2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners
pulitzer.org
pulitzer.org
Given his source material, it would have been easy (and justified) to construct the narrative into a tirade against the CIA. Instead, Taub takes a rather empathetic and detached frame of reference, and the result is a monument to the human toll of ruthlessly-executed ignorance. None of the people (victims or perpetrators) seem to fully understand their absurd roles: their actions driven by jumpy supervisors and acquaintances, who in turn are driven by a mix of fear, ideology and separation from "ground".
And once the veil of ignorance is lifted, there are reputations and legacies to protect, bureaucratic boxes that "cannot" be unchecked. There's no undoing what's set in motion, because "undo" implies reflection and the admission of wrongdoing, which is something that we really struggle with as a society.
It's a tragedy you see play out everywhere, and this is a particularly poignant and tragic case, beautifully presented. If it isn't a case study already, it ought to be one.
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...)
After so many words about their shared story, seeing that photo of Wood and Salahi together was quite arresting.
I say sadly since those who believe otherwise are directly primed by the beliefs common only in very religious societies, like the U.S., and not in the rest of the world.
via Seattle Times:
- How Boeing, FAA certified the suspect 737 MAX flight control system https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19421612
- Boeing altered key switches in 737 MAX cockpit limiting ability to shut off MCAS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887177
And via ProPublica:
- Death and Valor on an American Warship Doomed by Its Own Navy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19094762
- Navy’s flawed technology set the USS John McCain up for disaster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21844963
Both were awarded the prize in National Reporting (it's not typical for 2 different projects to get the same award the same year): https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/209
Worth their weight in gold on the 737 Max story. Congratulations!
Papers like The Financial Times have an obvious one: people are using these to inform themselves about business and investment. If FT was giving inaccurate data, it would have an obvious cost to the people who read it.
But for papers like the NYT, what is the incentive to accurately report the news? It seems like by inaccurately reporting things, they'll make more money. This is a problem. How would you fix it?
I agree that if you market your news product a certain way then there is little incentive to be correct (tabloids do this). However, the NYT is not marketed that way.
The way a publication can ensure its quality is to charge for it. That is, rather than relying mostly on advertising (which is per article), rely on subscriptions. The kind of audience that pays for news will appreciate higher-quality journalism. That audience also must stick around for the long haul.
That's why the best-regarded outlets tend to be newswires (AP, Reuters), business news (WSJ, Bloomberg), donation driven (NPR, PBS), and long-form stories (NYT, WP).
Indeed, a quick check of NYT's latest 10K shows that they got over $1B from subscriptions (and growing) with an additional $500M from advertising (and shrinking).
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/71691/000007...
News and quality of news has been a major part of my life since my first ever semi successful project, which was a news aggregator I started over a decade ago. One of the mechanisms we tried then (before reddit existed as far as I know) was a sortof economy where each poster got a certain amount of tokens to “spend” on submissions and comments, and you could earn more tokens when people “paid” you for your quality contributions.
Obviously it didn’t work.
Since then I’ve tried computational linguistics approaches to this problem, which solves a problem, but not the fitness checking one I’m talking about here.
And finally: my wife is a former political journalist, so obviously news and quality of news is a major topic in my life which I talk about, read about, and write about pretty regularly.
High quality reporting is, still, one of the most effective ways to speak truth to power. Unfortunately the internet has decimated smaller journals and local papers, so local issues might never get reported on. I wish that trend would reverse, but I have no idea how one would do that.
I subscribe to CalMatters and Berkeleyside and Boom California. Anyone who considers themselves a good local journalist needs to write for those outlets if they want my dollar. I'm not here to enrich the shareholders of legacy newspapers.
ETA: There actually is one good newspaper in California: the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Wouldn't want to miss mentioning America's last newspaper.
But while scrolling down that page, I was crossing my fingers for APM's podcast In the Dark to win something.
The second season following the Curtis Flowers case is fascinating, infuriating, beautiful, harrowing, and culminates in a US Supreme Court case...
