Those Cheapened Pulitzer 'Prizes'

Once upon a time, it meant something for a reporter to be called a "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist." The prestige of this designation is quickly eroding. The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes looked less like an excellence-in-media competition and more like an exercise in leftist self-affirmation. No prize established this more strongly than the coveted National Reporting prize going to ... The Huffington Post.

The Pulitzer judges who would rather swallow rat poison than give an award to a conservative outlet, such as The Washington Times, are bestowing kudos on a site that thrives on such celebrity dreck as "Miley Shows Off Legs in Lacy Shorts" and "Kim Kardashian Kanye West Earrings: Reality Star Sports 'KW' Initial Jewelry."

The prizewinner, "senior military correspondent" David Wood, has been at The Huffington Post for about a year. He won the Pulitzer by reporting on the struggles of veterans and their families. It's a worthy subject but also something pretty much every other media outlet has tried to cover over the last 10 years. There's nothing here worthy of a National Reporting prize. What the Pulitzer Prize judges are doing is exactly what the Obama White House did right from the start -- mainstreaming the Huffington Post. Obama took questions in a press conference from Huff-Post political reporter Sam Stein to add prestige to Arianna Huffington's liberal imitation of the Drudge Report. A Pulitzer seals the liberal deal.

The website congratulated itself with a quote from Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review. "I think it's very healthy to see the Pulitzers have moved, albeit slowly, from a solely print focus," Rieder said. "The world has changed dramatically. There's an awful lot of exciting developments with digital news operations."

But they also quoted leftist professor Jay Rosen oozing about how "old media" and "new media" are now meaningless terms. So now heavily opinionated and oftentimes downright sloppy liberal reporting -- commentary, really -- from the Huffington Post and Politico (which won the editorial cartooning prize) can be defined as part of the establishment.

The Pulitzer judges even bestowed an imprimatur on The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly rag edited for six years by radical sex columnist Dan Savage. Eli Sanders won the feature writing category for a story on a horrific local double-rape of two lesbians, one of whom was stabbed to death.

The Stranger staff's reaction to the Pulitzer wasn't solemn. Big surprise, that. Their website quickly added "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" like a slogan and asked on their blog, "Hey, Eli: Is that a Pulitzer Prize in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us?" Unless I miss my guess, this is the first Pulitzer Prize for a newspaper that also operates an annual home-video pornography competition (called the Hump! Festival).

The liberal tilt carried over to the book prizes. The history prize was awarded to the late radical Manning Marable for a biography of Malcolm X. Marable's other works include "How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America" and "Speaking Truth to Power: Essays on Race, Resistance, and Radicalism." Guess where he fell on the spectrum -- if he was even on it. In his last book, Marable complained that Malcolm's autobiography was mangled by that "liberal Republican" Alex Haley and became a work in "the tradition of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography" rather than "a manifesto for black insurrection," which Marable desired.

The general nonfiction prize went to Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard for "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern." Greenblatt tells the tale of a book hunter named Poggio Bracciolini and how he preserved the work of the atheist Roman poet Lucretius, a poem called "On The Nature of Things."

The Pulitzer website oozed that Lucretius wrote "a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life." The priest and scholar Father Robert Barron, a fan of Greenblatt's previous book on Shakespeare, found this book's anti-religion, anti-Catholic thesis not only incorrect but also exasperating. "Modernity emerged out of a long twilight struggle with a supreme enemy ... Roman Catholicism! This is one of the great myths of the secular academy."

The Pulitzer juries are just like other liberal media collectives. Marable's book made the Top Ten Books of 2011 at The New York Times. Greenblatt's book was celebrated twice by National Public Radio (the book critic said it made her "shiver" as she read it).

It's amazing that liberals have cartooned conservative thinkers as locked in a bubble or an echo chamber. These cheapened "prizes" expose the airless insularity of today's leftist journalism.

"Once upon a time, it meant something for a reporter to be called a "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.""

RE: Walter Duranty, the "principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R"

Prize Specimen
The campaign to revoke Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer
Andrew Stuttaford
May 7, 2003

We will never know how many Ukrainians died in Stalin's famines of the early 1930s. As Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, "No one was keeping count." Writing back in the mid- 1980s, historian Robert Conquest came up with a death toll of around six million, a calculation not so inconsistent with later research (the writers of The Black Book of Communism (1999) estimated a total of four million for 1933 alone).

Four million, six million, seven million, when the numbers are this grotesque does the exact figure matter? Just remember this instead:

The first family to die was the Rafalyks — father, mother and a child. Later on the Fediy family of five also perished of starvation. Then followed the families of Prokhar Lytvyn (four persons), Fedir Hontowy (three persons), Samson Fediy (three persons). The second child of the latter family was beaten to death on somebody's onion patch. Mykola and Larion Fediy died, followed by Andrew Fediy and his wife; Stefan Fediy; Anton Fediy, his wife and four children (his two other little girls survived); Boris Fediy, his wife and three children: Olanviy Fediy and his wife; Taras Fediy and his wife; Theodore Fesenko; Constantine Fesenko; Melania Fediy; Lawrenty Fediy; Peter Fediy; Eulysis Fediy and his brother Fred; Isidore Fediy, his wife and two children; Ivan Hontowy, his wife and two children; Vasyl Perch, his wife and child; Makar Fediy; Prokip Fesenko: Abraham Fediy; Ivan Skaska, his wife and eight children.

Some of these people were buried in a cemetery plot; others were left lying wherever they died. For instance, Elizabeth Lukashenko died on the meadow; her remains were eaten by ravens. Others were simply dumped into any handy excavation. The remains of Lawrenty Fediy lay on the hearth of his dwelling until devoured by rats.*

And that's just one village — Fediivka, in the Poltava Province.

