Fourth Estate The Pulitzer Prize Scam For the 99th straight year, they’ve convinced the American people they matter.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Abandon everything you’ve ever been told about cynical journalists. If you want to melt the frozen heart of a reporter, just whisper in his ear that he’s a finalist in some journalism prize contest. It won’t matter how insignificant or unknown the prize is, whether it’s local or national, whether he’s won one before or not, or whether it comes with a cash prize or just an acrylic trophy.

Most journalists can refer to themselves as “prize winning” in their biographical notes because prizes seem to outnumber journalists these days. “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes,” as the Dodo says at the conclusion of the caucus race in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Prizes, prizes!” Dodo insists, taking the thimble from Alice’s pocket and presenting it to her. “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble.”


Investigative journalists hand out awards to themselves, as do online reporters, alt-weeklies, business journalists and games journalists. The Dart Center gives eight prizes for trauma reporting, the Cabot Prizes honor work that advances “ Inter-American understanding,” and the Sidney Hillman Foundation gives both American and Canadian prizes for pieces that serve the common good.

There are awards for media writers, young journalists, courageous journalists, black journalists and journalism, innovative journalism, works that right wrongs, human interest stories, superior journalism, public interest journalism, and public interest magazine journalism. Still more prizes are distributed for electronic journalism, features journalism, children and families journalism, disability journalism, science journalism, international journalism, political writing, intrepid journalism, excellence in journalism, journalism done using social science research methods, data journalism, and journalism that unmasks corruption. Works-in-progress have a special prize, as do works that address social justice, or advance ethical reporting (actually there are two of these). And a slew of trophies go to practitioners of investigative journalism ( Worth Bingham, Goldsmith, Selden Ring, Daniel Pearl, Clark Mollenhoff, et al.). Even the American Copy Editors Society distributes “ best headlines” prizes each year.

That’s just a short list. Contests celebrating the journalism of food, travel, sports (with separate awards for coverage on each sport!), the environment, women and health care exist. Local and regional prizes can be found in profusion. There are student prizes galore, press-club honors, internal company awards and photojournalism awards. Then comes the cataract of the big “name” prizes from the American Society of Magazine Editors, Scripps Howard, the Emmys, the Society of Professional Journalists, duPont-Columbia, the American Society of News Editors, the Overseas Press Club, and the Loebs, which splash down every prize season to replenish newsroom egos. Oh, how we journalists honor ourselves!

But the left-lane passing, high-status prize for journalists remains the Pulitzer, a graven and craven honor if ever there was one. All journalism prizes are arbitrary and self-aggrandizing, the product of insular thinking and administrative logrolling. But only Pulitzer winners expect the world to bow to the prize’s prestige and think owning one indemnifies them against criticism. Others believe that it should be rolled into their name like a knighthood or a doctorate. In her new autobiography, The Story: A Reporter’s Journey, Judith Miller castigates Harvard academic Howard Gardner for something he wrote about her, hissing in a footnote, that Gardner “makes no mention of my Pulitzer.”

Other professions honor themselves with award pageants. The industries of fashion, cinema, books, Broadway, television, and music stage galas in tribute to themselves. But only journalists possess bullhorns through which they can rain publicity on themselves, and when the Pulitzers drop, as they did today, their bullhorn orchestra cuts loose at high volume.

Like a Disney Animatronic, Pulitzer administrator Mike Pride this afternoon welcomed his livestream audience to a “glorious day on the Pulitzer Prize calendar.” Speaking from the World Room at Columbia University, Pride presented the standard mix of journalism prizes, salting the egos of publications large and small—from Charleston’s Post and Courier to the predictable New York Times. This was the 99th installment of the prizes and somewhere far above (or far below) Joseph Pulitzer was gloating about what his namesake trophies have become.

The Pulitzer Prizes were conceived in a 1902 brainstorm by their benefactor, Pulitzer, the owner of the wildly successful New York World and other newspapers. (I am indebted to Roy J. Harris Jr.’s comprehensive book Pulitzer Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism for most of the prize back story.)

“My idea is to recognize that journalism is, or ought to be, one of the great and intellectual professions; to encourage, elevate, and educate in a practical way the present and, still more, future members of that profession, exactly as if it were the profession of law or medicine,” Pulitzer dictated.