I don't know where that podcast sits on the spectrum of "pulp crime interest" to "genuine reporting" but IMO it's far, far on the side of "genuine reporting".
That said, This American Life did win a Pulitzer in 2011, but it had ProPublica as a publishing partner, and I believe it was the first time a journalism Pulitzer went to a project that did not publish in print [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Dark_(podcast)#Season_2...
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about/announcements/pulitze...
The American Revolution was simply not about protecting slavery. You can't say the birth of America was a racist endeavor - it's factually incorrect. This is historical revisionism.
I'd encourage people to read the comments there.
It's tiresome. I mean, I read this stuff when it was published (it was really great, and absolutely Pulitzer-worthy), and I swear when the knives started flying I had to go back and find the passages in question because frankly I didn't even remember them.
It's also really upsetting that still, in the year 2020, the idea that black folks experience endemic racism is a partisan idea that has to be opposed by half the population as a matter of faith.
It’s a subject of much debate both in and out of academic circles.
While this list contains everything that is positive and great about journalism, it also embraces what makes journalism reviled. The Pulitzer award going to the 1619 project despite it's mistruths further erodes people's willingness to trust the media to do their basic job - to tell the truth.
The NYT article embraces the conceit from the media that they are they experts - they need not listen to historians, but instead journalists can be the sole arbiter of truth.
The articles "overarching contention that slavery and racism are the foundations of American history" is simply a story that the journalist wants to tell. The journalist ignored the truth in order to tell that story risks kicking out the legs to a true evaluation of America's (and more generally the west's) troubled history with race.
To some, the 1619 project becomes incontrovertible truth, backed by the Pulitzer and the NYT, and anyone who disagrees with it are racist. To others the easily disproved assertions discredit not only this article, but all well-founded criticisms of race in America.
This is how we get two Americas. Every man is entitled to their opinion, but not their own set of facts. If we ignore facts in order to feed our biases, we will never be able to talk about the truly hard issues that we have to master.
I'm not sure how you can read these (especially the brutal Atlantic article) and come away believing that the Times is acting in good faith w/ regards to the publication and defense of the 1619 Project.
When you look at the arguments offered up by the Times, they seem to be holding themselves to some standard other than objective truth.
Just look at their arguments in defense of Hannah-Jones' claim (which she states as a fact) that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery". The NYT offers their support of this argument in paragraphs 7-10 of the Editor's Response [0](the second half). The author does not even attempt to support the claim was factually correct. He makes no argument that this is the belief of any single individual, let alone a believe as common as Hannah-Jones makes it out to be. Instead he states the existence of a single anti-slavery ruling, and the fact that news of it appeared in the newspaper. QED, defending slavery was a primary motivation for the revolution!
To my eye, the author seems to be merely attempting to establish the argument's plausibility, as though the simple act of defending an argument is an acceptable substitution its for objective truth.
History is and always should be about inquiry, about discovery of truth first and foremost. Making statements of fact about history without a regard for the truth is dangerous. There's a word for that, you know.
And people are pushing to put this into public school curriculum!
[0] Original Critique and NYT response: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...
[1] Historians' response: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/1619-proje...
[2] NYT Issues Correction: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...
...and Socialists:
"Both Wood's and McPherson's remarks were published by the World Socialist Website, a left-wing, socialist website, which claims that the 1619 project's "aim is to create a historical narrative that legitimizes the effort of the Democratic Party to construct an electoral coalition based on the prioritizing of personal 'identities'—i.e., gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and, above all, race."[41] The site has also published interviews on the project with historians Victoria Bynum[42] and James Oakes,[43] and promoted a lecture series critiquing the project's alleged "racialist falsification of American and world history."[41]"
One of the more interesting sections for the Hacker News crowd is how technological advancements in World War II like artificial rubber and international standards allowed the US to cede the huge amount of land it directly controlled after the war (which is not to say that US influence completely disappeared in these places).
