8 ms·

2022 Pulitzer Prizes

35 points by hhs 4y ago

colechristensen 4y ago
Every single book revolves around an ethnicity issue except one about poverty. This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about.
- aarestad 4y ago
  Wouldn't you agree that they're worth talking about _right now_?
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    They're worth talking about right now. But they're not the only thing worth talking about right now.
  - jimbob45 4y ago
    As someone who doesn't have a dog in this fight, the Hunter Biden laptop story represents a far stronger embrace of journalistic ethics in the face of adversity than any of the stories that were actually awarded. For a publication to stand by a story while facing extreme financial repercussions and censorship is impressive.
    - jacobolus 4y ago
      The Hunter Biden laptop story was a fake scandal made up by political hack “journalists” to (try to) swing an election, dropped on the electorate with no corroboration and no expert analysis, handed to them by people directly working for the president’s campaign who had a history of promoting Russian propaganda. Reputable media outlets tried to corroborate the story, could not, and decided not to publish anything about it until after they could do their routine due diligence. The NY Post – not a reputable media outlet – instead jumped at the chance to score political points without concern for corroboration. The supposed “scandal” is that the candidate’s son tried to set up a meeting between his boss and his father, which meeting either never happened or was no more than a few minutes long, and never demonstrated any whiff of illegality or even unethical behavior by the candidate. That is hinted at by some (apparently real) emails which were obtained by an unknown method [but note the company had been hacked by Russian military intelligence in the recent past] and then placed on a hard drive by unknown actors for unknown reasons, along with a highly suspicious (and now impossible to validate, because the hard drive was handled so sloppily) story about a laptop abandoned to a legally blind repair shop owner. This hard drive eventually found its way to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. “Unqualified relative of a powerful/famous person with mediocre talent/skills talks up his importance and connections to get a fancy job” is an everyday occurrence in the USA (and around the world). As an obvious example, look at George W. Bush’s entire pre-presidential career (or thousands of family/friends of Governors, Senators, CEOs, ...). It’s a bummer that we can’t all have a famous dad to put on our resumés, but unless some actual corrupt dealing happens, there’s nothing unusual or scandalous about this. But despite there being no serious story here, it has been repeated ad nauseam by every hack propaganda rag for the past year and a half to the point that millions of faithful conspiracy theorists are convinced of its significance. Meanwhile the (now former) president’s son in law was having his bankrupt family business bailed out by oil sheikhs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and more recently has been put in charge of a $2 billion investment fund) as direct payback for altering US government policy to help those patrons, and nobody involved in this laptop story batted an eye. (Not to mention, the former president himself spent his whole term in office shaking down everyone he could for cash and political favors, including the US federal government and various foreign leaders.) What a joke.
      - BitwiseFool 4y ago
        Dropped on the electorate? I distinctly remember major news outlets outright saying they weren't going to cover it and dismissed it as Russian propaganda right after the story came out. I also distinctly remember the insinuation that it was totally fake, somehow forged, or pure disinformation. By all accounts it should have been an October Surprise but it wasn't because it was starved of attention. Turns out, though, it was real and the contents on the drive have been reported on after the election - and even then not with the level of detail and urgency that one would expect of an unbiased media.
        jacobolus 4y ago
        At least some of the emails were real (but not particularly interesting or scandalous). You can read about them here https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... > Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post. ¶ The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.[...] ¶ Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. How those emails (and other materials) were originally obtained and how they made their way onto the hard drive in question is impossible to determine. Because there isn’t really much story or scandal in the emails themselves (similar to the Blumenthal and Podesta hacked email leaks from 2016), the whole “conspiracy coverup” angle has been played up endlessly by breathless propagandists. But even if you take a leap and assume that the laptop story is true precisely as claimed, the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
    - ineptech 4y ago
      Per the wikipedia article on the topic, the author of the article refused to put his name on that article due to concerns about its veracity, and the main allegation in it (that Biden Sr met with a Burisma board member at his son's request) turned out to be false.
    - pupppet 4y ago
      Interesting seeing the right losing their collective minds over this Hunter Biden laptop story but completely dismissing all of Trump’s kids getting in trouble with the law. Trump’s kids, who were all given cushy government jobs.
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    No, they have been talked about ad nauseam for the past few years.
    - oorza 4y ago
