Could Nikole Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary have fallen more neatly into that category of events that are shocking yet unsurprising? The announcement landed with a thud of inevitability, yet it was also a thumb jabbed forcefully into the eye of good scholarship and of reasonable people not in step with the vanguard of faddish leftism.
The prize-winning essay introduced the New York Times’s 1619 Project. Much has already been written on this, but the chutzpah of it is so egregious that a few details are worth revisiting. The project aims to wrench the accepted date of America’s founding a century and a half back from the 1776 Declaration of Independence to the year the first African slave arrived on the continent. The prize-winning essay argues that America declared independence to perpetuate the institution of slavery.
It is a salvo in the sub-Marxist battle to destroy this nation’s idea of itself, demolish its values as rank hypocrisy, and demoralize its citizens into seeing their history as a pack of lies. Eminent historians tried but failed to persuade the New York Times that the 1619 Project’s errors were not matters of interpretation or framing but of clear falsehood in pursuit of an ideological agenda.
The newspaper wants to foist the 1619 Project onto school curricula, so future generations will be fed propaganda rather than solid history. The Pulitzer imprimatur is calculated to buttress a narrative that does not bear scrutiny. The New York Times controls the Pulitzers, so it is giving itself an award to lend ersatz authority to its falsehoods.
The Poynter Institute, a self-appointed arbiter of good journalism, described Hannah-Jones’s commentary as “one of the most important essays ever” and opined that “there’s no question … [it] deserved to be recognized with a Pulitzer.” This suggests that the institute’s reading of essays past and present is dreadfully limited and that it does not understand the term “no question.” Skim media commentary for a few minutes, and you find plenty of legitimate questioning from sensible people.
But let’s set aside tendentious revisionism and the cultural conflict of which it is a part. Let’s focus instead on the narrower but nevertheless important issue of whether journalism prizes are a good thing. Some excellent writers have been recognized over the years, of whom some are friends of mine, and I don’t wish to impugn either the entire corps of recipients or much of the work that has been honored.
But the question remains: Should journalism receive prizes? For several allied reasons, I think not.
One is that prizes distract from journalism’s real mission, which is to write for readers. Prizes lure writers and editors into focusing too often on winning the admiration of colleagues who are their judges. And to do so, since journalism has become an increasingly credentialed and elite profession, they write articles of lugubrious length and academic tortuousness, often of little interest to those who are, ostensibly, their customers.
And then, there is the corruption of the whole process which has, according to jurors who have participated, less to do with merit or distinction and more to do with honoring writers and articles, who in their persons, subject matter, or conclusions endorse left-liberal intellectual fashions.
I once read a comedic glossary of terms concocted to help readers understand inverted meanings used in modern journalism. “Courageous,” for example, as in “a courageous analysis of troubling and controversial themes rarely discussed,” really describes an unoriginal and safe recitation of orthodox ideas for which the writer will receive nothing by praise from the right people. Prize-winning journalism can be genuinely courageous, but often it sucks up rather than stands out.
Prizes for such ideas are part of a matrix that cuts journalism off from ordinary people, creating a gulf across which the two camps gaze with uncomprehending contempt. Token conservatives who have been Pulitzer jurors report that their cautious suggestions of writers who don’t fit in prompt foot-shuffling and throat-clearing and are nixed by an oppressive jury room monoculture.
Finally, prizes are admission tickets to an elite, membership of which militates against what journalists should be. The great English columnist, Bernard Levin, once wrote in The Times (of London) that he disapproved of senior editors and writers on Fleet Street receiving knighthoods in the Queen’s birthday honors list, for it made them literally part of the establishment.
Prizes do the same thing, making journalists participants and members of the body that they are, above all, supposed to scrutinize. Journalists should be observers, not participants — outsiders, not insiders. Prizes get in the way.
