The Pulitzer Prize Remains A Crown For Left-Wing Propagandists

About a decade ago, I was “considered” for a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series on Wisconsin’s unconstitutional John Doe investigations. There was no need to get a big head about it. The Pulitzer is a bit like the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. Anyone can enter; few will win. Unlike the sweepstakes, which is free to enter, entrants have to pay to play in the Pulitzer — a “nonrefundable handling fee of $75 via credit card.”

Anyone may enter anyone’s journalistic work for Pulitzer Prize consideration, “whether an editor of a news organization, an individual journalist or a reader.” Technically, someone being treated for blunt force head trauma or a Biden era press secretary could “nominate” a journalist, although the Pulitzer Prize Board frowns on entrants using the term “nominated.”  

The now-defunct statehouse organization I worked for submitted my name and some of the stories from the series, “Wisconsin’s Secret War.” Don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of the series, which ultimately numbered hundreds of stories, shone a spotlight on one of the darkest chapters in Wisconsin history, and challenged a false narrative from corrupt corporate media. Sound familiar? 

But I knew a decade ago what I know now: I had no chance of winning a Pulitzer — or really being “considered.” I’m not saying my series would have won or even made the cut as a finalist. What I am saying is it could not have won the Pulitzer. Let’s just say conservative journalists aren’t the Pulitzer people’s kind of people. 

A series about a politically-motivated secret investigation to punish a Republican governor and his conservative allies for successfully taking on powerful public sector unions isn’t the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes. Sure, it had all the elements that typically catch the eye of the people running the puffed-up, century-plus old prize: Government agents illegally spying on citizens, pre-dawn, armed raids on the homes of victims, sweeping prosecutorial abuse. But the people unjustly targeted in Wisconsin’s political John Doe investigations didn’t fit the left-infected legacy media’s definition of a “victim.” The story of abusive bureaucrats and creepy Democrat prosecutors certainly didn’t fit the usual narrative from the usual corporate media suspects — then or now. 

‘Distinct Political Dimension’

Such liberal provincialism is nothing new in Pulitzer Land. As The New Criterion opined more than 30 years ago, Pulitzers are ever destined for the piously liberal. 

“It has long been recognized that there is a distinct political dimension to the awarding of the Pulitzer Prizes. Briefly stated, the Pulitzers favor the expression of liberal opinion. No other mode of political belief is considered eligible for Pulitzer consideration. It is thus the main business of the Pulitzer committees to hand out the Prizes to other liberals, both in the press and in the arts,” the editors of the conservative magazine wrote in May1992. 

The piece reflected on the awarding of the prize in the category of “Commentary” to Anna Quindlen, “the often angry, always lachrymose columnist for The New York Times.” The columnist-turned novelist, in the estimation of The New Criterion, was honored for being emblematic of the modern liberal school of thought obsessed with “the emancipation and gratification of the self.”

The story remains the same 33 years later. 

‘Reported Cautiously’

This week we learned The Washington Post, complicit in chloroforming democracy in darkness, won the Pulitzer in the “Breaking News” category for its tentative coverage on last July’s assassination attempt on then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The same news outlet that covered for and carried water for a senile Joe Biden, wrote off the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as Russian disinformation, and aided and abetted in the Russia collusion hoax long after that old chestnut died of unnatural causes, has been awarded with yet another Pulitzer. The latest chapter in liberals loving liberals. 

But as my Federalist colleague Brianna Lyman wrote, the Trump-hating WaPo, in its Pulitzer Prize-winning breaking story, was slow to believe that the man it had so often vilified could be the target of an assassin’s bullet. The first headline, according to the archives, was “Trump rushed off stage after loud noises at rally.” As we know and learned quite quickly following those “loud noises,” Trump had been shot in the ear, escaping assassination by a fragment of an inch. One of his supporters at the July campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was murdered; two others were seriously wounded. The Post knew it, too. After all, the online version of the newspaper published the photo showing blood pouring down the side of Trump’s face as he stood up and yelled, “Fight! Fight!” 

“Two days later, the paper’s Paul Farhi defended the media’s coverage that deliberately downplayed the horrific event, saying media outlets ‘reported cautiously about what had occurred’ since ‘it wasn’t immediately clear what was unfolding,’” Lyman noted. 

“Cautiously”, of course, is a convenient word to defend  corporate media players that clearly bristled at the fact that the left’s Public Enemy No. 1 was the victim of a violent political crime during an election they desperately wanted Trump to lose. 

‘Awarded for Propaganda’ 

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer’s “prestigious” public service metal went to leftist propaganda pusher ProPublica. The news outlet won for its disgustingly disingenuous reporting on women who, ProPublica claimed, died from medical care delays in states with “strict abortion laws.” ProPublica featured a slanted story about Amber Thurman, a Georgia woman pregnant with twins who, as The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, “died in 2022 after … suffer[ing] untreated complications from the dangerous [abortion] drug regimen responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions … ProPublica “blam[ed] confusion about Georgia’s lifesaving abortion limits for [her] death.”

ProPublica’s leftist spin was just the kind of piously liberal reporting worthy of Pulitzer Prize attention. It definitely fit the requisite narrative, facts be damned. 

For corporate media’s gaggle of leftist elites, the Pulitzer still means something, a crowning achievement. For those who have watched these self-important reporters defile the once-noble craft of journalism, the Pulitzer Prize is a prom queen crown awarded to the most insufferable leftists on the dance floor.  

“Once you realize Pulitzers are awarded for propaganda, it’s kind of funny to see who wins and who loses. Also funny to see who thinks it’s a prize that you want to win or should be complimented for winning rather than mocked over,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway, winner of several meaningful journalism awards, wrote this week on X. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.