      Right, because the measure of how much we should talk about injustice is how much we've talked about injustice, rather than how much injustice there actually is. Because ignoring problems is always how to solve them.
      - bendbro 4y ago
        Right, because a sarcastic strawman is the best way to prove a point.
      - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
        No one is making an argument in favor of ignoring one specific problem. On the contrary, the complaint that all the books getting pulitzer prizes are about the same topic, is not against that topic, but about other problems being ignored.
        jacobolus 4y ago
        This “same topic” is: how people and groups of people feel about and relate to themselves and each-other. Which is so broad as to encompass basically anything having to do with people.
        Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
        the topic as defined by the post making the complaint was "an ethnicity issue / exploring identity issues". You generalize it to "identity" and your critique is true for the definition you make, but you may be missing the point the complaint was about: that the books don't just feature this topic, they resolve around it. The post i commented on described the topic as "injustice" and argued that making the complaint is akin to asking to ignore injustice, and therefor morally wrong. I find that an eristic argument and engage it with logic, because i strongly dislike such arguments. Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
  - austhrow743 4y ago
    Why is _right now_ a time when they're more worth talking about than any previous time?
  - gaws 4y ago
    No
- devindotcom 4y ago
  The winners are: A fictional story about the Netanyahus A recasting of Hamlet in the American South The origin of a treaty in a conflict between early colonists and indigenous peoples & A 500-year history of Cuba (tie) Biography of a man living in the Jim Crow era Poems about working class life in the Rust Belt Book-length nonfiction about growing up homeless and poor And there are plenty of counter-examples in the runners up too. It's not even close to every single book. There are other things to talk about, and talking about them won Pulitzers.
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    @colechristensen is mostly correct, let's look at the descriptions in the announcement for the first three books you mentioned. The Netanyahus: "historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience" Fat Ham: "grapple[s] with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty" Covered with Nigh: "A gripping account of Indigenous justice" And for the rest, I think the description you provided hints that collective identity is an important element of the books. (except perhaps for "Cuba: An American History" and "Invisible Child")
- burkaman 4y ago
  Was the link updated? None of the books at the current link seem like they "revolve around an ethnicity issue", at least from the short summaries on the page.
  - jimbob45 4y ago
    I think it was. When I clicked earlier, it was only showing the journalism awards (or maybe my scroll just broke halfway down? Hard to tell).
- hoofedear 4y ago
- Bud 4y ago
  Hard to explain such a tendentious and careless take, especially when you apparently didn't even take the ten seconds necessary to check whether you were even right about your basic premise.
- joshcryer 4y ago
  Honestly, it's no wonder The Pile produced models have to be "bias adjusted." Please, pick, at random, any date on that page and you can say the same thing about any of the subject matters. Here. I just did it. 2003. Middlesex. Book about a girl that's not a girl. 1982. Rabbit Is Rich. Book from a series that explores drugs, identity, religion, this one has alcoholism themes. 1976. Humboldt's Gift. Story about commodification and culture. The whole point of the Pulitzer for books novels and music is to encourage and highlight the unique stuff. The fact that they may reflect the current themes of those times should not be surprising or bothersome.
  - whymauri 4y ago
    I did the same thing! For the 1970s awards. One is about a black bartender and the racial tensions of the Civil Rights era. Another is about the experience of womenhood and loneliness. One about Gandhi and the Indian experience. The biographical piece was about Huey Long, an advocate for wealth taxes and redistribution. The thing is identity is so broad that you can fit anything as being 'identity' media, especially the kind of emotionally compelling/captivating works that would win a Pulitzer.
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    Yes, it has always been biased and far from ideal (e.g. see @chernevik's comment about Walter Duranty). But I think it's getting worse. I wish there was some metric like Oscar's viewership for Pulitzer, so we could chart the decline of their prestige in recent years. The closest thing I can think of right now is Google n-grams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_start=2000&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_...
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- ramesh31 4y ago
  >This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about. The Pulitzer is an American award. To talk about American culture is to talk about race. Only it isn't that obvious when you're the one that's considered default. The rest of us don't get a choice.
99_00 4y ago
Stories that won in the past. Has anything come of the investigations into Trump's taxes, criminal inquiries, or connections with Russian interference? 0 out of 3 is not a good record. David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges. Staff of The Wall Street Journal For uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment. Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  I don't see the connection here. What do these have to do with '22 awards?
  - jyrkesh 4y ago