Even journalists (like me) who admire the yellow and muckraking journalism Pulitzer stirred and served from the 1880s until his death in 1911 will laugh at the old man’s lofty pretensions. While it’s true that he battled the plutocrats and stuck up for the working class, his lowbrow paper also decanted New York for all the crime, sex, vice, divorce and violence stories it could tell. “A sensational story that is worth featuring is to be pushed to the limit,” he once said. When his tabloid-esque excesses were challenged by upstart publisher William Randolph Hearst in the mid-1890s, he chased his competitor to the bottom in what one visiting British journalist called “a contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer.”

Murder and catastrophes were Pulitzer staples, the more lurid and blood-stained the better. “When a murder was particularly gruesome, the front page was flooded with illustrations,” writes Sidney Kobre in The Yellow Press and Gilded Age Journalism. “Pictures grew from one-column cuts to four and five-column layouts towards the end of the century.” News of a St. Louis tornado filled the entire front page of Pulitzer’s World one day in 1895. His newspapers also specialized in publicity stunts, often placing a female journalist in peril to manufacture a story. Reporter Nellie Bly became a Pulitzer star by faking insanity to report from inside an asylum. Later she raced around the world in 80 days in imitation of Jules Verne’s hero. The words “scandal,” “sensationalism,” and “partisan” better describe the Pulitzer news method than do “encourage,” “elevate” and “intellectual.”

Pulitzer was wildly partisan, and never restrained himself from using the World to advance his political agenda. During the 1884 presidential contest, Pulitzer’s World took a strap to the Republican candidate, James G. Blaine, a former speaker of the House, calling him “the prostitute in the Speaker’s chair, the representative and agent of corruptionists, monopolists and enemies of the Republic.” Pulitzer offered readers four reasons why they should vote for Democrat Grover Cleveland over Blaine: “He is an honest man. He is an honest man. He is an honest man. He is an honest man.” Pulitzer’s idea of elevated ideals included running a story, sourced to a pro-Cleveland physician, that Blaine had Bright’s disease and would likely die in office, Denis Brian writes in his Pulitzer biography.

Pulitzer’s shock tactics, not uncommon in the day, continued for most of his run at the World. The standard story maintains that Pulitzer, now filled with regrets, throttled back on sensationalism after the Spanish-American War, during which he and Hearst dueled for the position of top jingoist. But his yellow methods were still going strong in the new century. The World pursued Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy with tabloid intensity. The World’s reporting and that of other muckrakers so enraged Eddy that in 1907 she ordered the establishment of a new, uplifting newspaper as an antidote. The motto of her newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, was “To injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” Pulitzer may have preached elevation but the Monitor practiced it.

The prizes are part of Pulitzer’s manufactured legacy. He appears to have created them in the mold of the Nobel Prizes, which were first given in 1901. Like Pulitzer, Alfred Nobel had a reputation problem, having profited wildly from a murderous invention—dynamite—early in his career. Thanks to the Nobel Prizes, people associate the name Alfred Nobel with peace and scientific achievements, not with products of annihilation. Whatever Pulitzer’s motivations, thanks to his prize, made possible by a bequest in his will, we now associate him with excellence in journalism, not scandal, jingoism, stunts, sensationalism, entertainment or partisanship. By giving Columbia University operational control of his prizes, he wisely blessed his reputation with an important school’s prestige. His other bequest to Columbia, which established its school of journalism, deepened that association, although the school resisted pressure that it be named after the old man. The parallels aren’t perfect, but imagine a lofty journalism prize named after Rupert Murdoch, another publisher with a mixed record, and you get a sense of the size and success of the Pulitzer make over. And so is reputation purchased.

The prizes finally got going in 1917. In his history, Harris commends Pulitzer for having shrewdly included prizes for novelists, historians, dramatists and poets alongside prizes for “lowly newspaper work,” an arrangement that helped “elevate the press.” The prizes faltered in those early years, Harris writes, because of a shortage of submissions.

Since the Pulitzer’s beginning, the judging has been done in secret, with the jurors deliberating in seclusion like the College of Cardinals electing a new pope. Although the judging process has changed over the years, the outcomes are difficult to justify. Former Washington Post Managing Editor Robert G. Kaiser, who has served as a Pulitzer juror, knocked the arbitrariness of the prizes in a Post piece last year. “Pulitzer Boards are capable of brilliant good sense, and egregious errors,” he wrote. “They generally pick from a few finalists chosen by juries of peers which—I know from personal experience as a member of several—can be utterly frivolous and arbitrary.”

The arbitrariness Kaiser finds so irksome is built into the Pulitzer process. How can you honestly judge a piece of journalism against others unless they all cover the same subject? Even then, it would be a stretch. To fully appreciate this arbitrariness, try reading the winning entry from the 2014 “ Explanatory Reporting“ category and then read the two finalists back to back. Is there a feather-measure of quality separating them? Perform the same comparison on other Pulitzer categories from any year and you’re likely to arrive at the same conclusion. (Here’s the official explanation of the prize-giving mechanism.)

