The staff of The Washington Post won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series of stories examining the rise of the AR-15, while David E. Hoffman’s series on autocracy was recognized for editorial writing and Vladimir Kara-Murza received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Additionally, The Post’s AR-15 series was a finalist in the public service category and there were also finalists in the following categories:
- International reporting for “Rising India, Toxic Tech”
- Illustrated reporting and commentary for “Searching for Maura”
The stories submitted to the Pulitzer Board for the winning entries and each of the finalists are included below:
2024 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting
The staff of The Washington Post
“American Icon:” A visceral, innovative examination of the AR-15, a lethal weapon with a singular hold on a polarized nation.
In a nation numb to tragedies such as the 2022 slaughter of 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., journalists who cover gun violence at The Washington Post concluded that the conventional ways of covering mass shootings were no longer sufficient. The Post considered how to disrupt the nation’s stalemated gun debate: Could fresh reporting and new approaches to storytelling compel readers — of all ideologies — to confront the causes and consequences of gun violence directly, in a way they haven’t before?
The result was “American Icon,” a series of penetrating stories examining the rise of the AR-15 — the most commonly used gun in the country’s deadliest shootings. Drawing on the work of more than 75 journalists, the series revealed with deep reporting and arresting visuals the AR-15’s capacity to kill. The Post obtained previously unpublished crime-scene photos, body-cam footage and investigative files; reviewed company records, court files and autopsy reports; and interviewed industry insiders, first responders, survivors and victims' families.
To depict the devastating effects of AR-15 fire in unsparing yet respectful ways, The Post relied on inventive storytelling formats rooted in exclusive reporting — including never-before-released photos and other investigative material from Uvalde and the 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex., as well as documents obtained through 30 public-records requests.
“The Blast Effect” distilled autopsy reports and expert interviews into an innovative, immersive experience, with 3-D animations showing the entrance and exit wounds of two shooting victims killed by multiple bullets. And while “Terror on Repeat” was unusual because it included photos and videos that U.S. news organizations typically don’t publish, it was the careful presentation of such imagery that made it a truly novel endeavor. Multiple warnings empowered readers to control their own experiences. The oral-history format, weaving accounts from 11 shootings into one cohesive chronology, emphasized how this recurring nightmare transcends time and place. This approach continued with a 44-page Sunday print insert.
The Post embraced an unusual degree of transparency, publishing two letters from our executive editor explaining our decision-making process. “We recognize that this presentation may disturb readers,” Sally Buzbee wrote, “but we determined the information it contains is critical to the public’s knowledge.” The Post took extraordinary care to be sensitive to those affected by the violence, publishing animated depictions of wounds suffered by two school shooting victims, but only after receiving the consent of both families.
The relevance of the series was tragically affirmed five hours after the first stories published, when an AR-15-wielding assailant killed six at a Nashville school.
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2024 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing
David E. Hoffman
Today’s dictators harness digital techniques to crush dissent — creating a new type of political prisoner. We expose the dictators’ methods and explain how to fight back.
This series started when David Hoffman learned that Danuta Perednya, 21, a university student in Belarus, was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for the simple act of reposting her boyfriend’s message against the war in Ukraine. The punishment was so arbitrary and severe that it led him to probe other, similar cases — and discover hundreds of young people jailed for exercising freedom of expression on social media. Hoffman’s investigation showed that autocrats are modernizing and using new tactics: manufacturing and spreading disinformation, brazenly snatching foes from abroad, and turning social media into a weapon against the users. Today’s dictators do this in the shadows, without a free press or open debate to hold them to account. In each piece, Hoffman excavated examples of how modern autocracies function, using deception, censorship and subversion. His main challenge was to unearth their dirty work and verify the truth. Hoffman showed how Russia manufactured and propagated a huge lie about biological weapons in Ukraine. In the case of the pandemic, he showed how China’s leaders concealed news about the fact of human transmission as the coronavirus spread, eventually leading to 7 million deaths. To illustrate the fear and risks involved with transnational repression, he brought to readers the hitherto unknown story of an émigré Cambodian journalist in Washington who had received death threats from Cambodia for his work.