    Can't speak for OP, but it was interesting for me in that it points to either: a) speculative reporting that turned out to have less basis in reality than was initially thought (to the point that top-tier award-winning journalism wasn't actually true), or b) a disconnect between facts on the ground as reported by journalists, and our individual, societal, or governmental inability to effect change based on those facts My personal take is that it's probably a combination of the two. A bunch of anonymous sources cited by the press throughout Trump's presidency were either never corroborated by public sources, or were flatly proven to be incorrect as more facts came out. But there was also a TON of totally credible, well-sourced journalism in that era that the US federal and state governments have completely ignored, often with the support of their constituents who dismiss even the absolute best reporting as "fake news." Looking at the 2022 winners, it's personally disheartening for me to think how much of what's listed there will just continue on as the status quo. Though as a counterpoint, it also looks like there's some wins that were already corrected, like the Florida battery plant exposé that (if I take the Pulitzer description here at face value) resulted in new safety measures to protect workers.
tdhz77 4y ago
- evan_ 4y ago
  These prizes would have been for works published in 2021.
- agency 4y ago
  Aren't these for things published in 2021?
  - tdhz77 4y ago
    Why are they listed?
gautamcgoel 4y ago
Really awesome to see Quanta Magazine and Natalie Wolchover win a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting! They do great work.
- mabbo 4y ago
  Seriously! Her writing is brilliant and it's so nice to see her recognized for it.
- _delirium 4y ago
  The citation is: "For coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research." So it seems like this is the winning piece: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-te...
ibejoeb 4y ago
"The Washington Post: For its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation's darkest days." Indeed. Zero questions remaining. I understand unflinchingly, whatever that is.
- Jonovono 4y ago
  I wonder how much Bezos paid for that !
  - gaws 4y ago
    Bezos has zero control or sway in any editorial decision made by the newsroom.
    - Jonovono 4y ago
      Ah, good to know. Thanks Jeffrey.
      - gaws 4y ago
        Low T response. I'm not the biggest Bezos or Amazon fan, but his hands-off approach for The Washington Post has been reported on -- and continually monitored -- by multiple news organizations since he purchased it years ago. If he stepped in and blocked a story, whether it was about him, Amazon or something else, people would know about it.
- Bud 4y ago
  WaPo's coverage was indeed excellent. The best that I read anywhere, overall. Good call by the Pulitzer board.
  - ibejoeb 4y ago
    The part where they explained why the capitol police officers were escorting people into the building was perhaps the most vividly compelling.
hedora 4y ago
- bendbro 4y ago
  There are none. But the good news is that your view is media dependent, so all we need to change it is a few more Elon Musks!
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Every user input is error.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  Or alternatively, the Pulitzer board is biased. I invite you to find a single right-winger among the 19 in the list: Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Applebaum, Nancy Barnes, Lee C. Bollinger, Katherine Boo, Neil Brown, Nicole Carroll, Steve Coll, Gail Collins, John Daniszewski, Gabriel Escobar, Carlos Lozada, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Kevin Merida, Marjorie Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Emily Ramshaw, David Remnick, Tommie Shelby. [1] You have a point about news sources being biased and nonobjective, but that applies to the liberal ones two. [1]: https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2022 https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2022
  - hedora 4y ago
    This is precisely why I asked for an example of reputable reporting from the right. I'm beginning to suspect it is no longer exists at any significant scale. The Pulitzer board's bias (or lack thereof) doesn't magically invalidate the concrete evidence and painstaking documentation the winners performed. Most, if not all, of the winners' work can and has been independently validated by other reporters.
    - cato_the_elder 4y ago
      > This is precisely why I asked for an example of reputable reporting from the right. Of course it exist, if the standard to compare with is Washington Post. Here are some examples: Reason, WSJ, National Review and The Spectator all have the same Media Bias/Fact Check [1] rating as the Post. (or better) > The Pulitzer board's bias (or lack of) Let's agree (or disagree) on the facts instead of going on with the hypotheticals. Were you able to find a single right-winger on the board? > validated by other reporters Which again, are mostly liberals. We live in an era dominated by liberals, so we should be really skeptical about assertions like "truth has a liberal bias". [1]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
chernevik 4y ago
Never forget that Walter Duranty and the NY Times got a Pulitzer for "reporting" on the Holodomor in Ukraine -- without ever mentioning the forced famine or deaths of millions.
- screye 4y ago
  I have come to realize that NYT is considered the newspaper of record, not because it is likely to be correct, but because they eventually change their stance to match the consensus. Their shift in reporting on the Rittenhouse case and LabLeak Hypothesis are the most recent examples of this. Using NYT to figure out the truth while an event is ongoing is usually no better than other NYT-esque media outlets.
gaws 4y ago
The biggest surprise was the WSJ's snub for its Facebook Files coverage.

