Reuters wins Polk Award for Musk coverage

The staff of Reuters has won the George Polk business reporting award for penetrating reports on nefarious practices at companies owned by multi-billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.

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.

In addition, two Polks were given for coverage of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s faulty regulation.

Anna Werner of CBS News and the KFF Health News team of Brett Kelman, Fred Schulte, Holly K. Hacker and Daniel Chang won for “When Medical Devices Malfunction,” which reported on the failure of FDA-approved knee implants; hip implant failures that led to emergency surgery; faulty heart pumps; the recall of insulin pumps three years after an FDA official hailed them as technology that would “give patients greater freedom to live their lives,” and (literally) jaw-dropping dental devices that totally escaped the agency’s attention.

Michael D. Sallah, Michael Korsh and Evan Robinson-Johnson of the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette and Debbie Cenziper of ProPublica have been honored for “With Every Breath,” a series exposing the scope of a corporate cover-up that allowed Philips Respironics to continue marketing breathing machines around the globe years after the FDA received warnings about contaminants in the machines and the company’s own experts concluded that the devices posed severe health risks to users.

This year’s winners will be honored at a luncheon sponsored by CBS in Manhattan April 12. At the same time, sixteen outstanding journalists whose careers reflect a commitment to deep investigative reporting will be honored as “George Polk laureates.” The luncheon at Cipriani 42nd Street will be followed by an evening symposium, “Journalism in an Age of Disinformation, Digital Media and AI,” at the Times Center on West 41st Street.

See all of the winners here.