Hoffman wanted readers to see the faces of the political prisoners, to grasp that so many innocent young people have been jailed, so he conducted a painstaking, global search to find photographs of them, and we published them. The Wuhan account is based on a number of highly sensitive documents from China, which Hoffman obtained, verified and translated, with the help of sources. This included a hospital’s internal report on events that took place during the critical early weeks as the coronavirus was spreading — a document that contradicts the timeline the authorities gave. These two editorials, on the prisoners and on the pandemic, ranked in the top five by article traffic for the entire year for The Post. The Wuhan piece was translated and published in Mandarin, attracting thousands of readers, 73 percent of them outside the United States. In Myanmar, the Telegram app was being used by allies of the military junta to identify dissidents and cause them to be arrested. Hoffman used the app to reverse-trace this pernicious process and expose it. These cases all involved patient, shoeleather reporting. An important innovation was using the long form for these editorials, allowing greater narrative opportunities than in the past.
At the dawn of the digital age, it was widely assumed that information would run free, undermine authoritarianism and unleash a new age of democracy. But this hasn’t happened. The autocrats are on the march and democracy is in retreat. Hoffman’s work showed a major reason why: Dictators have learned to harness the digital world, crushing freedom of speech and assembly, subverting elections, and using digital pathways to spread blatant disinformation. Modern dictators are increasingly arresting people and sending them to prison for nothing more than their words on Facebook or Telegram. These editorials show readers the extent of this danger through extensive reporting. They highlight a deepening conflict that will determine if the majority of the world’s population will live by the whims and demands of dictatorship. This is a profoundly moral choice. The editorials call on democracies to wake up and fight back, showing what a clear and actionable response to autocrats should look like.
One target audience was young people, for they are the victims of the autocrats’ new methods. We also wanted to reach leaders in democratic countries who can develop and deploy tools to fight back. The strategy was to use the long-form format to present overwhelming examples and evidence — and make exceedingly clear the dangers of expanding dictatorship, one of the most consequential stories of our time.
In the July 28 editorial on Myanmar, Hoffman showed how Telegram was being used as a “snitch line” by the country’s military junta. People who expressed opposition to the junta — usually on Facebook — were being systematically singled out on a Telegram channel. After being identified, they were arrested and imprisoned. We used a database maintained by Radio Free Asia to expose this pattern. The snitch line violated the principles of Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, who had vowed that “Telegram’s mission is to preserve privacy and freedom of speech around the world.” We asked Telegram about the abuse of the app before publishing the editorial, and they did nothing. But within days after it was published, the snitch channel was taken down.
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David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor to The Washington Post. He joined the newspaper in 1982 and covered the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was later diplomatic correspondent and the newspaper’s bureau chief in Jerusalem and Moscow, then foreign editor and assistant managing editor for foreign news. He is the author of four books including “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy” (Doubleday, 2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Hoffman has also been a correspondent for “Frontline,” the flagship PBS investigative television series.
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2024 Pulitzer Prize for commentary
Vladimir Kara-Murza
Despite his imprisonment since April 2022, Kara-Murza has continued to use his role as a Washington Post columnist to provide powerful analysis of Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Share this articleShareEvery column included in the entry was written by Kara-Murza in his prison cell. Kara-Murza did this knowing full well that he might incite the ire of prison authorities; his persistence offered yet more proof of his extraordinary courage.
Kara-Murza has always been an incisive and passionate writer, requiring only minimal interventions by his editor. In these pieces, though, he has done something remarkable. Working almost entirely without the support of a library or access to outside media, Kara-Murza summons his wide knowledge of Russian history and politics to produce commentaries of distinctive power. The one plus of captivity, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted, is the lack of distractions, and Kara-Murza’s prison writing achieves an extraordinary clarity.
