The Pulitzer Prizes Are a Joke

Its handling of Gaza and the protests at its own headquarters was cowardly and absurd.

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The Pulitzer Prizes are always a slightly dubious affair—these are the people who think Bret Stephens is one of our nation’s top thinkers, after all—but they are usually rather easily ignored.

Not this year. 2024’s edition might go down in history as one of the prize’s most infamous. That’s because of who hands out the Pulitzers (Columbia University) and how they handled the most important story of the past year (Gaza). On both counts, the decisions of the Pulitzer administrators turned the awards into a sick joke.

First, the Columbia-centric part of the problem.

Columbia, as everyone knows, has been at the heart of the authoritarian crackdown against the student movement for Palestine in the past few weeks. That crackdown included severe restrictions on journalists, including ones from Columbia’s own campus, some of whom were trapped by police inside the Columbia Journalism School building. (Here is where I say that I am a Columbia J-school graduate.)

For Columbia to then pretend as though it is qualified to hand out the top journalism prize in the world is ludicrous. What made it even more ludicrous is that, even as the Pulitzers were being announced, Columbia was still restricting press freedom. This was just under an hour before the prizes were announced:

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You could not make it up if you tried. The hypocrisy is unreal.

Now we turn to the more insidious offenses from this year’s Pulitzers. Obviously, there was no way that they could avoid the topic of Gaza. But the way they handled it was appalling from beginning to end.

First, the Pulitzers gave the prize for international reporting to the New York Times for its Israel-Gaza coverage. Given the depths to which the Times’ coverage has repeatedly sunk in the past seven months, this is a little bit like giving Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize, in that both things are crazy and also very much happened in the universe we all inhabit together. Disgusting!

Somehow, though, the worst was yet to come. The Pulitzers then announced that it would be bestowing a “special citation” to “the journalists covering Gaza.” Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller said this:

“This year, the board recognizes the courageous work of journalists and media workers covering the war in Gaza. Under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and aid workers in Gaza. This war also has claimed the lives of poets and writers among the casualties. As the Pulitzer Prizes honor categories of journalism, arts, and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”

Where to begin. First of all, to say that reporters (and poets and writers) “have died” is the kind of slimy passive voice that is the enemy of good journalism. How did they die, Marjorie? Who killed them?

We know the answer, as we always have. Israel killed them, and is still killing them in unprecedented numbers. To leave that out is to tell a lie of omission—another thing journalists are supposedly against.

Then there is the absurd vagueness of the recipients, as many people pointed out. Nowhere in the citation is it even specified that we are talking about Palestinian journalists. Instead, we get the all-encompassing “journalists and media workers.”

Again: cowardly, shameful, absurd. Fuck this nonsense!