Pulitzer Board Rejects Trump’s Call to Strip NY Times and Washington Post of Awards For Russiagate Articles: No Coverage ‘Discredited by Facts’
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The Pulitzer Prize Board released a statement on Monday standing behind awarding the New York Times and The Washington Post the prize in 2018 for their coverage “on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
The board noted in the statement that they have established a “formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed.” The board went on to note that complaints by former President Donald Trump prompted such a review, which found no factual errors in the award-winning reporting.
Trump’s complaints “prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition,” the board said in its statement.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board continued, explaining the review process.
“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the board concluded, roundly rejecting Trump’s complaints.
Trump wrote the Pulitzer Board in early October of 2021, saying, “There is no dispute that the Pulitzer Board’s award to those media outlets was based on false and fabricated information that they published.”
Trump shared the letter, addressed to Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller, in a statement via his campaign PAC.
“The continuing publication and recognition of the prizes on the Board’s website is a distortion of fact and a personal defamation that will result in the filing of litigation if the Board cannot be persuaded to do the right thing on its own,” Trump added in the letter.
“The Pulitzer Board has a standing process for reviewing questions about past awards, under the guidelines of which complaints are considered by an appointed committee,” The board said in a statement at the time.
Trump followed that statement up with another in late October, raging, “These Pulitzer Prizes for totally incorrect reporting have become worthless and meaningless.”
The New York Times and Washington Post won the highly respected Pulitizer for national reporting in 2018 for their “relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Trump hinged much of his complaints regarding the Times and Post coverage on legal proceedings surrounding special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI probe into Trump’s campaign links with Russia.
So far, the first and only charges related to Durham’s investigation have resulted in an acquittal for Michael Sussmann who was charged with making a false statement to the FBI regarding allegations of computer links between Trump and Russia.