We will never know whether Walter Duranty, the principal New York Times correspondent in the U.S.S.R., ever visited Fediivka. Almost certainly not. What we do know is that, in March 1933, while telling his readers that there had indeed been "serious food shortages" in the Ukraine, he was quick to reassure them that "there [was] no actual starvation." There had been no "deaths from starvation," he soothed, merely "widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition." So that was all right then.

But, unlike Khrushchev, Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, was keeping count — in the autumn of 1933 he is recorded as having told the British Embassy that ten million had died. ** "The Ukraine," he said, "had been bled white," remarkable words from the journalist who had, only days earlier, described talk of a famine as "a sheer absurdity," remarkable words from the journalist who, in a 1935 memoir had dismayingly little to say about one of history's greatest crimes. Writing about his two visits to the Ukraine in 1933, Duranty was content to describe how "the people looked healthier and more cheerful than [he] had expected, although they told grim tales of their sufferings in the past two years." As Duranty had explained (writing about his trip to the Ukraine in April that year), he "had no doubt that the solution to the agrarian problem had been found".

Well, at least he didn't refer to it as a "final" solution.

As the years passed, and the extent of the famine and the other, innumerable, brutalities of Stalin's long tyranny became increasingly difficult to deny, Duranty's reputation collapsed (I wrote about this on NRO a couple of years ago), but his Pulitzer Prize has endured.

Ah, that Pulitzer Prize. In his will old Joseph Pulitzer described what the prize was designed to achieve: " The encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In 1932 the Pulitzer Board awarded Walter Duranty its prize. It's an achievement that the New York Times still celebrates. The gray lady is pleased to publish its storied Pulitzer roster in a full-page advertisement each year, and, clearly, it finds the name of Duranty as one that is still fit to print. His name is near the top of the list, an accident of chronology, but there it is, Duranty, Times man, denier of the Ukrainian genocide — proudly paraded for all to see. Interestingly, the list of prizewinners posted on the New York Times Company's website is more forthcoming: Against Duranty's name, it is noted that "other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."

Understandably enough, Duranty's Pulitzer is an insult that has lost none of its power to appall. In a new initiative, Ukrainian groups have launched a fresh campaign designed to persuade the Pulitzer Prize Board to revoke the award to Duranty. The Pulitzer's nabobs do not appear to be impressed. A message dated April 29, 2003 from the board's administrator to one of the organizers of the Ukrainian campaign includes the following words:

The current Board is aware that complaints about the Duranty award have surfaced again. [The campaign's] submission…will be placed on file with others we have received. However, to date, the Board has not seen fit to reverse a previous Board's decision, made seventy years ago in a different era and under different circumstances.

A "different era," "different circumstances" — would that have been said, I wonder, about someone who had covered up Nazi savagery? But then, more relevantly, the Pulitzer's representative notes that Duranty's prize was awarded "for a specific set of stories in 1931," in other words, before the famine struck with its full, horrific, force. And there he has a point. The prize is designed to reward a specific piece of journalism — not a body of work. To strip Duranty of the prize on the grounds of his subsequent conduct, however disgusting it may have been, would be a retrospective change of the rules, behavior more typical of the old U.S.S.R. than today's U.S.A.

But what was that "specific set of stories?" Duranty won his prize " for [his] dispatches on Russia especially the working out of the Five Year Plan." They were, said the Pulitzer Board "marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity…."

Really? As summarized by S. J. Taylor in her excellent — and appropriately titled — biography of Duranty, Stalin's Apologist, the statement with which Duranty accepted his prize gives some hint of the "sound judgment" contained in his dispatches.

""Despite present imperfections," he continued, he had come to realize there was something very good about the Soviets' "planned system of economy." And there was something more: Duranty had learned, he said, "to respect the Soviet leaders, especially Stalin, who [had grown] into a really great statesman.""

In truth, of course, this was simply nonsense, a distortion that, in some ways bore even less resemblance to reality than "Jimmy's World," the tale of an eight-year-old junkie that, briefly, won a Pulitzer for Janet Cooke of the Washington Post. Tragic "Jimmy" turned out not to exist. He was a concoction, a fiction, nothing more. The Post did the right thing — Cooke's prize was rapidly returned.

After 70 years the New York Times has yet to do the right thing. There is, naturally, always room for disagreement over how events are interpreted, particularly in an era of revolutionary change, but Duranty's writings clearly tipped over into propaganda, and, often, outright deception, a cynical sugarcoating of the squalor of a system in which he almost certainly didn't believe. His motivation seems to have been purely opportunistic, access to the Moscow "story" for the Times and the well-paid lifestyle and the fame ("the Great Duranty" was, some said, the best-known journalist in the world) that this brought. Too much criticism of Stalin's rule and this privileged existence would end. Duranty's "Stalin" was a lie, not much more genuine than Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" and, as he well knew at the time, so too were the descriptions of the Soviet experiment that brought him that Pulitzer.

And if that is not enough to make the Pulitzer Board to reconsider withdrawing an award that disgraces both the name of Joseph Pulitzer and his prize, it is up to the New York Times to insist that it does so.

*From an account quoted in Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow.

** On another occasion (a dinner party, ironically) that autumn Duranty talked about seven million deaths.

http://www.nationalreview.com/stuttaford/stuttaford050703.asp

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Ukraine Famine - 1932-1933 - 7,000,000 Deaths

Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, set in motion events designed to cause a famine in the Ukraine to destroy the people there seeking independence from his rule. As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 persons perished in this farming area, known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands.

http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/Ukraine_famine.htm

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