Pulitzers Pull Up Lame

Jeff Jarvis, a pioneering journo-blogger of the liberal persuasion has long aired his opinions on his "BuzzMachine" blog. The blog has gotten a bit self-referential of late, and we frequently can't agree with Jeff's opinions, but he hits the nail mostly on the head with his link-rich discussion of the increasingly debased Pulitzer Prizes here.

Jarvis mentions the highly political (i.e., anti-Bush) nature of this year's prizes, which we'll get to in a moment. But he also scores the Pulitzer committee and newspapers in general for pulling back to the point of nonexistence on their coverage of local politics, save when a local politician like Duke Cunningham is caught up in a national scandal. Corruption on Capitol Hill is always good for some juicy stories that gain national recognition for the reporters who break them. But the fact is, most corruption begins at home as all politics, to paraphrase the late Tip O'Neill, is local.

Problem here is that most corrupt, "local," big city mayors and politicoes are either Democrats or the remnants of old Democratic machine politics, and the tendency is for the media, with their liberal bias, to give these crooks a pass. The result has been, over at least the last quarter century, the utter destruction of major cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, not to mention pre-Katrina New Orleans which has been a Democratic disgrace since time immemorial.

And yet, politics aside, another problem the papers have in covering the local angle is that they have no reporters, numerically speaking, to cover the local angle. A three- or four-part series detailing a local scandal is tough to report. The reporter who covers such a story must be an investigative expert to start out with, loaded with excellent contacts who are willing to talk. In the second place, his newspaper must be willing and able to pay him what is probably not an inconsiderable salary for many, many months on end while he conducts R&D and produces no editorial product.

Today, more and more papers have cut staffs to the bone in partial answer to shrinking subscriptions and shriveling ad revenue, due at least in part to the migration of the younger crowd to the Internet for its news and views and exacerbated by the obvious liberal bias that is turning off droves of fair-minded readers on both sides of the aisle. The result is that the papers either don't have real investigative reporters on staff, by and large. And those that do rarely employ them to do the deep digging. Or when they do, they sic them on the Bushies, as opposed to mining the rich mother-lode of local corruption.

An additional victim of this trend is local news itself. We've noted that our old hometown paper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, always a liberal mess anyway, increasingly buys its stories from the AP and other sources. This is a clear indication that the PD has shrunk its own stable of reporters and has closed any number of bureaus in other cities that it used to have. The result is that local newspapers are increasingly homogenized in the same way that conglomerate-owned radio stations are, robbing the papers of more and more of the local interest stuff that might actually sell papers.

Getting back to the Pulitzers, another part of the problem here, aside from insufficiently rewarding what local advocacy journalism remains in America's papers, is the Committee's increasingly intense politicization. It is already axiomatic that no journalist who's not at least a liberal if not a hard lefty, will ever receive a Pulitzer Prize. What remains of this dubious "honor" is membership in an exclusive club where anyone right of center, or even at the center, is routinely blackballed. Thus, the Pulitzers in journalism have become largely an honor that's bestowed for leftist advocacy journalism, which has nothing to do with quality, accuracy, or common sense.

And this is why two major awards this year went to the Washington Post and the New York Times. What were they awarded Pulitzer honors for? The Posties (via the vile Dana Priest) happily exposed "secret prisons" in Eastern Europe that the U.S. used to interrogate terrorist mass-murder suspects. And the Times, even more egregiously, happily exposed NSA intelligence techniques. Both pieces set off what were clearly intentional firestorms of criticism for the Bushies, as the organized left responded on cue. Both efforts were, in an absolute sense, treason. (Which the administration is cautiously attempting to prosecute, BTW). So what the Pulitzer Committee has done here is to bestow its highest honors on two newspapers that have arguably committed treason and endangered the national interest. The legal eagles at Power Line have an excellent commentary on this disgusting turn of events.

Although the MSM's monolothic leftist culture is largely to blame, Power Line also wags a legal finger at the perps of this latest bogus "prize" outrage, citing an earlier example (1930s) of a NYTimes Reporter who knowingly whitewashed Stalinist terror for years and won a Pulitzer for it—a prize the standing committee, to its everlasting shame, has never revoked. Power Line reaches a logical conclusion, at least regarding the high-handed antics of the NYTimes:

What about the Pulitzer Prize committee? When Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times in connection with his mendacious coverage of Stalin's Soviet Union, he performed valuable public relations work for a mass murderer. He nevertheless did no direct harm to the United States. Today's Pulitzer Prize award to the Times brings a new shame to the Pulitzer Prize committee that builds on its disgrace last year via the award to the AP.

Amen to that. But they have no shame.