The Guardian and WaPo don't deserve Pulitzers just for sparking a surveillance debate

The Pulitzer Board’s citation to these two organizations has a faintly comic air. The Post the board congratulates not merely for “its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency” but for “authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.” For the Guardian, by contrast, the board rather conspicuously omits any reference to authority or to insight, noting only that the paper had “help[ed] through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.”

The latter is at least true. The commendation to the Post, by contrast, involves an assertion of fact that is, at a minimum, highly contestable. The Post got big things wrong in the stories the board honors. It reported that NSA has access to the servers of internet companies—a fact it then changed in the story without running a correction, for example. It grossly misreported, using entirely true facts, on a compliance audit so as to present it as suggesting nearly the opposite of what it actually shows. And it frequently reported on the most routine sort of overseas intelligence collection, collection of precisely the sort the law authorizes, in breathless tones suggestive of gross impropriety. The Post‘s reporting has indeed been authoritative, though not because it has been good or consistently accurate; its authority has been part of the problem. Its coverage has often been the opposite of insightful. And it has in fact served to help the public misunderstand the issues on which it was intended to shed light.