Two New Yorker staff writers were announced on Monday as winners of this year’s George Polk Awards, among the highest honors in journalism. Jane Mayer, the magazine’s chief Washington correspondent, was recognized in the political-reporting category for an exposé revealing that Pete Hegseth, then Donald Trump‘s nominee for Secretary of Defense, had been forced out of two previous roles following claims of misconduct, including sexual harassment and a drunken outing to a strip club with co-workers. (Hegseth has denied any wrongdoing.) In the magazine reporting category, Rachel Aviv received the Polk for her examination of the author Alice Munro, who overlooked her partner’s sexual molestation of her youngest daughter, Andrea, but incorporated the abuse into her fiction.
Mayer’s prize marks her second Polk Award. Her reporting on Hegseth unveiled exclusively obtained documents, including a confidential whistle-blower’s report, to show that Hegseth had stepped down as the leader of two nonprofit advocacy groups, both dedicated to veterans, because of alleged financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and a pattern of heavy drinking at work. In announcing the prize, Long Island University, which confers the Polk Awards, noted that Hegseth’s Cabinet confirmation was ultimately decided by a single vote—and “not before an intense Senate examination of issues largely stemming from Mayer’s reporting.” (Mayer, for her part, published a follow-up report on a campaign by Hegseth’s supporters to intimidate whistle-blowers who’d witnessed misconduct.) Mayer’s previous Polk Award was for “The Secret Sharer,” a 2011 investigation into the leaking of classified information by an executive at the N.S.A.
Aviv’s article on Munro, the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, examined decades of family history and correspondence, along with Munro’s personal writing and published fiction, in order to recount Andrea’s sexual abuse and her mother’s subsequent use of that story for her own work. The piece chronicles how Munro left Andrea to deal independently, as a young girl and as an adult, with the psychological fallout. On Thursday, the article became one of two pieces by Aviv that were named as finalists for this year’s National Magazine Awards.
The Polk prizes will be presented in New York City on April 4th. They are named for George Polk, a CBS News correspondent who was murdered in 1948 while covering the civil war in Greece.
Twenty-six previous Polk Awards have honored New Yorker articles, writers, and editors. ♦