The Wall Street Journal has won its first Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch took over the paper in 2007. The award went to Joseph Rago in the category of Editorial Writing “for his well crafted, against-the-grain editorials challenging the health care reform advocated by President Obama.”
Other major winners included the Los Angeles Times in the category of Public Service, for its series on corruption in the city of Bell, and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Paige St. John in Investigative Reporting for “her examination of weaknesses in the murky property-insurance system vital to Florida homeowners, providing handy data to assess insurer reliability and stirring regulatory action.”
A full list of the winners is at the Pulitzer main site; interestingly, the five-member jury in the category of Breaking News Reporting awarded no prize.
After the research and interviewing in Inside Job, it would be hard to compete. Perhaps there is a decisive analysis of the strikingly successful interviewing in that film--Joel probably knows.
I suggest that American media outlets strengthen their public editor or ombuds staff, and that those functions be eligible for a Pulitzer. The New York Times does not have a perfect public editor, but does have one who is putting a lot of thought into his work. Without such a function, a paper might be tempted to cut corners, as The Harvard Crimson likes to do by deleting inconvenient reader comment.
What is vivid about the performance of the American media is that so much goes uncovered. Have we seen powerful coverage of the Libya links to Monitor Consulting Group, and professors at Harvard? Coverage to match that of the student newspaper at LSE, The Beaver? I do not think so. How can we explain the contradiction of the formal investigation at LSE set against the flimsy excuses of Drew Faust?
A continuing issue with The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the weekend Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker, for example, is the lack of depth in intellectual coverage.
If it turns out that Oxford Paperback Reference has a dozen excellent books in Science, Psychology, and Medicine that could be systematically reviewed by assigning three at a time to reviewers, the work emphatically does not get done.
The Oxford Companion to Cosmology, by Andrew Liddle and Jon Loveday at Sussex, is a powerful and fascinating book. If you were to ask Andrew and Jon about the reviews, you might find that they would be unable to think of a good one.
It falls outside the range of hearing of the media. Pulitzer should establish a prize specifically for intellectual depth, in news or reviews, so that, for example, we would have a reporter dominate history and international relations sections in bookstores, and interview professors in her territory--Washington, New York, or Boston--and see if there is a good fit between reality and the world of the university.
Inside Job more or less decimates the Columbia and Harvard professors who had their fingers in the economic collapse of 2008. Was it all invisible before Charles Ferguson took it on? If we were to start thinking seriously about Harvard, we might be amazed to note the Monitor Consulting Group fiasco, and the contribution to the economic disarray of 2008. Just how many instances would it take before it dawned on us that this is a pathological institution?
How about the Pulitzer Prize for the Story Not Covered? The Dog That Did Not Bark?
My choice would be the media incomprehension about the College Board/Kaplan scams in education. The New York Times Education Life of Sunday April 17, 2011 provides some useful clues: begin with "The B-School Blahs," by David Glenn. Why not churn hundreds of thousands of inferior undergraduate degrees in business--up to 335,000 in 2007-8--when there are no downstream costs? Or at least that is how college administrators must imagine it. No costs to the trivia of the admissions process either.
What is the American answer? Try on page 13 in NYT Education Life, Jacques Steinberg on the College Board ReadiStep sentence completion trash, or on page 30, "The New G.R.E.," more infantile sentence completion.
How large in terms of economics is the US college admissions industry? What are the opportunity costs of this shabby way of doing it? What if we had a national admissions curriculum?
How big is the trash English industry in America, including the SAT, verbal on the GMAT--all aspects of teaching and testing the language, including the depredations of Kaplan Education Predators? Do we have the figures? I think not.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 18 Apr 2011 at 05:56 PM