He doesn’t pontificate about Russian propaganda; he experiences it from the inside, because it’s being piped into his cell, day and night. He tells the powerful and under-reported story of the many Russians who — like him — have paid dearly for opposing the war in Ukraine. In his account of a remote encounter with fellow dissident Alexei Navalny, he exposes the absurdity of an autocracy that strives to conceal its crimes under a veneer of legality. And above all he makes an eloquent case for the virtues of democracy — a hard one to make, given present circumstances, but which is, he argues, absolutely vital to the country’s future.
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Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian politician, author and historian who has been imprisoned in Russia since April 2022 for speaking out against the war on Ukraine. A longtime colleague of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, he was a candidate for the Russian Parliament and served as deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party. He is a contributing writer at The Washington Post and hosts a weekly show on Echo of Moscow radio, and he has previously worked for the BBC, RTVi, Kommersant and other media outlets.
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2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for illustrated reporting and commentary
Claire Healy, Nicole Dungca and Ren Galeno
A vividly rendered investigation of the Smithsonian’s brain collection reveals the story of Maura, a woman from the Philippines put on display at the 1904 World’s Fair.
“Searching for Maura,” reported by Claire Healy and Nicole Dungca, reveals the journey of Maura, an 18-year-old Igorot woman who was brought from the Philippines in 1904 to be put on display in staged villages at the World’s Fair in St. Louis. After she died, records suggest, Smithsonian anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka took part of her brain. Over decades, he collected more than 250 brains, and other human body parts, to research his now-debunked, racist theories about anatomical differences between races.
The Post worked with Ren Galeno, a Filipino visual artist based in Davao City in the Philippines, to illustrate the story. Every panel in “Searching for Maura” is an artist’s approximation of history, but each is based on painstaking research into archival photos, newspaper articles and records from the time. In her illustrations, Galeno flipped the historical narrative, which until now has been shaped by the views of White fairgoers and anthropologists. She instead presented the story through the eyes of Maura and other Filipinos who were brought to the United States, offering a fresh perspective and deeper understanding of this historical moment.
The illustrated investigation was also part of a broader examination by The Post of the Smithsonian’s vast collection of human remains. “Revealing the Smithsonian’s racial brain collection” traces how most of the remains appear to have been gathered without consent, by researchers preying on the vulnerable. The Post documented how the Smithsonian has neglected to take steps to repatriate the vast majority of remains. The Post also shared publicly, in a searchable database, the most extensive accounting to date of the 30,700 body parts in the Smithsonian’s possession.
The illustrated investigation “Searching for Maura” was published on The Washington Post’s website and on YouTube as an animated video. Post print subscribers received a 44-page tabloid insert of “Searching for Maura” in graphic-novel form with their Sunday paper. A book version of the story was made available for purchase on the Post website. The Post translated the story into Filipino to ensure access to Filipino speakers worldwide.
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About the reporters: Claire Healy is a newsroom copy aide, and Nicole Dungca is a reporter in The Post’s investigative unit. Ren Galeno is a visual artist from Davao City, Philippines.
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2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for international reporting
The staff of The Washington Post
India’s Narendra Modi and his allies are in the global vanguard of using technology to advance their extreme ideology and cement control. The Post revealed the vast and often covert effort.
As a Post correspondent in Beijing, Gerry Shih witnessed how the Communist Party controls the internet through blunt force and blanket repression. When Shih became The Post’s New Delhi bureau chief, he learned that the Indian government and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party also seek to dominate the online realm, but through different means, including coordinated hate speech, covert state-sanctioned disinformation, censorship and coercive relationships with large tech companies. These efforts have been far less documented than China’s approach. Modi and his Hindu nationalist allies must operate within the constraints of a democracy, the world’s largest, even as they are subverting it.
Recognizing the huge stakes for India, The Post decided to launch a series examining how Modi and his allies are using social media and other technologies to advance their extreme agenda and tighten their grip on the world’s most populous country. The Post thought it vital to do this work, because the Indian media is largely unable or unwilling to do it themselves.
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