35 points by hhs 4y ago

Every single book revolves around an ethnicity issue except one about poverty. This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about.

aarestad 4y ago
Wouldn't you agree that they're worth talking about _right now_?
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  They're worth talking about right now. But they're not the only thing worth talking about right now.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  As someone who doesn't have a dog in this fight, the Hunter Biden laptop story represents a far stronger embrace of journalistic ethics in the face of adversity than any of the stories that were actually awarded. For a publication to stand by a story while facing extreme financial repercussions and censorship is impressive.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    The Hunter Biden laptop story was a fake scandal made up by political hack “journalists” to (try to) swing an election, dropped on the electorate with no corroboration and no expert analysis, handed to them by people directly working for the president’s campaign who had a history of promoting Russian propaganda. Reputable media outlets tried to corroborate the story, could not, and decided not to publish anything about it until after they could do their routine due diligence. The NY Post – not a reputable media outlet – instead jumped at the chance to score political points without concern for corroboration. The supposed “scandal” is that the candidate’s son tried to set up a meeting between his boss and his father, which meeting either never happened or was no more than a few minutes long, and never demonstrated any whiff of illegality or even unethical behavior by the candidate. That is hinted at by some (apparently real) emails which were obtained by an unknown method [but note the company had been hacked by Russian military intelligence in the recent past] and then placed on a hard drive by unknown actors for unknown reasons, along with a highly suspicious (and now impossible to validate, because the hard drive was handled so sloppily) story about a laptop abandoned to a legally blind repair shop owner. This hard drive eventually found its way to Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. “Unqualified relative of a powerful/famous person with mediocre talent/skills talks up his importance and connections to get a fancy job” is an everyday occurrence in the USA (and around the world). As an obvious example, look at George W. Bush’s entire pre-presidential career (or thousands of family/friends of Governors, Senators, CEOs, ...). It’s a bummer that we can’t all have a famous dad to put on our resumés, but unless some actual corrupt dealing happens, there’s nothing unusual or scandalous about this. But despite there being no serious story here, it has been repeated ad nauseam by every hack propaganda rag for the past year and a half to the point that millions of faithful conspiracy theorists are convinced of its significance. Meanwhile the (now former) president’s son in law was having his bankrupt family business bailed out by oil sheikhs to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars (and more recently has been put in charge of a $2 billion investment fund) as direct payback for altering US government policy to help those patrons, and nobody involved in this laptop story batted an eye. (Not to mention, the former president himself spent his whole term in office shaking down everyone he could for cash and political favors, including the US federal government and various foreign leaders.) What a joke.
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      Dropped on the electorate? I distinctly remember major news outlets outright saying they weren't going to cover it and dismissed it as Russian propaganda right after the story came out. I also distinctly remember the insinuation that it was totally fake, somehow forged, or pure disinformation. By all accounts it should have been an October Surprise but it wasn't because it was starved of attention. Turns out, though, it was real and the contents on the drive have been reported on after the election - and even then not with the level of detail and urgency that one would expect of an unbiased media.
      - jacobolus 4y ago
        At least some of the emails were real (but not particularly interesting or scandalous). You can read about them here https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-biden-laptop-data-examined/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/hunter-... > Thousands of emails purportedly from the laptop computer of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son, are authentic communications that can be verified through cryptographic signatures from Google and other technology companies, say two security experts who examined the data at the request of The Washington Post. ¶ The vast majority of the data — and most of the nearly 129,000 emails it contained — could not be verified by either of the two security experts who reviewed the data for The Post. Neither found clear evidence of tampering in their examinations, but some of the records that might have helped verify contents were not available for analysis, they said.[...] ¶ Among the reasons for the inconclusive findings was sloppy handling of the data, which damaged some records. The experts found the data had been repeatedly accessed and copied by people other than Hunter Biden over nearly three years. How those emails (and other materials) were originally obtained and how they made their way onto the hard drive in question is impossible to determine. Because there isn’t really much story or scandal in the emails themselves (similar to the Blumenthal and Podesta hacked email leaks from 2016), the whole “conspiracy coverup” angle has been played up endlessly by breathless propagandists. But even if you take a leap and assume that the laptop story is true precisely as claimed, the better explanation for the media reaction is: serious media outlets who were repeatedly burned by credulously reprinting Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon’s (later proven false) claims wised up and decided to be a bit more careful this time.
  - ineptech 4y ago
