Reuters’ Manuel Mogato Receives Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting

Photo by Lito Ocampo

A FILIPINO journalist is one of the recipients of this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for his  reporting on the killings in the Duterte administration’s “war” on drugs.

Manuel Mogato, Reuters’ political and general news correspondent in Manila, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. He shares the award with fellow Reuters journalists Claire Baldwin, Special Correspondent, and Andrew R.C. Marshall, Southeast Asia Special Correspondent.

The Pulitzer Prize, named after newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, is an award for exceptional achievement in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States. It is presented annually by Columbia University.

The Reuters team was recognized for its series “Duterte’s War” which, according to Pulitzer.org, “exposed the brutal killing campaign” behind the war on drugs. Among the articles included in the series was the special report in which two police officers admitted  receiving cash payments for executing drug suspects, planting evidence at crime scenes, and carrying out most of the killings they blamed on vigilante groups (“Special Report: Police describe kill rewards, staged crime scenes in Duterte’s drug war”).

The Philippines’ “drug war” began in 2016, shortly after Duterte assumed office. The number of deaths under the war on drugs differs from source to source. While the police insist that many of those killed in anti-drug operations “fought back”, this argument has been disputed. Philippine policemen have been accused of as many as 14,000 extrajudicial killings in the course of the campaign.

Mogato is the fifth Filipino to win a Pulitzer, following Carlos P. Romulo (1942 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Correspondence), Cheryl Diaz Meyer (2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Breaking News Photography, The Dallas Morning News), Jose Antonio Vargas (2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Breaking News Reporting, Washington Post) and Alex Tizon (1997 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Investigative Reporting, Seattle Times).

A fellow in CMFR’s 2017 Jaime V. Ongpin Journalism Seminar, Mogato also received  the 2017 Marshall McLuhan Fellowship of  the Embassy of Canada in the Philippines, which CMFR and the Embassy jointly award yearly to an outstanding Filipino journalist.