Prize Poseurs

From IBD:
Posted 4/18/2006

Media: Corks are popping in newsrooms across America. It's the Pulitzer Prize fest, when journalists praise themselves for "speaking truth to power." But do they really understand their First Amendment freedom?
It's not a trifling question. A Pulitzer, after all, is journalism's most prestigious award, and if we won one our shirts, too, would be stained with champagne.

So let's praise the most deserving winners by far: the two Gulf newspapers — The New Orleans Times-Picayune and The Biloxi Sun Herald — that shared the public service prize for their coverage of Hurricane Katrina. At the T-P, staffers worked outside their devastated offices for six weeks, for days publishing only online.

So, journalistic heroism lives. There's even more reason to applaud these papers' coverage of the nation's greatest disaster. They refrained from the stealth partisanship that sought to blame the Bush administration, instead detailing government failure at every level.

But apart from those exceptions, the Pulitzer Committee once again seemed to take pride in poking thumbs in President Bush's eye. Top prizes went to The Washington Post and The New York Times for investigative pieces the commander in chief personally appealed to the editors to spike.

In the Times' case, writers James Risen and Eric Lichtblau revealed what has come to be known as the government's "domestic eavesdropping" program. That's a misnomer. The program listens only to suspected terrorists who call the U.S. from abroad.

The government would be shirking its duty if it didn't gather that intelligence. Bush, fearing compromised security, asked Times executive editor Bill Keller to hold the story. He did. For a year. Then, he released it, timed to the publication of a Risen-Lichtblau book.

At The Post, writer Dana Priest raised eyebrows by revealing secret CIA prisons overseas where suspected terrorists were harshly interrogated. Again Bush appealed to the editor, Leonard Downie Jr., who ran the story anyway, arguably compromising security and handing Islamo-fascists a propaganda victory.

Now, in a free society it's wonderful that editors can defy presidents. But just who are the enemies of freedom? The U.S. security apparatus? Or the terrorists? Messrs. Keller and Downie, now sending congratulations to each other for acting out their "watchdog" scripts, seem to have leapt through the looking glass.

Neither newspaper, the Pulitzer Committee notwithstanding, has covered itself in glory during the war on terrorism. In wars prior to Vietnam, their editorial decisions would have been deemed treasonous.

Something deeply troubling has gripped our media since our troops left Indochina.

Why not a prize for free-lancer Claudia Rosett, who single-handedly unraveled Saddam Hussein's multi-billion-dollar corruption of the United Nations? Or for The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, who painstakingly connected the Iraqi dictator to al-Qaida?

To ask is to understand just how far the mainstream media — and those who hand out prizes for their work — have drifted.