Even recently when I watch the Trump briefings, I see journalists speaking as if in anger because the President is belittling them: especially when he played his compilation video: they where quick to dub it as a campaign video, and networks cut it from the broadcast: but mostly in contained clips of TV news downplaying the Covid-19 situation. No whatever the motivations of Trump are, the media seem to act self-defesively, even with anger and resentment around him. Trump may hate the press, but the feeling appears to mutual now: but really the press shouldn't love or hate anyone.
Also I see lot of journalists ask Trump a question and then constantly interrupt him while He is answering: this dose not look good on TV for the journalists credibility is my view.
Journalists play an extremely important role in keeping a check on power and as such are critical to the health of a democracy. The current US presidents violent rhetoric against the press should make people a lot angrier than it has so far; without a good, unbiased press there is simply no way to have an honest conversation about the most important problems that a country faces and the different plans by which to address them (as is becoming very clear by the botched response to the Coronavirus pandemic).
It would make me a lot angrier if the most popular news outlets were indeed "good, unbiased press" and not spin doctors and propaganda distributors for [insert political machine].
John Gruber (of Daring Fireball, Mardkown fame, etc.) coined the term "claim chowder" and started keeping a list of dubious tech reporting. I've been keeping a mental list myself and its almost painful how often a highly circulated story obviously will have a shelf life of weeks or days before being completely invalidated. As long as it makes it through the spin cycle, though, I suppose it doesn't matter to show runners, editors, and others pushing the narrative.
When news outlets run significantly fabricated stories (sometimes for months or years) and then run a genuine story how can they be believed? When news outlets never issue retractions, corrections, or apologies for misleading the public, how can they be trusted. When they actively attempt to remove or change content from their public archives in order to put themselves on the right side of history or direct the way history is being made, how can they be treated as protectors of freedom against tyranny. When they destroy the lives of who accidentally entered their crosshairs to sell ad space, how can they be considered good.
I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.
All those outlets are compromised expect maybe NPR. Eric Weinstein calls it the gated institutional narrative, it is on you you still consider the mainstream anything more than shadow of what they represented in the past.
* Nicholas Sandmann
* “Experts generally agree that N95 masks have little value in the community.”
* Local “news” stories that are effectively infomercials
* https://youtu.be/ksb3KD6DfSI
* allegedly CNN removing the Larry King episode from Google Play with a call from Tara Reade’s mother
* implicitly or explicitly suggesting unrelated archive footage represents the story being reported (Italian hospital footage in a story about New York hospitals, firing range footage presented as foreign conflict)
* the my pillow guy, who retooled to support health workers being railroaded simply for standing next to Trump
* the sudden and nearly universal admiration for GWB
* NYT editing an article, without notice that originally claimed HRC implied the Russians were grooming Tulsi Gabbard.
I have a terrible memory for specific details, so those just the ones I can think of recently. I primarily listen to NPR in the car. Their bias is staggering. They present opinion as fact frequently, often misrepresenting parties in opposition.
Just different halves, but being angry at many things at once is hard, mentally. But you have your wish granted, more or less. Everyone is angry :)
If a person makes a blanket statement like "press is biased" or "is a spin-doctor" for X, we need to ignore that move past it.
We tend to identify reliable sources over time, and there are plenty of reputed, reliable journalists and newspapers in the world. Just like reliable politicians. Kudos to them.
There is no one “the media”. The journalism produced by cable news opinion segments is not the same as that produced by national print outlets, which is also not the same as a local newspaper. Equating them all is something Trump and his friends would very much like you to do.
It's true in one sense that there's no such thing as "the media". If "the media" is just "the set of people who write things about current events that other people read", then I, too, am a member of the media. Groovy.
But this is an isolated demand for rigor. If you look at who's employed by "the most popular news outlets" (which can be relatively objectively determined through subscription numbers), you cannot help but notice that they are a rather distinct class. They come from particular schools, live in particular cities, have particular points of view including suppositions so basic that they often do not even realize that they hold them, understand themselves to be accomplishing particular professional and social objectives through their work, and so on and so on. None of these qualifications are strictly categorical, but as a statistical matter they are so robust as to be tedious. Which is all fine, so far as it goes, but the concept of "the media" is "a thing" inasmuch as it allows you to concisely name patterns and regularities that exist in the world. And there are an awful lot of patterns and regularities to be noticed.
