New York: On Friday, the Pulitzer Board announced a Pulitzer Prize in the international reporting category for the ground-breaking investigative report done by Indian-origin journalist Megha Rajagopalan that exposed the Uyghur Muslim Concentration camps in China.
The US’ top journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize was announced for Megha Rajagopalan’s advanced investigative reports which was done harnessing satellite technology that revealed China’s mass detention camps for Muslim Uyghurs and other minority ethnicities.
She shares the Pulitzer with two colleagues from an internet media, BuzzFeed News, it is learned. Rajagopalan and her colleagues used satellite imagery and 3D architectural simulations to support her interviews with two dozen former Uyghur prisoners from the detention camps where as many as a million Muslims from ethnic minority were unlawfully detained.
“I’m in complete shock, I did not expect this,” she said.
According to the publication, she and her colleagues, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek, identified 260 detention camps after building a voluminous database of about 50,000 possible sites comparing censored Chinese images with uncensored mapping software, a report from the National Herald revealed.
Rajagopalan, who had previously reported from China but was barred from there for the story, travelled to neighbouring Kazhakstan to interview former detainees who had fled there, BuzzFeed said.
“Throughout her reporting, Rajagopalan had to endure harassment from the Chinese government,” the publication said.
The series of stories provided proof of Beijing’s violation of Uighurs’ human rights, which some US and other Western officials have called a “genocide”.
According to the news report from the National Herald, another journalist of Indian-origin, Neil Bedi, has also won a Pulitzer in the local reporting category for investigative stories he wrote with an editor at the Tampa Bay Times exposing the misuse of authority by a law enforcement official in Florida to track children.
The Pulitzer Prizes awarded by a board at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York recognising the outstanding work is on its 105th year as of 2021.
In appreciation of the proliferation of citizen journalism in the internet age, teenaged non-journalist, Darnella Frazier, was awarded a Pulitzer Special Citation for her courage in filming the killing of George Floyd, the African-American who died in police custody in Minneapolis last year.
The video clip made on Darnella Frazier’s smartphone went viral and set off sustained countrywide protests against police brutality and led to measures in many states and cities to reform policing.