    Per the wikipedia article on the topic, the author of the article refused to put his name on that article due to concerns about its veracity, and the main allegation in it (that Biden Sr met with a Burisma board member at his son's request) turned out to be false.
  - pupppet 4y ago
    Interesting seeing the right losing their collective minds over this Hunter Biden laptop story but completely dismissing all of Trump’s kids getting in trouble with the law. Trump’s kids, who were all given cushy government jobs.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  No, they have been talked about ad nauseam for the past few years.
  - oorza 4y ago
    Right, because the measure of how much we should talk about injustice is how much we've talked about injustice, rather than how much injustice there actually is. Because ignoring problems is always how to solve them.
    - bendbro 4y ago
      Right, because a sarcastic strawman is the best way to prove a point.
    - Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
      No one is making an argument in favor of ignoring one specific problem. On the contrary, the complaint that all the books getting pulitzer prizes are about the same topic, is not against that topic, but about other problems being ignored.
      - jacobolus 4y ago
        This “same topic” is: how people and groups of people feel about and relate to themselves and each-other. Which is so broad as to encompass basically anything having to do with people.
        Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
        the topic as defined by the post making the complaint was "an ethnicity issue / exploring identity issues". You generalize it to "identity" and your critique is true for the definition you make, but you may be missing the point the complaint was about: that the books don't just feature this topic, they resolve around it. The post i commented on described the topic as "injustice" and argued that making the complaint is akin to asking to ignore injustice, and therefor morally wrong. I find that an eristic argument and engage it with logic, because i strongly dislike such arguments. Please note that i have no strong opinion whether the complaint is objectively true, complete nonsense, or only the subjective understanding of the person making the complaint. I do not have such an opinion, because i have not read any one of the winning books and will not make any argument about their content or major themes based on one sentence summaries.
- austhrow743 4y ago
  Why is _right now_ a time when they're more worth talking about than any previous time?
- gaws 4y ago
  No
devindotcom 4y ago
The winners are: A fictional story about the Netanyahus A recasting of Hamlet in the American South The origin of a treaty in a conflict between early colonists and indigenous peoples & A 500-year history of Cuba (tie) Biography of a man living in the Jim Crow era Poems about working class life in the Rust Belt Book-length nonfiction about growing up homeless and poor And there are plenty of counter-examples in the runners up too. It's not even close to every single book. There are other things to talk about, and talking about them won Pulitzers.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  @colechristensen is mostly correct, let's look at the descriptions in the announcement for the first three books you mentioned. The Netanyahus: "historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience" Fat Ham: "grapple[s] with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty" Covered with Nigh: "A gripping account of Indigenous justice" And for the rest, I think the description you provided hints that collective identity is an important element of the books. (except perhaps for "Cuba: An American History" and "Invisible Child")
burkaman 4y ago
Was the link updated? None of the books at the current link seem like they "revolve around an ethnicity issue", at least from the short summaries on the page.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  I think it was. When I clicked earlier, it was only showing the journalism awards (or maybe my scroll just broke halfway down? Hard to tell).
hoofedear 4y ago
Bud 4y ago
Hard to explain such a tendentious and careless take, especially when you apparently didn't even take the ten seconds necessary to check whether you were even right about your basic premise.
joshcryer 4y ago
Honestly, it's no wonder The Pile produced models have to be "bias adjusted." Please, pick, at random, any date on that page and you can say the same thing about any of the subject matters. Here. I just did it. 2003. Middlesex. Book about a girl that's not a girl. 1982. Rabbit Is Rich. Book from a series that explores drugs, identity, religion, this one has alcoholism themes. 1976. Humboldt's Gift. Story about commodification and culture. The whole point of the Pulitzer for books novels and music is to encourage and highlight the unique stuff. The fact that they may reflect the current themes of those times should not be surprising or bothersome.
- whymauri 4y ago
  I did the same thing! For the 1970s awards. One is about a black bartender and the racial tensions of the Civil Rights era. Another is about the experience of womenhood and loneliness. One about Gandhi and the Indian experience. The biographical piece was about Huey Long, an advocate for wealth taxes and redistribution. The thing is identity is so broad that you can fit anything as being 'identity' media, especially the kind of emotionally compelling/captivating works that would win a Pulitzer.
- cato_the_elder 4y ago
  Yes, it has always been biased and far from ideal (e.g. see @chernevik's comment about Walter Duranty). But I think it's getting worse. I wish there was some metric like Oscar's viewership for Pulitzer, so we could chart the decline of their prestige in recent years. The closest thing I can think of right now is Google n-grams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_start=2000&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ramesh31 4y ago
>This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about. The Pulitzer is an American award. To talk about American culture is to talk about race. Only it isn't that obvious when you're the one that's considered default. The rest of us don't get a choice.