If there was any science to prize giving, we should expect some sort of convergence: That is, the different prize-bestowing organizations would tend to declare the same stories as winners within prize categories. But that doesn’t happen! Harris observes that in recent years, the Pulitzers have gone out of their way to honor younger staffers and to toss out a few “shocks,” that is, honor works that have been passed over by the other contests.

Not even the newspaper bosses in charge of submitting entries can reliably predict which of their stories constitutes prize-winning work. In the 2012 cycle, New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman nominated himself in the international reporting category and won. “Jeffrey put himself forward for the Pulitzers,” said Gettleman’s editor, “and for that, Jeffrey, bless your heart.” Steven Pearlstein, who won the Pulitzer in commentary in 2008, was not nominated by his paper, the Washington Post. The paper’s business editor sent in his entry. Members of the Pulitzer club-clan will dismiss this faultfinding with a bored hand wave. The prizes aren’t about honoring the “best” works, they’ll tell you, but about honoring “distinguished examples.” If you can’t see through this semantic hand-jive, I’ve got a foil-plated Knucklehead Award for you.

Arbitrariness infects the whole journalism award racket, making every contest something of a fraud. How depressing it is that journalism, a craft dedicated to truth, could allow itself to be part of such a laughable lie. Some of the biggest and nicest names in journalism have advanced its cause as jurors and board members. I direct maximum abuse on the Pulitzers because its history and standing have given sanction to the many lesser frauds. I punch up at the same time that I punch down.

(Disclosure: Politico participates in the Pulitzers, submitting entries and helping to fill its jury box. One of our lads has won a prize in recent years and another has sat on the board.)

It is with shame that I confess that I once participated in the contest racket, although at sub-sub-Pulitzer levels. Friends and colleagues would call and ask me to help judge their local, state, or association-wide contests, and I would agree. I knew from the get-go that it was absurd to judge, say, a story about police brutality in St. Louis against a piece about political corruption in Chicago and the two of them against a story about an endangered species in the Bay Area. But I chugged my beer and bent to the industry ethos. During interminable conference calls, the more experienced judges would squeeze the less experienced judges to speed the deliberations. It was about as scientific as an astrology reading. I took no solace in anointing winners because for every winner a jury creates it makes three to five accomplished journalists think they’re losers.

Perhaps the only thing worse than awarding a Pulitzer is withholding one. That happens periodically, and happened in last year’s “ Feature Writing” category. Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute speculates that a hung jury might have been at fault (the winner must collect at least nine of 17 votes, he wrote). Now this is just arbitrariness piled on top of arbitrariness. Imagine the Miss America contest or the Oscars operating under rules permitting a hung jury. The Pulitzer mob is candid about recruiting former winners and finalists to serve as jurors and board members. Who better to designate an arbitrary winner of a prize than a previous arbitrary winner?

The Pulitzers operate under a cone of secrecy, and this has long inspired conspiracy theories about how the selection process works. In the early 1980s, Los Angeles Times media reporter David Shaw amassed and evaluated the theories in an entertaining excavation he later collected in his book Press Watch. Shaw heard of logrolling for votes; historical domination by eastern papers; that it had become captive of the New York Times; that sentimental votes are cast for repeat finalists because it was deemed “their turn” to win; and that the prizes now balance the distribution of prizes by geography, circulation, race and gender to dispel the criticisms that they favor eastern papers, large circulation papers, whites and males.

Although the Pulitzers aren’t as clubby and inside as they were three generations ago, having recently opened their doors to online and magazine submissions, no effort to “reform” the prizes is likely to cleanse them of their silliness. Perhaps Alexander Cockburn assessed the Pulitzer Prizes best in a 1984 Wall Street Journal piece, writing, “Year after year this undignified prizegiving ritual goes on, without any apparent qualms on the part of my profession. Why? If bankers gave themselves prizes (‘the most reckless Third-World loan of the year’) with the same abandon as journalists, you may be sure that the public ridicule would soon force them to conduct the proceedings in secret.”

What defense, then, can be mustered for the Pulitzer Prizes? Small newspaper journalists will tell you that their prize brought needed national attention to a local story, which is good! And that the prize brought national recognition to their work, thereby paving their way for a better job in a bigger market. That’s also good! Newsroom veteran Dean Starkman gave prizes a clear-eyed endorsement in 2012 in the Columbia Journalism Review. Acknowledging the shortcomings of the Pulitzers, Starkman declared “we need contests more than ever” to encourage “big, ambitious, risky public-service journalism.”

