The Washington Post has won three 2019 Scripps Howard Foundation Awards.

The foundation named The Post the winner in its Investigative Reporting category for National Reporter Craig Whitlock’s reporting on the Afghanistan Papers, which revealed that senior U.S. officials misled the public about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign. The judges described The Afghanistan Papers as an “epic series that will change the way the history of the Afghanistan War and U.S. foreign policy in the early 21st century is written – forever. The final product is a well-written, comprehensive and elegant piece of journalism that is an extraordinary and definitive draft of our history."

The Post won in the Breaking News category for its coverage of the August 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. In their citation for this category, the judges wrote: “The Post’s deep history of covering mass shootings allowed it to put the incidents into a broader context with a graphic history of these shootings back to 1966, exposing their increasing frequency.”

Judges awarded The Post in the Human Interest category for National Reporter Eli Saslow’s coverage of the poor state of rural healthcare in America. “The reporter gained the trust of sources; from ordinary people who live in flyover country, rural areas where the mainstream media is held in low regard. The ability to get these intimate on-the-record accounts is what distinguishes this work, "the judges wrote.

The Post was also named a finalist in the Innovation category for “The Mueller Report Illustrated”; in the Multimedia Journalism category for “Gone in a Generation,” which captured the way climate change is disrupting life across America; in the Visual Journalism category for Photojournalist Jahi Chikwendiu’s 2019 portfolio: “From My Own Backyard,” and in the Human Interest category for Stephanie McCrummen’s reporting on “Lives of Everyday Americans.”