99_00 4y ago

Stories that won in the past. Has anything come of the investigations into Trump's taxes, criminal inquiries, or connections with Russian interference? 0 out of 3 is not a good record. David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges. Staff of The Wall Street Journal For uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment. Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

ibejoeb 4y ago
I don't see the connection here. What do these have to do with '22 awards?
- jyrkesh 4y ago
  Can't speak for OP, but it was interesting for me in that it points to either: a) speculative reporting that turned out to have less basis in reality than was initially thought (to the point that top-tier award-winning journalism wasn't actually true), or b) a disconnect between facts on the ground as reported by journalists, and our individual, societal, or governmental inability to effect change based on those facts My personal take is that it's probably a combination of the two. A bunch of anonymous sources cited by the press throughout Trump's presidency were either never corroborated by public sources, or were flatly proven to be incorrect as more facts came out. But there was also a TON of totally credible, well-sourced journalism in that era that the US federal and state governments have completely ignored, often with the support of their constituents who dismiss even the absolute best reporting as "fake news." Looking at the 2022 winners, it's personally disheartening for me to think how much of what's listed there will just continue on as the status quo. Though as a counterpoint, it also looks like there's some wins that were already corrected, like the Florida battery plant exposé that (if I take the Pulitzer description here at face value) resulted in new safety measures to protect workers.