If we really need prizes to inspire great work, why not test this thesis by unilaterally canceling all awards for one year to gauge their effect on journalistic quality? Have a blue-ribbon committee to assess the before and after! One unintended consequence of Pulitzer worship has been a surplus of stories engineered from conception to win a prize, an obvious truth that former Pulitzer Prize administrator Sig Gissler has dismissed. But ask around: You won’t find a single American newsroom of any consequence that doesn’t strategize early in the year on how best to win a Pulitzer or a lesser cousin. Prize-whoring can’t help but produce some good copy, but at what expense? Marshaling scarce resources on prize-bait starves the rest of a publication, often producing self-indulgent, endlessly padded, multipart series where a couple of snappy stories would have served readers better.

Way back in 1926, long before the Pulitzers had reached puberty, H.L. Mencken was ripping the predictable and conformist nature of Pulitzer engineering. “Newspapers have been rewarded, in the main, for ‘crusades’ of the conventional cut, requiring only plenty of money to make them effective,” he wrote. Earlier this month, Roy J. Harris, a friend of the prizes, wrote about how to predict this year’s winners. Study “what earlier competitions have singled out, and then [adjust] for certain quirks in the Pulitzer process,” he wrote. That’s exactly what editors do at the beginning of the year when blueprinting what they hope will be prize-winners. Journalists should be writing for readers, not contest judges.

“The Pulitzer halo is glorious but evanescent, like a rainbow,” Robert G. Kaiser wrote in his essay about the prizes. “Name fifteen journalists who ever won a Pulitzer. Most people, even journalists, will flunk this quiz, because this sort of information doesn’t stick,” he continued.

Are there any die-hard defenders of the Pulitzers—outside of Pulitzer winners, Pulitzer finalists, and prize-mad editors? Without getting all Marxist about it, journalism prize-givers are power grabbers who use contests to seize cultural capital and exploit it. Culture capital, as defined by philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, exists outside of normal markets. It cannot be bartered for or haggled over, it is not tangible, it lives in the ether, as James F. English writes in The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Bourdieu holds that the prizes consecrate winners, lending them godlike status, and perform a similar miracle on the givers. Some of the left over manna flows to the prize’s long-dead benefactor and some of it to the organizers and judges, who use the prize to define journalistic orthodoxy and dictate professional taboos.

American journalism at its best has always avoided the heavy credentialing that plagues other professions. A high-school dropout or a Ph.D. in microbiology who can do the work will find both a job and newsroom acceptance. This openness has attracted independents, misfits, nonconformists, outsiders, foreigners (Pulitzer came from Hungary!), and other cussed souls to the craft.

So why no backlash against the Pulitzers? Why does Pulitzer worship persist in a culture that promotes skepticism? The annual nature of journalism prizes suggests an answer. Most religions mark their calendars with a sacred new year, which celebrates the previous year and provides a reflective starting point the next. The annual Pulitzers, not so coincidentally announced at the time of the spring equinox, consecrate the past and mark journalism’s limitless rebirth. New Year’s celebrations are often marked by prayer, raucous merriment, solemn ceremony, or a bit of all three. The Pulitzers satisfy this yearning, distributed as they are at a swank luncheon on the Columbia campus that is indistinguishable from a religious investiture.

You can no more expect journalists to turn their backs on the Pulitzers than you can expect the deeply religious to turn their backs on their churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. The prizes tap into something too elemental for pure reason to disturb. Journalists, famous for their distrust of authority, are made weak by Mr. Pulitzer’s bogus prize. Don’t hate the Pulitzers, hate the deferential journalists who rush to them for validation instead of finding direct validation in their own work.

******

For the longest time, I gloated about the fact that I was not a “prize-winning journalist,” even appending my biographical note with the sentence, “Shafer has never won a journalism prize of any kind.” Then, in 2012, during my first year at Reuters, I got a phone call from a Reuters colleague in charge of prizes who told me that I’d just won one from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. I didn’t even know I’d been entered. “Oh, shit,” I shouted. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You’ve ruined my streak!” I replied. One consolation: When the prize arrived I discovered to my relief that they’d misspelled my name on the plaque. So technically, I’ve never won a prize, although a certain “ Jack Schafer “ has. Send me a prize via email to [email protected]. My every email alert, tweet, and RSS feed contains a cheap prize.