What? Give Up My Pulitzer Prize?

Tulsi Gabbard brings the receipts. And the Kiss Cam brings back public shame.

In 2018, the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting went to the NYT and the WashPost for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign. From its comfortable headquarters at Columbia University, the board issued an official citation (emphasis mine) saying:

“For deeply sourced, 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, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.” Diving deeper, the committee cited revelations of contacts between Russians and Michael Flynn and Donald J. Trump Jr. that contributed to public understanding of the issue.

Oops. Now that a very bravo DNI Tulsi Gabbard has declassified a rash of documents showing President Obama led a conspiracy to twist US intelligence to prop up a bogus claim of Russian collusion with Trump, a more accurate award might have said:

“For manufacturing a story out of whole cloth that did nothing to further public understanding of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and everything to elect Hillary Clinton and then, after voters saw through that, for hamstringing Trump’s 45 administration. They tarred him for a crime of collusion with Russia he did not commit. They spread the lie that when he said there were “fine people on both sides” he was referring to neo-Nazis when in fact he was talking about the people on both sides of a debate in Charlottesville about whether to tear down historic statues.

In short, the media — because as night follows day, the lazy and crazed cable newsies followed their print trailblazers into the abyss — all saluted this fabrication. Cobbled together by dishonest intelligence agents — you may remember them from the Hunter Bidden laptop scandal, charging ‘Russian disinformation’ then too — and spoon fed to friendly reporters, this garbage should not have passed the smell test for honest journalists. Even Joseph Pulitzer — publisher of the New York World, itself known for yellow journalism, selling a million copies a day on a steady diet of sex, crime, and graphic urban horrors — might have blanched at the audacity of this propaganda.

When DNI Gabbard came into the lion’s den this week — disclosing more and more documents to a hostile press — WH Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt — to their faces — called on the Post and the Times to return their Pulitzers.

“The New York Times, Washington Post, were ridiculously awarded Pulitzer prizes for their perpetuation of this hoax. It's well past time for those awards to be STRIPPED,” she said. “It is not journalism to propagate political disinformation in service of the Democrat Party and those in the intel community who hand over out of context and fake intelligence to push a false political narrative.”

Instead, ever dishonest, the media doubled down.

CNN cut off Gabbard in mid-sentence, least any of its dwindling audience of listeners learn the truth. Anchor Jim Sciutto, a former Obama administration official, belittled Gabbard’s “quite extreme allegation” that former President Obama was guilty of treason and part of a conspiracy with Hillary Clinton regarding Russia’s 2016 election interference, disparaging it as not worthy of extensive airtime.

MSNBC described her findings as “ludicrous” and a “nothingburger,” arguing that the declassified documents lack substance and manipulate evidence to debunk a theory of Russian election interference that the Obama administration never endorsed. Wow, rewriting history even as it is made. And then of course Obama weighed in, calling it all a “distraction.” Nothing about how inaccurate the documents were, nothing about how untrue they were. Just “a week attempt at distraction,” for him, no doubt, for now he has to spend $$ on a team of lawyers. And worry that Clapper might talk.

Once, journalists cared about their reputations. Now they care about ratings.

CBS fired anchor Dan Rather after he gave air to a story about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard that turned out to be bogus. And NBC executives punished anchor Brian Williams after he embellished an account of an incident in Iraq in 2003, as well as events in Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina. They shipped him over to MSNBC, as if fewer would notice his dishonesty there. He left altogether in 2020. Dan Rather came back to the news biz too, like an insect stuck to fly paper. Now, they are both gone, felled by age.

In 1981, the Washington Post won a Pulitzer for a page-one feature story called ‘Jimmy’s World,’ in which reporter Janet Cooke profiled the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict. The story was subsequently found to be a complete fabrication. The Pulitzer was returned, and Cooke never worked in journalism again.

But now they are all in on being an echo chamber for far-left Dems. If Janet Cooke had written her fictionalized essay now, they would all rally to her, saying Republican policies made it all too likely that such an addicted child could exist. She wouldn’t be fired, she would be promoted.

The other day, following the Coldplay Concert Kiss Cam controversy, I mused that perhaps shame was making a comeback. Ever since the 1960s, progressives have tried to convince us morality was relative, that life was a lodestar to feel-good. It didn’t matter what God prescribed, what parents urged. What mattered is how you felt. Feelings trumped morals. And if you were happy, it was no one’s business but yours.

Now, 60 years after feminists first began to attack the family unit, even the left seems to know that marriage is sacred. The Kiss Cam video went viral because everyone knows adultery is a betrayal to family, as the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh noted, deeply wicked, and incredible harmful. For centuries, adultery was a crime. “When the voices of our ancestors speak up unanimously, it’s wise to at least listen to them,” he said.

Maybe the mainstream media will soon figure out that journalism is sacred too.