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Washington: The Washington Post won six Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, the largest haul in the paper's history, for stories ranging from an expose of poor care at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre to an examination of Vice President Dick Cheney's behind-the-scenes clout to coverage of the mass shootings at Virginia Tech.
Those subjects, along with an investigation of military contractors in Iraq and the writing of business columnist Steven Pearlstein and magazine columnist Gene Weingarten, enabled the paper to exceed its previous record of four Pulitzers, awarded in 2006.
Among other prizes, administered by Columbia University, the New York Times won two Pulitzers: for investigative reporting, on dangerous foreign imports, and explanatory reporting about DNA.
In an unusual move, the Pulitzer board awarded a second prize for investigative reporting to the Chicago Tribune on faulty regulation of toys, car seats and cribs. The Boston Globe's Mark Feeney took the criticism prize, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel won for local reporting about padding of the pensions of some county employees.
The Post series on Walter Reed, by reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille, won the public service medal by documenting in vivid detail the substandard treatment and poor living conditions of wounded soldiers. The stories also sparked a political uproar, prompting Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates to fire Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey.
Monday's award was the second Pulitzer for Priest, who won in 2006 for revealing that the CIA was using secret prisons in Eastern Europe to interrogate terrorism suspects.
Barton Gellman and Jo Becker won the national reporting award for a four-part series that examined how Cheney "has shaped his times as no vice president has before".
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