Editors at the Washington Free Beacon criticize a major Ivy league university for its role in the recent Pulitzer journalism awards.
The increasingly irrelevant Pulitzer Prizes were awarded on Monday to a slew of left-wing news reports. …
… The prize for commentary went to the “Palestinian poet” Mosab Abu Toha for his work in the New Yorker—”deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir,” as the Pulitzer board put it—depicting the evils of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
It took just more than 24 hours for Abu Toha’s public statements defending the atrocities of Oct. 7 and assailing the Israeli victims of those attacks to surface. (“How on earth is this girl called a hostage?” he wrote of Emily Damari, a 28-year-old IDF soldier abducted by Hamas. He objected to the media’s humanization of Israeli “hostage” Agam Berger: “These are the ones the world wants to share sympathy for, killers who join the army and have family in the army!”)
Somehow the intrepid reporters on the Pulitzer Prize board missed them. Huh.
Columbia University’s role in the administration of the Pulitzers and selection of the prize winners is not lost on us. The president of the university, Claire Shipman, sits on the Pulitzer board, which selects the prize winners. So does the president of the Columbia School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, and the editor in chief of the Columbia Journalism Review. The administrator of the prizes, Marjorie Miller, is also a Pulitzer board member and a Columbia employee. Deliberations over the prize winners take place on the Columbia campus.
Were the Pulitzer board members, including Shipman and New Yorker editor in chief David Remnick, aware of Abu Toha’s public statements before they gave him the award? Will they reevaluate their decision given that, in the immortal words of Jeff Lebowski, new s— has come to light?
