An announcement from managing editors Matea Gold and Scott Vance and deputy managing editor Craig Timberg:
We are excited to share that two Washington Post documentaries produced in collaboration with Frontline, “The Discord Leaks” and “Failure at the Fence,” have been nominated for a total of four News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
“The Discord Leaks” is the result of a months-long investigation into the leak of top-secret Pentagon documents — detailing sensitive intelligence and analysis of the Ukraine war, China’s military and virtually every global hotspot — that revealed a new kind of national security threat, one driven by ego and radicalized in online, unmoderated gaming chatrooms. It earned nominations in Outstanding Investigative News Coverage: Long Form and Outstanding Music Composition, both in the News categories.
In their reporting, Post journalists exclusively obtained the full trove of classified documents leaked online, allegedly by National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, and painstakingly identified members of his Discord chatroom to uncover a history of racist and extremist behavior. The deep dive into Teixeira’s backstory and online presence also revealed lackadaisical oversight on the Air Force base on which he worked, outdated Defense Department security clearance procedures that do not take account of candidates’ digital lives and unmoderated online spaces that teem with extremist ideology. The reporting forced the Air Force to come forward with disclosures of punishment for senior officers and a base security assessment and put Discord’s data retention and privacy policies under a microscope.
“Failure at the Fence,” a collaboration that powerfully combines The Post’s renowned investigative and visual forensics reporting with Frontline’s tradition of revelatory on-the-ground dispatches for television from conflict zones, has also been nominated in two of the News categories, Outstanding Research and Outstanding Editing.
Post reporters reviewed and archived more than 450 videos depicting Hamas’s preparations, the carnage of Oct. 7 and scenes from its aftermath. They exhaustively mined social media for videos and obtained others from survivors and sources in Israel. Working from this database, reporters determined where dozens of the videos were recorded by scouring open-source maps and satellite imagery for buildings, streets and other landmarks that matched those visible in the footage. This painstaking work amounted to the verification of 14 separate breaches of the Israel-Gaza wall on Oct. 7, incursions that we found spanned practically the entire length of the barrier.
The winners for each of these categories will be announced at a ceremony later this year on September 25th.
