New Yorker writer leads Polk Award winners

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NEW YORK, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- New York's Long Island University announced this year's George Polk Awards for excellence in journalism in 14 categories, led by a writer for the New Yorker.

The announcement from the school's Brooklyn campus said John McPhee, a New Yorker non-fiction writer, has won the George Polk Career Award for "his extraordinary contributions as a prolific author, essayist and educator, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of creative non-fiction."

Other winners were "senior foreign correspondent Jim Sciutto, producer Angus Hines and cameraman/producer Tom Murphy of 'ABC World News with Charles Gibson,' the television reporting award for their revealing accounts of government crackdowns on protesters in Myanmar."

The award for political reporting went to reporters Barton D. Gellman and Jo Becker, for their Washington Post series on "Vice President Dick Cheney's role as the hidden architect of U.S. policies on torture, military tribunals and other controversial issues."

The award for foreign reporting was given to Leila Fadel, Baghdad bureau chief for the McClatchy Co., for "coverage that offered chilling, first-hand accounts of violence and murder among Iraq's own people."

The award for environmental reporting went to The Wall Street Journal's Shai Oster, for his "reports on the devastating environmental consequences of China's construction of the Three Gorges Dam."

The award for medical reporting went to The New York Times' Charles A. Duhigg; local reporting, Talking Points Memo's editor and publisher Joshua M. Marshall; consumer reporting to the Chicago Tribune; book award, to Jeremy Scahill, for "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army"; magazine reporting to Joshua A. Kors; financial reporting, Edward Chancellor; business reporting, the staff of North Carolina's Charlotte Observer; state reporting, Jerry W. Mitchell of the Jacksonville (Miss.) Clarion Ledger, and local reporting (posthumously), Charles W. Bailey Jr., editor of the Oakland (Calif.) Post, gunned down while investigating a story.

The George Polk Seminar is scheduled April 16 at the Brooklyn campus.