By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) – Reuters won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, taking home the national reporting award for a series of investigations into Elon Musk’s manufacturing empire and the breaking news photography award for searing images of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
The New York Times captured at least three awards, winning for investigative reporting, international reporting and feature writing.
Reuters’ winning Musk series, “The Musk Industrial Complex,” revealed a spate of worker injuries and one death at Musk’s rocket company SpaceX and the mistreatment of animals at his brain-implant company, Neuralink.
In addition, Reuters found that electric car pioneer Tesla covered up dangerous defects, rigged its cars’ dashboard driving-range estimates and shared sensitive images recorded by its vehicles without drivers’ knowledge. The series prompted investigations in the U.S. and Europe and calls for action from U.S. lawmakers.
Reuters shared the prize with the Washington Post, which won for its examination of the AR-15 rifle and its role in U.S. gun violence.
Reuters was also honored for its photography coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict. The agency’s photographers – often working at great risk to their personal safety – have produced thousands of images documenting the war, which began with the militant group Hamas’ early-morning Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 people.
Since then, Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip has killed more than 34,000 people, including many children, and displaced the majority of its 2.3 million residents. Nearly half of the population is suffering catastrophic levels of hunger, according to the World Food Programme.
The winning photos include an affecting image taken in October by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem, depicting a Palestinian woman cradling the body of her 5-year-old niece in Gaza. That photograph previously won the prestigious 2024 World Press Photo of the Year.
Lookout Santa Cruz won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for its coverage of catastrophic flooding and mudslides in California.
The annual Pulitzers, first presented in 1917, are the most prestigious honors in U.S. journalism.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax and Eric Beech)
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