IN HIS RECENT AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Ben Bradlee sums up the schizophrenic feelings many journalists have about the Pulitzer prize. “First,” writes the former editor of the Washington Post, “as a standard of excellence the Pulitzer prizes are overrated and suspect.” Less than a page later, Bradlee goes on to detail his frantic attempts to wangle one of these overrated and suspect prizes for his newspaper.
Endowed more than 80 years ago by Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian-born newspaper publisher with a soft spot for sensational headlines and alcoholic reporters (“Find a man who gets drunk and hire him at once,” Pulitzer once instructed an editor), the 14 Pulitzer prizes for journalism awarded each spring have for decades drawn a mixture of scorn and adulation from those who would win them. And it’s easy to see why. The board that oversees newspapering’s most prestigious award has a mixed record of picking what is best in American newspapers. This year’s Pulitzer prizes will be remembered as an especially stark example of spotty judgment, and for one reason: Dorothy Rabinowitz didn’t win one.
Rabinowitz, an editorial writer and columnist at the Wall Street Journal, has over the last several years waged a campaign on behalf of dozens of people’s wrongly accused of molesting children (see “America’s Foremost Muckraker,” THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Jan. 8). By pursuing leads other reporters ignored, Rabinowitz single-handedly exposed a number of highly visible sex- abuse cases as legal witch hunts, complete with fabricated evidence, coerced testimony, and unscrupulous prosecutors motivated by political gain. Taken together, Rabinowitz’s columns constituted a classic Pulitzer prize-winning series, in which a lone reporter rises to the defense of the despised and powerless while taking aim directly at the Establishment, in this case cops, judges, prosecutors, and child-welfare workers. Over the course of 1995 alone, Rabinowitz’s columns for the Journal — the same columns she submitted to the Pulitzer prize board this year –were responsible for freeing at least two wrongly convicted people from prison with their convictions over-turned, as well as for convincing countless news outlets to change their editorial positions on the cases she covered.
Rabinowitz’s work was, in other words, precisely the kind of journalism the Pulitzer prizes were designed to honor. But she didn’t win. Instead the award for distinguished commentary went to another finalist in the category, E.R. Shipp of the New York Daily News. While Shipp’s columns — on affrmative action, welfare, and black culture — are at times impressive, they do not begin to compare in style or eff3ct to those Rabinowitz submitted.
What happened? The board that confers the Pulitzers won’t say, officially. For a group ostensibly committed to free access to information, the 18-member ber board of academics and professional journalists operates surprisingly like a secret society. “The proceedings within the board meeting are privileged, and are never discussed or revealed,” says Seymour Topping, the board’s administrator. According to Topping, keeping the proceedings under wraps allows the judges to speak more freely, while protecting feelings. This explanation is undoubtedly well-meaning, but secrecy also has another effect: allowing the board to make ill-informed or politically motivated decisions without the cleansing benefit of public scrutiny. Indeed, had the board’s proceedings been open to the outside world, it is unlikely the debate over Rabinowitz’s entry would have unfolded as it did.
The great mystery of this year’s Pulitzer prize decisions is how the board could fail to choose a journalist whose columns had, unlike so much that is printed in newspapers, actually changed society and freed innocent people from prison. According to Edward Seaton, editor of the Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury and a member of the Pulitzer board, it’s no mystery at all. Rabinowitz’s columns, says Seaton, had no such effect on society and certainly didn’t get anyone out of jail. Seaton says he knows this because other members of the board explained it during the deliberations. “I don’t want to get into criticizing,” Seaton says, “but we did have members of the board who lived in the communities she wrote about, and they indicated that was not the case. I mean, if you just read the Wall Street Journal, you might have had that impression.” According to board members from Boston and the Pacific Northwest, the two places where the sex-abuse cases in question took place, Rabinowitz’s columns were merely rewrites of articles that had already appeared in the local press. “What she really did, as I understand it, ” Seaton says, “was to bring some local situations to national attention, but those local situations were not affected, to my knowledge, by what she did.”
Secure in the belief that Rabinowitz’s columns had achieved nothing particularly significant or unusual, some board members apparently felt free to choose the winner using less weighty criteria. “I remember one of the board members said, “If I picked up my morning newspaper, which one of these commentary entries would I go to first?'” says Seaton. “And she said, “E.R. Shipp, every time.'”
Mystery solved. The only problem is that the unnamed board members’ assessment of Rabinowitz’s columns is factually untrue — and probably deliberately so. In fact, what Rabinowitz wrote had a decisive effect at the local level, particularly in Boston. Anyone who claims otherwise is being deceitful or doesn’t read the newspapers, neither of which is an encouraging quality in a member of the Pulitzer prize board.
“There isn’t a day since she entered our lives that we don’t reflect back and know that if it wasn’t for Dorothy Rabinowitz we would still be sitting in prison,” says Violet Amirault, a 72-year-old former schoolteacher from Boston who, along with her daughter, spent eight years in prison on bogus child-abuse charges until Rabinowitz’s columns led to a new trial and an overturned conviction last September. Amirault says she and her family had for years begged news outlets, including Boston’s dailies, the Globe and the Herald, to reexamine her conviction. But to no effect. “They considered us guilty, child molesters. They ignored us,” Violet Amirault says. Finally, in the winter of 1995, the Amiraults wrote to Rabinowitz, who dug into the facts of the case and produced a moving series of columns explaining how the family had been railroaded.
Within days of Rabinowitz’s first piece in the Journal, lawyers in Boston volunteered to take on the Amiraults’ appeal pro bono. More than $ 70, 000 poured in from Journal readers for the family’s defense. Perhaps most remarkable, after nearly a decade of accepting the prosecutor’s description of the Amiraults as child molesters, both the Globe and the Herald commissioned new investigations into the case. Both papers ultimately concluded that the Amiraults had been tragically wronged. According to Ed Siegel, an at4arge critic for the Boston Globe who has written about the Amiraults, it was Rabinowitz, writing from another city, who spurred the local press into action. “Her stuff had enormous effect here,” says Siegel. ” She opened up a whole new way of looking at the case in Boston.”
None of this, of course, seems to have come to the attention of the majority of the members of the Pulitzer prize board — the same body that, in previous years, has bestowed awards upon reporters like Stalin apologist Walter Duranty of the New York Times and Washington Post prankster Janet Cooke, who won by making up a story about “Jimmy,” an 8-year-old heroin addict. On the other hand, the Pulitzer is hardly the most important mark of a reporter’s success. As people like the Amiraults understand.
by Tucker Carlson
