The New York Times receives 3 Pulitzers

New York, April 11: The New York Times won three Pulitzer Prizes this year in the categories of best feature writing, best special reporting and best breaking news photography, as jourlism presented its highest honours, the media reported. On Monday, the New York Daily News and ProPublica shared the prize for public service for their joint coverage on the New York Police Department’s widespread abuse of a decades-old law to force people from their homes and businesses over alleged illegal activity. The investigation, which involved the examition of more than 1,100 nuisance abatement cases, found that the Police Department almost exclusively targeted households and shops in minority neighbourhoods.

The reporting drove New York City to re-examine the nuisance law and pass sweeping reforms, the New York Times reported.

David A. Fahrenthold of the Washington Post won the prize for jhis work in tiol reporting during the presidential campaign on Dold Trump’s charitable foundation.

Peggy Noon of the Wall Street Jourl won the commentary award for columns that the Pulitzer board said “connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the tion’s most divisive political campaigns.” Colson Whitehead’s brutal and surreal novel “The Underground Railroad” won the prize for fiction. The novel, which won the tiol Book Award last year, centres on a young woman who escapes her life as a slave in Georgia and flees via a real subterranean network of train cars.

Whitehead, 47, told the New York Times on Monday that to be given even more recognition by the Pulitzer committee was “startling and wonderful”.

The prize for best explatory reporting went to the Intertiol Consortium of Investigative Jourlists, McClatchy and the Miami Herald for their work on reporting the Pama Papers, discussing intertiol tax havens.

Winning the award for investigative reporting was jourlist Eric Eyre, with the Charleston Gazette-Mail, for his coverage of the uncontrolled flow of opioids into the most disadvantaged areas of West Virginia.

The Pulitzers this year come as fincial pressure drains many news organisations of the resources to pursue top-flight jourlism, according to The Times.  They also come in the face of a combative stance from President Trump, who has called the news media “the enemy of the American people”. (IANS)