This many high-profile failures in such a short time makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.
The way the Pulitzer Prizes work seems simple enough – an Ivy league university hands out annual awards that ostensibly recognize important journalism. In practice, however, my former colleague Phil Terzian, a Pulitzer finalist who has served on the nominating committee, described the inner workings of the Pulitzers this way:
The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you’re a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.
While the Pulitzer Prizes have always been little more than self-dealing masquerading as journalistic beauty pageant, it was a lot easier to believe in this manufactured prestige back when journalism was at least slightly more competent and concerned with the appearance of objectivity. In fact, a spin through the last five years of Pulitzer recipients reveals some interesting choices that add up to a clear pattern.
In 2018, a Pulitzer for national reporting was given to The New York Times and Washington Post for reporting on the Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. A 2019 Pulitzer for “Explanatory Reporting” was given to The New York Times for reporting on Trump’s taxes.
The 2020 Pulitzer for commentary was given to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times for the 1619 Project. In 2021, a public service Pulitzer was given to The New York Times for its coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic “that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond.” In 2022, the Washington Post won a public service Pulitzer for its coverage of January 6.
Every one of these major stories was badly handled by the media writ large, served activist political narratives, frequently involved credulously regurgitating actual misinformation, or some combination thereof. While there is always reason to be suspicious of Pulitzers, historically most of the objections to the awards handed out never rose beyond the level of newsroom gossip.
The Pulitzers always reflected journalism’s skewed priorities. However, this many high-profile failures in such a short time underscores the rapid and catastrophic descent of American journalism into radical political activism and makes winning a Pulitzer look definitively like a mark of ignominy.
Russia, Russia, Russia Of the five Pulitzers mentioned above, only one has forced the institution that doles out the awards to do any reckoning. In the case of the media’s coverage of Russia collusion, the obsessive media coverage wasn’t just empirically wrong, it was akin to mass media hysteria. The saga meant years of overtly conspiratorial coverage on a story where the FBI was caught manufacturing evidence and relying on informants with dubious resumes.
It’s been such a black eye for the media, even Columbia belatedly acknowledged the failure in a major way. Earlier this year, Columbia Journalism Review, the college’s influential publication devoted to media criticism, published a damning, four-part 24,000-word report by Jeff Gerth, a veteran New York Times investigative reporter. Gerth brutally dissects the industry-wide media malpractice involved in the biggest story of Trump’s presidency.
Before you think anyone deserves plaudits for acknowledging the basic truth of a story that should have been obvious a month into Trump’s presidency, know that such admissions have their limits. CJR’s story came out after the Pulitzer committee commissioned a review of their Russiagate Pulitzer prizes last year with absurdly predictable results:
In 2022, the Pulitzer board announced that it had commissioned two ‘independent’ reviews of the 2018 awards to the Post and Times; they both found that ‘no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,’ so the awards ‘stand.’ The board did not disclose the identity of the reviewers or post their actual findings. In December, Trump made his threat to sue the Pulitzer board a reality; he filed a defamation lawsuit against the board’s members in Okeechobee county, Florida.
Suffice to say, more independent reviews of these awards have come to the opposite conclusion. In addition to Gerth’s evisceration, as far back as 2019 my RealClearInvestigations colleague Tom Kuntz (another New York Times veteran) authored a thorough, well, investigation of the specific New York Times and Washington Post Trump-Russia reporting that won the Pulitzer.
Kuntz’s conclusion? “Last year’s award to the New York Times and Washington Post for Trump-Russia coverage is already looking like a crumpled first draft of history lofting in a high arc to the dustbin.”
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