John Rash: Despite the dangers, journalists aren't letting up

An indelible image from the Minnesota Star Tribune’s coverage of last August’s Annunciation Catholic School shooting - which on Monday, May 4, was deservedly awarded a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news - is of a mother running barefoot toward the Minneapolis church, clutching her shoes so she can get there faster.

The picture, taken by Star Tribune photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii, is specific to this tragedy but universal to the scourge of school shootings. And while nothing could compare to the pain and panic of what the worried, hurried mother and so many other parents have felt, the photo is also a visual metaphor of what journalists themselves often do: run toward scenes of chaos or danger to provide vital coverage for the public.

Just like journalists from this paper did during Operation Metro Surge, providing riveting reporting and searing images that are not likely to be forgotten when awards for 2026 coverage are considered. The kind of coverage acknowledged on Monday when the Chicago Tribune won a local-reporting Pulitzer “for its powerful coverage of the Trump administration’s militarized immigration sweep of the city that described in vivid, muscular prose how the siege-like incursion of ICE agents unified Chicagoans in resistance.” (Sound familiar?)

It’s the ethos that led the Pulitzer board to also award journalists from the Star Tribune the 2021 Pulitzer for breaking news coverage of the murder of George Floyd and the resulting unrest that rocked the city - the same spirit that’s reflected in the worthy work from the breaking-news finalists from this year, including the Wall Street Journal and Seattle Times for coverage of Texas and Washington floods and the Southern California News Group for its reporting on wildfires.

In each case, teams of journalists, including some affected by the event themselves, ran to give readers coverage and context of the disasters, be they natural or man-made.

This superb journalism is juxtaposed against an ever-changing, ever-challenging business model and a global constriction of media freedom, as quantified in Reporters Without Borders’ recently released World Press Freedom Index. The media freedom organization states that “52.2% of countries now fall in the ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ categories for press freedom, compared to just 13.7% in 2002, while less than 1% of the world’s population now lives in a country where press freedom is considered ‘good.’”

The U.S., which used to be a beacon of media freedom, has seen its light dimmed, dismally falling to 64th out of 180 countries - below Botswana but above Panama - a decline, the organization states, that “underscores a deepening crisis across multiple indicators, including legal protections, journalist safety, economic viability, and political hostility toward the free press under the second Trump administration.”

Many media organizations are feeling this heat, but other industries and individuals have been similarly targeted, which was the topic of Reuters’ Pulitzer-winning work in the national reporting category “for documenting how the president used the U.S. government and the influence of his supporters to expand executive power and exact vengeance on his foes.”

Such unprecedented, unpresidential actions were the subject of stories from the New York Times, which won an investigative-reporting Pulitzer “for deeply reported stories that exposed how President [Donald] Trump has shattered constraints on conflicts of interest and exploited the moneymaking opportunities that come with power, enriching his family and allies.”

That this is part of the growing global rise in repression was often the subject of compelling columns from the Times’ M. Gessen, who won an opinion-writing Pulitzer “for an illuminating collection of reported essays on rising authoritarian regimes that draw on history and personal experience to probe timely themes of oppression, belonging and exile.”

Gessen, who was born in the Soviet Union and has extensively reported in Russia, was unflinching in an interview before speaking to a full house at the Walker Art Center in February, standing by the characterization of what was happening on the streets of Minneapolis as “state terror.”

And it’s not only on streets but screens where such state terror can manifest, as evidenced by Associated Press stories that won the Pulitzer for international reporting “for an astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance, created in Silicon Valley, advanced in China and spreading worldwide before returning to America for secret new uses by the U.S. Border Patrol.”

Surveillance of a Pulitzer winner’s digital devices was the subject of a court ruling favorable to reporter Hannah Natanson and more broadly the Washington Post, which won in the public-service category “for piercing the veil of secrecy around the Trump administration’s chaotic overhaul of federal agencies and chronicling in rich detail the human impacts of the cuts and the consequences for the country.”

According to CNN, in his congratulatory speech to the Post’s newsroom, Executive Editor Matt Murray acknowledged the paper’s “difficult stretch” (significantly worsened by Post owner Jeff Bezos’ gutting of the newsroom, especially the gutty foreign correspondents whose bureaus were shuttered just as the world shudders from geopolitical conflict).

But in a respite, rare good news for the newspaper came from a federal judge, who ruled on May 4 that “the Justice Department will remain blocked” from accessing Natanson’s devices, a case that Murray said “is about more than Hannah. If the government prevails, we will have crossed a threshold. A precedent will have been set that allows the government to raid a journalist’s private home, seize her materials, and determine for itself - without independent review, without constraint - what it gets to keep and examine. That is a profound threat. Not just to the Post. Not just to Hannah. To every journalist, every source, every person in this country.”

Indeed, it seems that those in the Justice Department and the administration more broadly targeting journalists and by extension the American people could benefit from reading Harvard history professor and journalist Jill Lepore’s book that won a Pulitzer in the history category: “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.”

While thanking the attorneys for the Post and Natanson herself, Murray said that “if the Pulitzer board’s recognition today helps bring broader awareness to what is at stake - if it casts the importance of this battle into clearer light for the public, for our peers, for policymakers - then I know we are grateful for that too.”

In turn, many readers are grateful too, for every journalist who runs to the story in order to keep citizens informed and our democracy vital.

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This story was originally published May 7, 2026 at 4:09 AM.