Pulitzer Prize: BuzzFeed News Wins For China Detention Investigation

Authored by buzzfeednews.com and submitted by vaish7848

BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer Prize on Friday for a series of innovative articles that used satellite images, 3D architectural models, and daring in-person interviews to expose China’s vast infrastructure for detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims in its Xinjiang region. The Pulitzer Prize is the highest honor in journalism, and this is the digital outlet’s first win since it was founded in 2012.

And the FinCEN Files series from BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists, the largest-ever investigative reporting project, which exposed corruption in the global banking industry, was honored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A former US Treasury Official was sentenced to prison just last week for leaking the thousands of secret government documents that served as its genesis.

The Xinjiang series won in the International Reporting category and was recognized as a finalist in the Explanatory Reporting category, and the FinCEN Files was recognized as a finalist in the International Reporting category. BuzzFeed News has been a Pulitzer finalist twice before.

Pulitzer Prizes were also awarded to the Minneapolis Star Tribune for their coverage of George Floyd’s killing by police and its aftermath. Darnella Frazier, the teen who recorded the viral video of Floyd’s death, received a special citation from the Pulitzer Prizes. The Boston Globe won for investigative reporting that uncovered systemic failures by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers. Ed Yong of the Atlantic won the Explanatory Reporting prize for his pieces on the COVID-19 pandemic. He shared the prize with a team of Reuters reporters for their examination of how “qualified immunity” shields police who use excessive force from prosecution.

The Pulitzer for Local Reporting went to the Tampa Bay Times for exposing a sheriff’s secretive intelligence operation to profile schoolchildren, while the staffs of the The Marshall Project, Alabama Media Group, The Indianapolis Star and the Invisible Institute won the National Reporting category for their yearlong investigation of K-9 units and the damage that police dogs inflict on Americans. The New York Times won the Public Service Reporting Pulitzer for its “courageous, prescient and sweeping coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond.”

In 2017, not long after China began to detain thousands of Muslims in Xinjiang, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan was the first to visit an internment camp — at a time when China denied that such places existed.

“In response, the government tried to silence her, revoking her visa and ejecting her from the country,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its entry for the prize. “It would go on to cut off access to the entire region for most Westerners and stymie journalists. The release of basic facts about detainees slowed to a trickle.”

Working from London, and refusing to be silenced, Rajagopalan partnered with two contributors, Alison Killing, a licensed architect who specializes in forensic analysis of architecture and satellite images of buildings, and Christo Buschek, a programmer who builds tools tailored for data journalists.

“The blazing Xinjiang stories shine desperately needed light on one of the worst human rights abuses of our time,” said Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. “I am immensely proud of Megha — who was kicked out of China yet still found ways to cover this critical story — as well as Alison and Christo for their brave and harrowing investigation, a leading example of innovative forensic analysis and creative reporting.”

Minutes after she won, Rajagopalan told BuzzFeed News she wasn’t even watching the ceremony live because she wasn’t expecting to win. She only found out when Schoofs called to congratulate her for the victory.

“I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” Rajagopalan said over the phone from London.

She said she was deeply grateful to the teams of people who worked with her on this including her collaborators, Killing and Buschek, her editor Alex Campbell, BuzzFeed News’ public relations team, and the organizations that funded their work, including the Pulitzer Center.

Rajagopalan also acknowledged the courage of the sources who spoke to them despite the risk and threat of retaliation against them and their families.

“I’m so grateful they stood up and were willing to talk to us,” she said. “It takes so much unbelievable courage to do that.”

The three of them set out to analyze thousands of satellite images of the Xinjiang region, an area bigger than Alaska, to try to answer a simple question: Where were Chinese officials detaining as many as 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities?

For months, the trio compared censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software. They began with an enormous dataset of 50,000 locations. Buschek built a custom tool to sort through those images. Then, “the team had to go through thousands of images one by one, verifying many of the sites against other available evidence,” BuzzFeed News wrote in its prize entry.

They ultimately identified more than 260 structures that appeared to be fortified detention camps. Some of the sites were capable of holding more than 10,000 people and many contained factories where prisoners were forced into labor.

The groundbreaking technological reporting was also accompanied by extensive old-fashioned “shoe leather” journalism.

Barred from China, Rajagopalan instead traveled to its neighbor Kazakhstan, a country known for its own authoritarian impulses, where many Chinese Muslims have sought refuge. There, Rajagopalan located more than two dozen people who had been prisoners in the Xinjiang camps, winning their trust and convincing them to share their nightmarish accounts with the world.

One article took readers inside one of the camps, which was described in unprecedented, vivid detail from the survivors’ accounts and then rendered, thanks to Killing’s architectural skills, into a 3D model.

“Throughout her reporting, Rajagopalan had to endure harassment from the Chinese government, which had persisted beyond forcing her to pack up her apartment in Beijing on short notice,” the prize entry read. At one point, “the Chinese government posted her personal information, including a government identification number, on Twitter.”

Ultimately, the series of four stories painted a damning and detailed portrait of China’s horrific detention and treatment of its Muslim citizens, which major Western nations have labeled a genocide and a crime against humanity.

ObiWansTinderAccount on June 11st, 2021 at 20:10 UTC »

Take this quiz to find out which kind of labor camp the Chinese government would put you in!

lesstalkmorescience on June 11st, 2021 at 19:29 UTC »

Change your name BuzzFeed News, you deserve it.

BlurryBigfoot74 on June 11st, 2021 at 18:39 UTC »

BuzzFeed news needs to be it's own thing because the BuzzFeed name is internet poison. They've done a lot of old school foot-to-the-pavement journalism and no one will take it seriously.