Those Systemically Racial Pulitzer Prizes

Tim Graham / May 12, 2023

In theory, the Pulitzer Prizes are a celebration of the best journalism in America. But in reality, it represents something entirely different.

It rewards left-wing journalists for most effectively thumping the tub for the Left. They call it “[elevating] our understanding of the world.”

We’ve entered the third year of the Biden administration, and no one has won a Pulitzer for courageous reporting exposing this president’s failures, like the dramatic lack of border control.

But there was still a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting for Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, “for deeply reported and compelling accounting of the Trump administration policy that forcefully separated migrant children from their parents, resulting in abuses that have persisted under the current administration.”

So, President Joe Biden only failed when he continued anything former President Donald Trump’s team did.

Race and racism was a dominant theme. In the Breaking News category, the winner was the Los Angeles Times for “revealing a secretly recorded conversation among city officials that included racist comments,” which at least came from Democrats.

The award for Commentary honored Kyle Whitmire (Twitter handle: @WarOnDumb) for “measured and persuasive columns that document how Alabama’s Confederate heritage still colors the present with racism and exclusion.”

The Audio Reporting victor was Gimlet Media and Connie Walker, “whose investigation into her father’s troubled past revealed a larger story of abuse of hundreds of Indigenous children at an Indian residential school in Canada.”

The Criticism prize celebrated book critic Andrea Long Chu of New York Magazine, for “using multiple cultural lenses to explore some of society’s most fraught topics.” That’s a little vague, so let’s explain the multiple lenses: Chu is 31, three-fourths white and one-fourth Chinese, and most importantly, transgender.

The same trend occurred outside the reporting prizes. The History prize went to Jefferson Cowie for “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power.” The book was lauded as “a resonant account of an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by settler colonialism and slavery, a portrait that illustrates the evolution of white supremacy by drawing powerful connections between anti-government and racist ideologies.”

Conservatism and racism have “powerful connections.” That’s why The New York Times hailed the book as “regrettably relevant.”

The prize for General Nonfiction was given to the book “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” described as “an intimate, riveting portrait of an ordinary man whose fatal encounter with police officers in 2020 sparked an international movement for social change.”

The Drama winner was “English” by 31-year-old Iranian-American playwright Sanaz Toossi, hailed as a “quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran.” Toossi told The New York Times, “I guess I wrote this play out of rage for the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was, and is, so pervasive in this country.”

The Music prize went to “Omar,” an “innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions.”

It’s not surprising when these Pulitzers mimic the tributes of other liberal organs like The New York Times, or of liberal idols like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Maybe they should just change the name of the prizes to something like “The Al Sharpton Prizes for Exposing the Evils of White Power and Privilege.”

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