | Read the stories

2019: The Post wins Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, photography; affiliated
cartoonist also honored | Read the stories

2018: The Post wins 2 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on Russian interference and
Alabama Senate race | Read the stories

2017: Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold wins Pulitzer Prize for dogged
reporting of Trump’s philanthropy | Read the stories

2016: The Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for coverage of police shootings |
Read the stories

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize awards history

Show more

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