The New York Times won a record number of Pulitzer Prizes
yesterday: seven. No newspaper had ever won more than three
Pulitzer Prizes in a single year before. Six of the Times’s prizes
were related to its coverage of Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism,
and on at least one of the six there can be no argument about
whether the Times deserved it or not. The Times won the Pulitzer’s
Public Service Award for the post-Sept. 11 sections it called “A
Nation Challenged,” and as Seymour Topping, the Pulitzer
administrator, said, this was “an extraordinarily powerful entry.”
Indeed it was the best thing the Times had done in years.
The “Nation Challenged” sections bundled together each day all
of the coverage, domestic and foreign, of Sept. 11 and its
aftermath. Much of this was routine stuff, but much of it was not.
Meanwhile the finest things in the section each day were the
capsule biographies of the World Trade Center victims. The Times is
rich in resources, and when it wants to, it can do some stunning
work. The capsule biographies of the abbreviated lives made the
tragedy of Sept. 11 achingly real. They were journalistic
haiku.
Think of the Times, however, as a bifurcated, even
schizophrenic, paper. It has, as always, many of the best reporters
in the business. It also has a few good editors, although most of
them seem to be in the lower and middle ranks of the Times
hierarchy, and not at the very top. The Times, in fact, is very
badly edited. In its eagerness to reflect liberal thinking, no
matter how sappy, the Times mixes in fact and opinion in what once
were the sacrosanct news columns. It also lives, increasingly, I
think, in a world of its own. As an institution, it is almost a
stranger to New York
The Times, for example, opposed Rudy Giuliani’s election as
mayor. It thought him utterly unsuited for the job — it feared he
was a Reagan Republican — and it preferred instead the hapless,
hopeless David Dinkins. But the voters thought otherwise, and it
was fortunate that they did. Giuliani reversed New York’s decline,
and allowed it to renew its emotional resources. New York was no
longer the dispirited city it was before he was elected. No thanks
to the Times, but when Giuliani restored the city’s confidence, he
gave it the strength it needed to cope as well as it did with Sept.
11.
As for the Times’s other Sept. 11 and terrorist-related
Pulitzers, you may pay your money and take your choice. Personally
I wish the Pulitzer judges had not given Tom Friedman another
prize. Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post is a much sounder
foreign affairs columnist than he is. But the judges, I suspect,
were influenced by Friedman’s recent prominence in the news
himself. The Saudis used him to float their dubious peace plan.
Meanwhile I am just a wee bit skeptical of the Pulitzer for
foreign reporting for the Times’s Barry Bearak. He writes awfully
well, but he sometimes seems too glib.
On the other hand, I am delighted that the Wall Street Journal
won a Pulitzer for its breaking news coverage of Sept. 11. I only
wish that Dan Henninger, who usually toils anonymously on the
editorial page, had gotten a special citation. He wrote a brilliant
first-person account of what it was like on that dreadful day.
Later he wrote an extraordinarily touching piece about the lives
that were lost.
