Since 1917, the Pulitzers have been a reliable barometer of upscale conventional wisdom—not necessarily a bad thing for decades, when despite some notable missteps they really did tend to honor terrific talent. My hometown paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, had been established by Joseph Pulitzer himself before he’d left for New York—and the prizes, especially those we’d won over the years, were held in hushed reverence and awe. The Pulitzer family remained prominent local philanthropists, especially of the arts, and having such demigods around was a source of civic pride.
But that was the era of mass media competing for a mainstream—unimaginable today with algorithms pushing specially tailored red meat directly to atomized consumers. In the digital age, the prizes have shrunk to a particularly pompous niche still coasting on the old prestige.
(I once asked Sig Gissler, the longtime prize administrator, why we hadn’t retracted the infamous award to Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent whose dishonest dispatches from the Soviet Union were critics’ go-to talking point. No way we’d give the right wing that satisfaction, he told me.)
As a free agent now I can’t emphasize enough how empty the prizes had become even a decade ago—Thomas Friedman sauntering from car service up to Pulitzer Hall’s famed World Room—and that was before the bottom really fell out. They were a sad cartoon well ahead of Donald Trump descending that golden escalator.
[Be sure to read it all from this former insider in journalism Academia. Keep an eye out for this new Substack, too. — Ed]
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