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

The winners of the Peabody Awards were announced and In the Dark, The New Yorker’s longform investigative podcast, was honored in the Radio & Podcast category, for its third season, a nine-episode series that examined the killings of twenty-five Iraqi civilians, in 2005, at the hands of U.S. Marines.

To report the series, the In the Dark team carried out four years of research on three continents, interviewing witnesses to the massacre and combing through thousands of pages of previously unreleased government documents. Led by the show’s host, Madeleine Baran, the team also gathered information in twenty-one states, tracking down Marines who had participated in the killings and speaking with military personnel involved in the subsequent investigations. 

In addition to the podcast, the latest season featured several multimedia components. After a Marine Corps commandant boasted that the media hadn’t acquired 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. The team also built the largest known database of alleged war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was published by The New Yorker alongside the podcast. The interactive documentary “Cleared by Fire” provided a vivid visual depiction of what happened during the killings, based on eyewitness accounts. 

Season three of In the Dark previously won prizes from the Overseas Press Club, New York University’s Ethics and Journalism Initiative, and the Women in Media Alliance Foundation. The first two seasons of the podcast received two Peabody Awards and a Polk Award. The staff of the podcast, which includes Samara Freemark, Parker Yesko, Natalie Jablonski, and Rehman Tungekar in addition to Baran, joined The New Yorker in 2023.