“…Skepticism is a bedrock principle of journalism. âIf your mother says she loves you, go check it out,â the old adage goes. So is full disclosure (âthe more information the betterâ) and transparency (âAlways tell readers how you kno what you knowâ).
The board that oversees journalismâs most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, and many of Americaâs most prestigious news outlets violated all three of those values this week.
This disquieting episode began on Monday when the board released a short statement saying that, âIn the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign â submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.â
The board said it had commissioned two âindependent reviewsâ of the contested coverage, which âconverged in their conclusions: 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. The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.â…”