On Monday, the latest Pulitzer Prizes were announced. I would say what I think about the Pulitzer Prizes, except that I'm just going to defer to my distinguished colleague, Phil Terzian. Since Terzian has been both a Pulitzer finalist for Distinguished Commentary as well as a Pulitzer juror, his opinion of the awards ought to carry a bit more weight than mine:

The Pulitzer Prizes are a singularly corrupt institution, administered by Columbia University and the management of the New York Times largely for the benefit of the New York Times and a limited number of favored publications and personalities. Any citizen who thinks that the annual distribution of awards has something to do with quality probably believes that the Oscar for Best Picture goes to the most distinguished film of the year. If you're a connoisseur of unrestrained self-praise, may I recommend the citations when the Times awards itself the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

This is but an amuse-bouche, and so I recommend you read the rest of " Prize and Fall," his piece about his experience with the awards. I was reminded of Terzian's damning article, because once again the Pulitzers did something that was at once breathtakingly political, unjustifiable as a reward for journalistic excellence, and, yes, served as a pathetic attempt to further burnish the reputation of the New York Times.

Now thank the gods they didn't actually win, but the New York Times editorial board was actually a finalist for editorial writing this year. And the Pulitzer committee specifically cited them for "editorials that focused on the human cost of gun violence to argue powerfully for the nation's need to address the issue."

Now it would be almost impossible to overstate how dreadful and factually challenged the New York Times's recent coverage of the gun debate has been generally, and specifically how bad the editorializing has been. I could pick apart a number of examples (and I've already cited a number of the Times's failings here), but specifically the fact they ended up a Pulitzer finalist would seem to center on one editorial in particular.

In the wake of the San Bernardino terror shooting, the Times ran a front page editorial on the need for sweeping gun control laws. It was the first front page editorial the Times had written since 1920, when they felt similarly compelled to make a drastic statement about the GOP nomination of Warren G. Harding. And speaking of "unrestrained self-praise," the Times was so proud of their editorial daring that they ran a news article elsewhere in the paper highlighting the fact they just ran a front page editorial. Anyway, the Times article was bold in that it was wildly out of step with what the vast majority of Americans think about banning guns:

It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition. … It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens."

As for whether it's "possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way," well, that allegedly simple task proved too much for the Times editorial board. Elsewhere in the editorial they wrote, "Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle, which an 18-year-old can easily buy in many places even where he or she must be 21 to buy a simpler handgun."

The problem here is that bolt action .50-caliber rifles were never banned by the so-called "assault weapons" ban. (And that law had a pretty dubious definition of an "assault weapon" that was easy to circumvent.) So there's a pretty serious factual error. Then in the online version of article, the Times editorial actually linked to a fake news site that falsely claimed California had banned one of the most popular forms of handgun ammunition.

The editorial then attacked Republicans for not supporting President Obama's call to ban people on the "no-fly list" from purchasing guns. The trouble is that the people who find themselves on the no-fly or terror watch list frequently have never been convicted of any crime, and often people erroneously end up on these lists. In fact, just the year prior, the New York Times editorialized about " Terror Watch Lists Run Amok":

Welcome to the shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror watch lists, which operate under a veil of secrecy so thick that it is virtually impossible to pierce it when mistakes are made. A 2007 audit found that more than half of the 71,000 names then on the no-fly list were wrongly included.

Yet, a year later the New York Times is editorializing that inclusion on this same list should be grounds for denying constitutionally guaranteed Second Amendment rights.

Further, by focusing on guns, rather than the specific nature of the San Bernardino terror attack, the editorial seemed specifically designed to distract from and shield the Obama administration from accountability for their gross national security failings. There was no mention in the Times editorial that the guns used in the San Bernardino terror attack were already banned. And the Times certainly didn't mention that, when they entered the U.S., the terrorists who perpetrated the attack should have raised more red flags in the immigration system than a Beijing parade.

Regardless of your feelings on gun control, there's simply no way to defend any of this as even journalistic competence. And to say that it's good enough to be a Pulitzer finalist, is yet another damning indictment of just how bad and politicized the American media has become.