Each week, editors and engagement staff at the Pulitzer Center come together to review applications and decide on whether to support reporting projects. They look for ambition in scope, creativity in applying new methods, and consideration for the audiences that could benefit most from telling the story.
It’s often enough that this formula for a successful pitch results in our support for groundbreaking journalism that gains recognition because it rearranges how society thinks about an issue.
Grantee Madeleine Baran’s project was such a rearrangement: It revisits the November 2005 Haditha massacre, a story once believed to have been a closed case. A group of Marines had killed 25 Iraqis without clear cause. Indeed, the story had been a dominant headline of the Iraq War period. But what happened after the spotlight moved on revealed an inability for the military to police itself when it came to war crimes.
Last week the project won both a Pulitzer Prize in Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award in Podcast & Radio. The outstanding quality of the reporting sets a new standard for investigative journalism. And more widely, it casts a new optimism on accountability stories that aim to tackle ‘closed’ and 'difficult' cases. Judges from both awards use the same word to describe In the Dark, the best quality of any impactful investigation: relentless.
Baran’s nine episodes were published as a third season of The New Yorker’s investigative podcast In the Dark. In them, she narrates the four-year journey to convince the world that what happened in Haditha was never fully accounted for. She interviews witnesses and experts in the U.S. and Iraq, covering exactly how the massacre was lost to justice. She takes listeners along for the ride as she files FOIA requests, pours over military archives, contacts families and veterans, and even sues the military—repeatedly—for evidence that military leaders had previously boasted about keeping away from the media.
Other pieces from the project, published by The New Yorker, include a database of U.S. military war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also an interactive article based on the findings of the investigation, visually reconstructing the events of that day in 2005. Importantly, the magazine published online the crime scene images that were obtained through the lawsuit.
Since publication, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Van Hollen referenced stories from the project in an official request to the Office of the Inspector General, where they ask whether the military has upheld recommendations for improvement in war crime investigation and prosecution.