Journalism's Stocking Filled With Coal, and Some Golden Rings

Ah, the holiday season: Time of soul-warming egg nog and Walmart beatdowns. But for news junkies, it's also a time to behold some of the best and worst of journalism.

For the moment, let’s set aside the clear winner of this year’s Media Suicide Award – coverage of the presidential campaign. In seasonal kindness, let’s not dwell too much on the predictable parade of listicles-on-autopilot that newsrooms are teeing up: the canned, yearend retrospective blather that ranks the year’s “best” and “worst” and “winners” and “losers,” along with annual famous-people-who-kicked-the-bucket lists. Nothing spells news like recycled obits!

How many trees have to die pointlessly – sorry, how much computer-generated carbon gas do newsrooms have to emit needlessly – so the newsroom A-team can take the holidays off? 

I don’t know about you, but I find it less eye-glazing to watch the yule-log channel than read another yearend best-of list of the best yearend best-of lists (I kid you not: Google “best of best-of lists 2015” to see what I mean).

But wait. There is some holiday cheer. Even now some fascinating lists are starting to be compiled: nominees for journalism’s top prizes. I know about this firsthand because for three years in the mid-1990s I helped edit the New York Times’s nomination packages for the Pulitzers.

The dynamic leading up to the prizes is very similar to – if less glamorous than – the one that drives Hollywood studios to push out prestige films at year’s end to generate Oscar buzz; publishers also tend to release their prestige titles in the fall.

News cannot be released with the same control as films or books – sometimes big things happen before Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, given journalists’ habit of pushing things right up to deadline, now is prime time for editors to publish deep-dive investigative heaves before the Dec. 31 cutoff, as well as follow-up or summary pieces that hammer home the impact of prize-aspiring work that appeared earlier in the year. (Check out late-year articles in Pulitzer-winning investigative entries of the last three years: 2016, 2015 and 2014.)

Such pieces are easy to distinguish from yearend fluff. For example, the first weekend in December, the New York Times went heavy-duty with a series on racism in state prisons by a group of reporters including two – Michael Schwirtz and Michael Winerip — who were Pulitzer finalists for investigative reporting on prisons in 2016.

And it wasn’t a surprise to see the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publish a long summary piece on Dec. 1 about the global reverberations of its “Panama Papers” exclusives. These came in investigative reports this year by its member news organizations around the world, sifting an enormous leaked document trove detailing the secrets of offshore banking.

The consortium seems to be clearly aiming for prize glory, since demonstrable impact is an important criterion in the prize game, especially for investigative reporting. Not to be outdone, the Times has already given prominent play to the impact of its series: an official investigation of prison bias ordered by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

We still don’t know who all the contenders will be for the top prizes, but don’t bet the farm on coverage of the presidential campaign and its aftermath.

I say this for two reasons. First, the mainstream media covered itself in ignominy during election 2016 by failing to accurately assess, understand or even take seriously the rise of Donald Trump (also, Bernie Sanders) and then, in some cases, openly abandoning traditional norms of fairness in covering his unconventional campaign. Another black eye was Wikileaks emails suggesting collusion between some reporters and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and their employers not doing much about it.

Second, even if the coverage hadn’t been abysmal, the historical odds seem against a Pulitzer for hard-news presidential-campaign coverage. For the nine presidential elections of the last 35 years, political coverage has won the National Reporting prize only twice, said Mike Pride, the administrator of the Pulitzers. Back in the 1990's, my betters at the Times who wanted a Pulitzer for Rick Berke for his political beat coverage would rue the fact that political scoops burned intensely but only briefly and so seemed unremarkable in hindsight.

This time a prize for political coverage would likely revive public disparagement of the media. And would any news outlet in the running, accused of anti-Trump bias, run afoul of the Pulitzer requirement to “note any substantive challenges to the accuracy or fairness of the work”? Especially, say, if criticism were backed with good evidence of an organization’s general hostility toward Trump in news columns?

I emailed Pride about the issue and, while he declined to comment on hypotheticals regarding nominees, he said, “Fairness in both news and commentary is always a factor for Pulitzer jurors and board members.”

My guess is that Pulitzer jurors will choose not to be gluttons for further scorn of their profession, but don’t listen to me: I was wrong about the presidential election, not to mention the one before that. In any case, there is plenty of other great work to recognize with American journalism’s highest accolade.

This is the holidays, so let’s end on a happy note. We at RealClearInvestigations.com have seen a lot to like since launching our aggregation site in late September. Keeping in mind that our focus is investigative news, consider this sampler of some of the best work we've seen this year:

-- An Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative series on doctor sexual abuse nationwide;

-- A Financial Times series of epic breadth on the global race for one of the world's most precious resources --land;

-- An expose from the Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., about local police nationwide stockpiling massive databases from millions never charged with a crime;

-- A close-in look at the Chicago police force’s code of silence, from the nonprofit news startup The Intercept.

-- An investigation from the Philadelphia Inquirer into how its home city ignores thousands of kids poisoned with lead;

-- A series from The Oklahoman on thousands with mental illness getting jail instead of treatment;

-- And a Washington Post investigation we headlined “From Dickensian African Mines to Your Smartphone."

That’s just to name a few, and the year is not over. The prize game is afoot now. You could even make your own list. And then, come Pulitzer time April 10, check it twice.

Tom Kuntz is the editor of RealClearInvestigations.