Incidentally, Orwell made precisely the same point (about a distributed, decentralized press that coordinates through shared cultural background and sense of what's simply Not Done) in a proposed preface to the first edition of Animal Farm. The free, decentralized, totally-not-a-thing British media declined to print it.
Even if this were true, (which I’m highly skeptical of) why would this even a bad thing? I mean, if we’re talking about elite papers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.. it wouldn’t shock me at all to hear a number of them went to elite universities – a number elite doctors likely come from difficult medical schools.
I’m also not convinced “they” all share the same beliefs, not convinced of this at all. I mean, if you want to declare that media sources who prefer the Democratic party exist, sure but for every single one of those there’s at least one Fox “news” equivalent. The simple fact of their existence doesn’t mean certain people have a monopoly on information. This argument would be as ridiculous as when people in 2017 were screeching (US) liberals run the world all while the president, both congressional houses, and the supreme court were conservative... the concern wasn’t based in reality, at all, and it’s the same with their panicky “liberal news” conspiracies, I see no evidence which shows conservatives voices aren’t being heard, none.
Anyway, I’m dubious about the idea that almost all news people come from the same class, same schools, and same cities. Unless you’re simply saying elite journalists come from the best journalism schools, at which point it shouldn’t really surprise anyone.
Columbia
Harvard, Harvard
UMich
N/A (the art design guy)
Notre Dame
Princeton
Yale
Columbia
Tufts
Stonyhurst, Oxford
UVA
Are those results out of line with what you were expecting? I can't say that they are for me. If anything, I consider it exceptionally broadminded of The Gray Lady to hire an ND grad.
Please recall that I never claimed this was a good or a bad thing. In some sense I regard domination by elites as inevitable, but I do think it's preferable to be explicit about it, and failing to recognize "the media" as a coherent social category tends to frustrate that recognition.
The political affiliation of journalists is a well-studied topic. Polls consistently find that Democrats outnumber Republicans and liberals outnumber conservatives by wide margins, ranging from 4-1 to 20-1 [!] depending on survey methodology (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3279453). A study which compared rates of citation of various think tanks by media outlets, vs. by Congress, found that every media outlet surveyed except Fox and the Washington Times stood to the left of the Congressional median (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098770?seq=1).
Again, I'm not making any normative claims about any of this. I'm just surprised at the resistance to taking it for granted.
I'd argue most of what is sold as "the press" is not that. Click-bait, PR mouthpieces, unverified "news", inflammatory news and padding are the majority of what people see.
Bye!
Why? He hasn't said it should be restricted in any way, he's said it's been biased and doing a bad job. That's a completely fair criticism.
A lot of people are purposefully blurring the lines here and it's really dangerous. The same argument could be used to say that the press has undue influence, and should therefore be regulated in what it is able to say or how it is able to report.
The press in America has the same freedom of speech as individuals do: near unlimited. They come together. If you start picking and choosing, free speech is no longer a right.
Similarly, the press give up the right to say any foolish claims without substantiation when they assume their official roles as journalists. They promise to back what they say with evidence and facts; that stops them from making baseless claims. Is that restricting their free speech? Free speech does not exist in a vacuum.
I think you do have a point. But consider what you're trying to apply it to here. The president is not saying "I think we should nuke Korea" or "the press should be abolished." He says "CNN? That's fake news." It's a criticism leveled at an organization that has had a rampant hyperbolic partisan slant and has printed fake news, making the criticism accurate.
Calling the media out for this behavior could be seen as holding it accountable. These types of criticisms mean nothing in terms of any meaningful action that could restrict the press.
I think more people need to question from where they have gotten the perspective that these attacks are particularly threatening towards a free press in the US. Was it from the press?? Go figure.
