The Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be an award for exemplary journalism. Recently, it has far more often served as a toxic feedback loop for legacy media outlets.
Last week, the Pulitzer board declined to revoke the 2018 award jointly won by the New York Times and the Washington Post over the papers’ false reporting on Russian collusion and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The board claimed that two “independent reviews” of the reporting confirmed “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.”
After Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the Steele dossier, was accused of lying to the FBI, the Washington Post at least edited some of its previous reporting and admitted that the allegations “cast new uncertainty” on its own pieces, as well as others. At Axios, Sara Fischer called the media coverage of the dossier “one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history.” At RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Mate identified five stories from the Washington Post and New York Times that needed corrections “just for starters.”
But the Pulitzer board is not interested in litigating this any further. J. Peder Zane of RealClearInvestigations called the board so that he could ask to read the report for himself, but the board said that it wouldn’t be made public.
The Pulitzer board won’t revoke its award to the outlets, and neither outlet appears likely to give its award back. That would mark the second black eye on the Pulitzer Prize in the last few years after it gave the New York Times an award for the historically inaccurate (but politically correct) 1619 Project. The project was riddled with inaccuracies, and one of its central premises, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, was quickly debunked. But the board granted the New York Times its Pulitzer anyway, even after those inaccuracies were made clear. The New York Times has been happy to keep yet another ill-gotten prize.
Rewarding shoddy journalism is nothing new for the Pulitzer board. In 2003, the board refused to revoke the award won by former New York Times reporter Walter Duranty denying the Ukrainian famine during the early days of the Soviet Union. The New York Times itself called his work “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” But now, the New York Times and Washington Post have decided that if they won an award, there is no reason to give it back or admit that they failed in their mission to inform the public.
By rewarding shoddy journalism, the Pulitzer board encourages outlets to produce and stand by shoddy journalism and subpar journalists. Retractions are less common because why would you admit you failed as a journalist when someone has attached a prestigious award to your name? These newspapers are content to fall short of basic standards of journalistic integrity, and the Pulitzer board is happy to encourage them.
