As part of his work for the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Murray Waas published a 7,912 word article in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1994 detailing how mentally retarded children institutionalized by the District of Columbia government had died because of abuse and neglect.

Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the The Los Angeles Times, Murray Waas along with Douglas Frantz, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for his stories detailing that administration's prewar foreign policy towards the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. That same year, Murray Waas won the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Shorenstein Barone Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University. The Goldsmith judges cited Murray Waas and D