I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
> I think you need to question from where you have gotten the perspective that getting one or two things right in a rant somehow legitimizes everything in a rant.
I don't believe this at all.
[0] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11142215334617907...
If you were one of the Central Park Five, wrongly accused of rape, or if you were a climate change activist, facing climate-denying articles, and said "the press has got it all wrong and are the enemy of the people" how would you interpret that? As anger, representing a valid critique that should be explored? Or that this person is literally calling for the end or restriction of journalism as a practice? It seems obvious. The only way to interpret it as the latter is to interpret it in such bad faith that it borders on malevolence.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/freedom-press/donald-t...
As a matter of fact such statements are borderline incitement of violence when you look at some of his heavily armed, but not necessarily smart supporters.
What you argue here is borderline historical revisionism.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/07/donald-trump...
edit : clarification
If literally everything you said was twisted in a way to misrepresent you don't you think you'd get a little tired of it, roll your eyes at it, and shrug it off sometimes too? That's not an absolute defense for doing this exclusively, but he doesn't do this exclusively. He calls it out, then answers.
But this is altogether besides the point of what I was responding to, which is that this kind of talk is existentially dangerous to the press as an institution. You could claim Trump is a liar and a deflector and is doing bad things and says a one-liner instead of justifying, and that would be a fair criticism. But then it would be a danger insofar as it means we have a lack of responsibility and accountability in our leadership, not insofar as it poses a threat to the freedom of the press.
he does not answer shit. He spews nonsense. He does not speak coherently about facts at all.
The quality of the hard-hitting journalism seems to be winding back, maybe Trump wore them down?
Something something turtles all the way down.
Where do this come from? There is EXCELLENT journalism all over the world. Even in places with high censorship (which are the exception, not the rule) there a great and brave journalism.
Most of what they do is not Big Stories, but things like covering the city council meetings in a way that TV stations don't.
Their disappearane has a real financial effect
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...
It is highly insulting and arrogant to assume there is no brave journalism there where people have lost their jobs or their lives by reporting inconvenient truths.
You need more street.
"The Enron Prize for good corporate accounting"
"The Benedict Arnold medial of Patriotism"
"The Lucrezia Borgia Best Cocktail award"
etc
https://twitter.com/joesonka/status/1257389461429784583?s=19
That said, there are one-shot amateur Pulitzer winners, most notably in the photography categories. The Pulitzer winning photo of the Kent State massacre was taken by a photojournalism student [2]. And one of the most famous early Pulitzer photos was taken by a non-journalism amateur: 24-year-old Arnold Hardy in 1947 [3].
I think the contemporary category where you will find the most examples of single-article winners will be Feature Writing, but I'm not aware of any amateurs who have won it: https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/211
[0] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post
[1] https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/washington-post-1
1) They genuinely don’t like the 1619 project.
2) They understand that the Pulitzer is supposed to be an award for good journalism.
3) They believe that journalism about some subjects is more likely to win a Pulitzer without being the best by illiilliiililil‘s standards. You could compare it to the concept of an “Oscar bait” movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait
I’m not sure I agree with this criticism - I think exploring tough subjects can lead to great work that is especially deserving of praise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...
Now high school students can write nonsense in an essay and cite the New York Times as a source, and get A+ from their teachers. This is the real purpose of it
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/barry-blitt-contributor-new...
Moved by the board means that the board nominated it; not submitted by the author / publisher.
Very surprised that Pat Bagley wasn't even nominated, his cartoons have been all over the place in the last year, particularly on social media. Which I find particularly interesting as he isn't from a major market like CA or NY (he's published in a Colorado newspaper I believe).
- This is the first year the audio reporting category is being awarded; This American Life seems like a perfect inaugural winner.
- Colson Whitehead (Fiction) also won in the same category in 2017.
It would seem to me that the Pulitzer Prize is ethically bankrupt considering who you share this 'prestige' with.
But seriously, congratulations to the winners!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize
But I guess congratulations are in order.