Golden Showers in the Media By Arjun Singh
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/golden-showers-in-the-media/
Did you read the title? Did it strike you as oblique and lurid, reminiscent of the Steele dossier’s salacious allegations? “Good,” Joseph Pulitzer would say. The 19th-century businessman and Democratic Party mover-and-shaker was a pioneer of such news copy. His marquee newspaper, The New York World, was sensational, scandalous, salubrious, and graphically outrageous – filled with colorful exaggerations designed to stimulate an opera of emotion: “yellow journalism.” There’s an oft-repeated line in the media that “sex sells.” Pulitzer and his opposite number, William Randolph Hearst, invented the idea long ago. In doing so, their pages reached circulation exceeding a million people, in the 1890s at that. Yellow journalism begat a gilded lifestyle for Pulitzer, who became fabulously rich.
Now, 111 years since his death, Pulitzer’s legacy of yellow journalism lives on in the ‘Pulitzer Prizes,’ whose 2022 honorees were announced on Monday. With award-winning irony, the endowment of Pulitzer’s wealth – built atop decades of gutter-press reporting – is now used to honor what many call the most prestigious award in journalism, for reportage supposedly of the highest quality. If Pulitzer were alive today, his work would never win the prize now in his name. Nobody would ever dream of it. It’d be like giving the National Enquirer – a celebrity gossip tabloid that funneled Donald Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels – the Nobel Prize in Literature. As one British journalist wrote of Pulitzer, he “strove for primacy of the sewer.”
Yet, such irony is lost on the journalistic profession, most of whose practitioners are happy to lavish praise upon the Pulitzer Board and on Pulitzer’s legacy every year in the hopes of receiving the award, which shall vault them atop the cocktail party hierarchy for the rest of their lives. Politico’s Jack Shafer termed the concept “prize-whoring” for good reason. The Board has responded in kind, forming what Chicago publisher Robert McCormick once called a “mutual admiration society” of liberal journalists. Each year, true to Pulitzer’s ferocious Democratic partisanship, its honorees typically hail from the left. Though you won’t find flag-waving socialists awarded for writings on class warfare, rarely will any conservatives be a finalist despite the high quality of their work. The New York Times, meanwhile, seems to have a standard quota of at least two awards each year. Indeed, the Pulitzer Board is so brazenly partisan that even its progressive honorees cannot help but pointing it out. “It’s only because I’m a conservative basher that I’m now recognized,” wrote Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post columnist and 2010 honoree for commentary.
Built on yellow journalism, sustained by sycophancy, and limited by blinkers of bias, the Pulitzer Prize is no longer prestigious (if it ever was). Now, it’s just pathetic. That Monday’s awards ceremony went virtually unnoticed – except, of course, by the winning outlets themselves – is a symbol of its oblivion. Once more, the media establishment showers itself in gold medals for conformity, unaware of how foolish its members appear to the rest of us.
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