NY Times’ Dreier, Reuters coverage of Musk win Pulitzers

Hannah Dreier, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for “Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.” and related stories exposing a migrant child labor scandal involving some of the world’s largest corporations.

Dreier’s work showed the struggles of real children in the context of the complex global political and economic challenges their families face. The story had immediate impact and led to sweeping changes in how the Department of Labor investigates child labor cases.

In addition, Reuters’ coverage of billionaire Elon Musk and his business ventures won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

The “Musk Industrial Complex” series was recognized for uncovering systemic harms to consumers, workers and lab animals at Elon Musk’s companies. The reporters documented a spate of injuries and the death of a worker at SpaceX and poor treatment of laboratory animals at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant company.

Other stories found that Musk’s electric automaker Tesla hid dangerous defects in steering and suspension parts, rigged in-dash driving-range estimates in its cars, invaded drivers’ privacy by sharing sensitive images recorded by their vehicles and made insurance customers wait months for claim payouts.

Where regulators had failed to police these companies, these stories sparked investigations in both the U.S. and Europe and calls for action from U.S. lawmakers.

STAT News reporters Bob Herman and Casey Ross were finalists in investigative reporting for their series on how artificial intelligence is used to deny vulnerable patients health care.

Bloomberg News was a finalist in explanatory reporting for its reporting that holds corporate water profiteers to account and exposes how they willfully exacerbate the effects of climate change at the expense of less powerful communities.