Times Wins Polk Awards for Riot, Nuclear Coverage

Los Angeles Times coverage of last year’s riots and a series on the Soviet nuclear legacy have won George Polk awards for excellence in journalism. The awards are among the most highly regarded journalistic prizes.

Coverage of the riots won in the category of local reporting. “Most of the city staff fanned out across South-Central Los Angeles bravely detailing the violence stirred by the Rodney King verdict,” a statement announcing the prize noted.

John-Thor Dahlburg, a Times correspondent in Moscow, won the award in environmental reporting for a three-part series entitled “The Nuclear Nightmare.” Dahlburg was cited for “his in-depth reporting on the unchecked disposal of radioactive material in the former Soviet Union and its devastating effects on people and nature.”

The George Polk awards were established by Long Island University in 1949 and are named after a CBS correspondent killed a year earlier during the Greek civil war.

The awards are granted based on recommendations of a panel of advisers comprised of past winners, media executives, writers and academicians. Final selections are made by a committee of university faculty and alumni, which this year examined more than 400 nominations. The two awards won by The Times were among 13 announced by the university.

Other Polk award winners were: George Vistica of the San Diego Union-Tribune (national reporting, for coverage of Navy’s Tailhook scandal); Seth Rosenfeld of the San Francisco Examiner (health reporting, for stories on Dow Corning and breast implants); Marianne Lavelle, Marcia Coyle and Claudia MacLachlan of the National Law Journal (legal reporting, for report on racial divide in toxic waste cleanup); Lawrence Weschler of the New Yorker (magazine reporting, for description of injustices done to a leader of Czechoslovakian resistance); Roy Gutman of Newsday (foreign reporting, for documenting human rights abuses in Bosnia); Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio (radio reporting, for uncovering Serbian executions of 200 unarmed Bosnian Muslims); Carlos Guerrero of El Nuevo Herald (photography, for scene from Hurricane Andrew); Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz of NBC’s Dateline (national television reporting, for uncovering Wal-Mart’s purchases of clothing from Indian sweatshops that employ young children); Chris Wallace, Neal Shapiro and Anthony Radziwill of ABC’s PrimeTime Live (foreign television reporting, for a piece on the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany and its American connection); Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (social commentary, for Op-Ed piece in the New York Times on academic form of black anti-Semitism); Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times (career award, for his 50 years as editor, commentator and reporter).