The Pulitzer board capped off a year of highly politicized journalism awards by giving top prizes to some of last year’s most controversial journalism. Among the winners:
● The NYT’s James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who exposed the NSA terrorist surveillance program.
● The WaPo’s Dana Priest, who exposed the existence of covert terrorist detention centers overseas.
● The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mike Luckovich, who drew this anti-war cartoon on the occasion of the 2,000th U.S. military fatality in Iraq (to which Georgia teenager Danielle Ansley provided this response).
This is not to detract from the deserving winners, such as the Gulf Coast papers that won in the Public Service category. It’s just to point out that the major journalism awards this year went to reporting based on anonymous sources who sought to damage the Bush administration or to commentary that shared the same goal. Sadly, the Pulitzers were no exception.
UPDATE: A few of you have written to say the link to Danielle Ansley’s response to Mike Luckovich doesn’t work, so I linked to Michelle Malkin’s post on the subject. You can view the cartoon there.