The board that oversees journalism’s most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, and many of America’s most prestigious news outlets violated their bedrock values this week:
This disquieting episode began on Monday when the board released a short statement saying that, “In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign – submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.”
The board said it had commissioned two “independent reviews” of the contested coverage, which “converged in their conclusions: 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. The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”
As an editor and columnist for news organizations that have challenged that coverage – RealClearInvestigations and RealClearPolitics – I was eager to read those reports to see where their analysis diverged from our own. They were not attached to the statement. When I called the board, I was told that they would not be made public.
Do I have to explain why this is so wrong? Does anyone even believe that the board members think their refusal to release an analysis of public information is in keeping with the traditions of a profession that celebrates itself for publishing the Pentagon Papers?
This and all other original articles created by RealClearInvestigations may be republished for free with attribution. (These terms do not apply to outside articles linked on the site.)
We provide our stories for free but they are expensive to produce. Help us continue to publish distinctive journalism by making a contribution today to RealClearInvestigations.
Support RealClearInvestigations →
