The Pulitzer Prize Parade is Purely and Perplexedly Progressive!

Tim Graham on May 7, 2025

The latest announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes brought great anticipation -- not about who would win awards but about what topics would be honored. Once again, the awards were dominated by the leftist brands -- The New York Times and The New Yorker. Pulitzer Prize juries tend to hand out awards based on which causes they want to honor, and who they feel needs to be exposed.

In Donald Trump's first term, four Pulitzer Prizes for reporting were handed out for investigating Trump, most notably for the phantom menace of Russian collusion in the 2016 campaign. As that conspiracy theory collapsed, Trump caused the Pulitzer bureaucrats to revisit this misinformation, but they resolved that since the awarded newspapers were merely channeling the anti-Trump lawyers and their findings, it was somehow not misinformation. It was publicity. The Pulitzer Publicity Prize.

In the previous eight years, there was not a single reporting prize for exposing anything about President Barack Obama or his administration's actions.

The 2025 Pulitzer announcement underlined that there was not a single reporting prize over the last four years for exposing anything about President Joe Biden or his administration's actions.

In the Clinton years, there wasn't a reporting prize for anything about President Bill Clinton's administration until 1999, after he had been impeached -- and it went to The New York Times. The Pulitzer people's wording was vague: it was about "the corporate sale of American technology to China, with U.S. government approval despite national security risks." There was no president mentioned, just "government approval."

This year, the Pulitzer pooh-bahs led their list with the "Public Service" prize, granted to the leftist website ProPublica. The subject was "pregnant women who died after doctors delayed urgently needed care for fear of violating vague 'life of the mother' exceptions in states with strict abortion laws." It won a prize because liberal journalists hate "strict abortion laws." They want abortion to be widely available and practiced without any moral qualms.

Here again, they reward misinformation. Their primary subject was Amber Thurman in Georgia, who died after taking an abortion pill and then had a dilation and curettage procedure delayed by a hospital, supposedly because of pro-life Republicans. But ProPublica's own reporting acknowledged Thurman's twins in utero were already deceased, so the "vague" exceptions did not apply. No liberal will place any blame on complications from abortion pills.

The other notable prize for liberalism went to former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who quit the Post in a huff because they wouldn't publish her cartoon attacking the paper's owner Jeff Bezos as a Trump lickspittle. The Pulitzer puffery sounded like this: "For delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity -- and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years."

Quitting "fearlessly" sealed the deal. Nevertheless, the Post shamelessly touted "their" Telnaes victory on the front page, and in a full-page advertisement.

For Team Pulitzer, their admiration for "piercing commentary" on "powerful people" with "fearlessness" all goes one way.

This farce wouldn't be complete without a lecture. Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller lamented journalists "face additional threats in the form of legal harassment, the banning of books, and attacks on their work and legitimacy." These efforts are "meant to silence criticism" and erode the First Amendment! Miller and her ilk think the First Amendment doesn't have any room for attacking the legitimacy of fake-news stories.

The Pulitzer parade implies liberal journalism is the only journalism -- like they think the First Amendment is only for liberal journalists, and that "democracy" flowers when liberal journalists successfully nudge voters to elect the Democrats.

Conservative criticism is also free speech and enhances democracy.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.