The New Yorker’s In the Dark Wins a 2025 Peabody Award

The New Yorker’s longform investigative podcast, In the Dark, has won a 2src25 Peabody Award, one of the highest honors in journalism. The series received the prize, in the Podcast & Radio category, for its third season, a nine-episode series that examined the killings of twenty-five Iraqi civilians, in 2srcsrc5, at the hands of U.S. Marines. Considerable media coverage followed in the months after the massacre, and President George W. Bush pledged that the public would see the results of a military probe. But attention dissipated, and no Marine served a day in prison.

To report the series, the In the Dark team carried out four years of research on three continents, interviewing witnesses and combing through thousands of pages of previously unreleased government documents. Led by the show’s host, Madeleine Baran, the team of reporter-producers also gathered information in twenty-one U.S. states, tracking down Marines who had participated in the killings and speaking with military personnel involved in the subsequent investigations. After the release of Season 3, its revelations prompted two senators, Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, and Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, to ask the Defense Department’s inspector general to review whether the agency was in compliance with its obligations to address alleged war crimes committed by American service members.

In addition to the audio series, the third season of In the Dark features multimedia components that reflect additional reporting and discoveries. After the Marine Corps commandant General Michael Hagee boasted that the media hadn’t acquired most of the photographs taken in Haditha, In the Dark successfully sued to receive the images, a selection of which it made public, with permission from Iraqi survivors. In the Dark also built the largest known database of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was published alongside the podcast season. “Cleared by Fire,” an illustrated interactive documentary produced with support from the Pulitzer Center, presents a vivid visual depiction of what happened during the killings, based on eyewitness accounts.

Season 3 of In the Dark also recently won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, New York University’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative, the Poynter Institute, and the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation. The first two seasons of the podcast received two Peabody Awards and a Polk Award. The In the Dark podcast team, which includes Samara Freemark, Parker Yesko, Natalie Jablonski, and Rehman Tungekar, in addition to Baran, joined The New Yorker in 2src23.

You can listen to all seasons of In the Dark wherever you get podcasts; for an ad-free experience, New Yorker subscribers can listen in our app (on iOS or Android). To receive future episodes and news about In the Dark, in addition to New Yorker podcasts focussed on news, culture, politics, fiction, and poetry, sign up for our daily newsletter. ♦