tdhz77 4y ago

evan_ 4y ago
These prizes would have been for works published in 2021.
agency 4y ago
Aren't these for things published in 2021?
- tdhz77 4y ago
  Why are they listed?

gautamcgoel 4y ago

Really awesome to see Quanta Magazine and Natalie Wolchover win a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting! They do great work.

mabbo 4y ago
Seriously! Her writing is brilliant and it's so nice to see her recognized for it.
_delirium 4y ago
The citation is: "For coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research." So it seems like this is the winning piece: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-te...

ibejoeb 4y ago

"The Washington Post: For its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation's darkest days." Indeed. Zero questions remaining. I understand unflinchingly, whatever that is.

Jonovono 4y ago
I wonder how much Bezos paid for that !
- gaws 4y ago
  Bezos has zero control or sway in any editorial decision made by the newsroom.
  - Jonovono 4y ago
    Ah, good to know. Thanks Jeffrey.
    - gaws 4y ago
      Low T response. I'm not the biggest Bezos or Amazon fan, but his hands-off approach for The Washington Post has been reported on -- and continually monitored -- by multiple news organizations since he purchased it years ago. If he stepped in and blocked a story, whether it was about him, Amazon or something else, people would know about it.
Bud 4y ago
WaPo's coverage was indeed excellent. The best that I read anywhere, overall. Good call by the Pulitzer board.
- ibejoeb 4y ago
  The part where they explained why the capitol police officers were escorting people into the building was perhaps the most vividly compelling.

hedora 4y ago

bendbro 4y ago
There are none. But the good news is that your view is media dependent, so all we need to change it is a few more Elon Musks!
- xeromal 4y ago
  Every user input is error.
cato_the_elder 4y ago
Or alternatively, the Pulitzer board is biased. I invite you to find a single right-winger among the 19 in the list: Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Applebaum, Nancy Barnes, Lee C. Bollinger, Katherine Boo, Neil Brown, Nicole Carroll, Steve Coll, Gail Collins, John Daniszewski, Gabriel Escobar, Carlos Lozada, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Kevin Merida, Marjorie Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Emily Ramshaw, David Remnick, Tommie Shelby. [1] You have a point about news sources being biased and nonobjective, but that applies to the liberal ones two. [1]: https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2022 https://www.pulitzer.org/board/2022
- hedora 4y ago
  This is precisely why I asked for an example of reputable reporting from the right. I'm beginning to suspect it is no longer exists at any significant scale. The Pulitzer board's bias (or lack thereof) doesn't magically invalidate the concrete evidence and painstaking documentation the winners performed. Most, if not all, of the winners' work can and has been independently validated by other reporters.
  - cato_the_elder 4y ago
    > This is precisely why I asked for an example of reputable reporting from the right. Of course it exist, if the standard to compare with is Washington Post. Here are some examples: Reason, WSJ, National Review and The Spectator all have the same Media Bias/Fact Check [1] rating as the Post. (or better) > The Pulitzer board's bias (or lack of) Let's agree (or disagree) on the facts instead of going on with the hypotheticals. Were you able to find a single right-winger on the board? > validated by other reporters Which again, are mostly liberals. We live in an era dominated by liberals, so we should be really skeptical about assertions like "truth has a liberal bias". [1]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

chernevik 4y ago

Never forget that Walter Duranty and the NY Times got a Pulitzer for "reporting" on the Holodomor in Ukraine -- without ever mentioning the forced famine or deaths of millions.

screye 4y ago
I have come to realize that NYT is considered the newspaper of record, not because it is likely to be correct, but because they eventually change their stance to match the consensus. Their shift in reporting on the Rittenhouse case and LabLeak Hypothesis are the most recent examples of this. Using NYT to figure out the truth while an event is ongoing is usually no better than other NYT-esque media outlets.

gaws 4y ago

The biggest surprise was the WSJ's snub for its Facebook Files coverage.