Stuff You Should Know - The Pulitzer Prize: A major award!

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

It doesn't get much bigger than the Pulitzer Prize if you're a journalist. Or a novelist. Or really any kind of writer. They even give them to podcasts now. We're not holding our breath.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's the reign of Ben still. And that makes this these days stuff you should know. That's right. The episode in which we talk about a major award. That's not a leg lamp, but the Pulitzer Prize. It is, you know, it's an award with much prestige attached. They will be giving out the next round on May 8th, probably not too long after this episode comes out,

in 23 different categories at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City. Did you say Pulitzer? Pulitzer. What do you say? That's what I say now. I said Pulitzer for the vast majority of my life though. Do you know which is right? I think Pulitzer. Oh, okay.

Yeah, we've been corrected enough times I think it is Pulitzer. You got it right. All right, good. They are, and we'll go over all the categories, but what you should know about the Pulitzer Prize is they are distinguished works of American works in a variety of categories. And I don't think even until yesterday I fully realized that it was such a strictly American award. I didn't either, which is ironic because it was the brain child that was founded by Joseph

Pulitzer who was a Hungarian immigrant. Yeah. But loved America. Loved America so much he moved to Missouri and didn't leave for a while. Yeah, he was born into a wealthy family April 10th, 1847 and and was a real, like, ambitious dude. He came over to fight in the American Civil War for the Union. Yeah, that's something.

And did, in fact, enlist for a year in the Lincoln Calvary. But he became a newspaper publisher at the age of 25, and by the time he was 31, he was the owner of the St. Louis Dispatch, like a major paper. Yeah, no, the Dispatch is still around. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. I didn't see how he ended up in New York, but eventually he made his way to New York.

And with his experience running a paper, took over the world, the New York world, which was just a New York paper in 1883 when he started, but under his tenure, it became the first national newspaper, like the USA Today of its time. Yeah. And he was, like I said, he was a tireless worker, but he also suffered from poor health for most of his life. I'm not sure exactly what it was, because I saw that noises were a big deal,

so he would have rooms that were just vaults basically, so he could sit in silence. But this poor health, and I think he had failing vision too, he eventually at the young age of 43 technically retired as editor in chief of the world, but still really maintained a pretty tight control over that paper. Right. So today we think of Joseph Pulitzer, we associate his name with

distinguished works of journalism, like the cream of the crop of journalism every year. And that, it turns out, is largely by design. Because Joseph Pulitzer, at the time he was alive and running the New York World, was well known for being essentially the guy who helped create yellow journalism, using hyperbole, using sensationalism, like writing front page stories about people's divorces, like just scandal tabloid stuff, like this guy helped establish tabloid journalism

in the United States. like just scandal tabloid stuff. Like this guy helped establish tabloid journalism in the United States. And it might not have been quite so pronounced his brand of yellow journalism, had he not had a like a rival, who actually in like perfect Star Warsian fashion was actually his protege, protege turned rival guy named William Randolph Hearst.

That's right. And they had the New York American, Journal American was the big paper for Hearst at the time. And they were in a real sort of neck and neck battle to sell newspapers there in New York and really kind of went at it yellow journalism style. Yeah. So yellow journalism, it turns out, has to do, we must have talked about it in our comics episode or whatever. There was a, the Yellow Kid was a character on a comic called Hogan's Alley. And the world and the journal American both had versions of this cartoon, essentially, one ripped off the other.

So this was the, known as the competition between the yellow kids, which came to be known as yellow journalism, right? And they would just pull out all the stops. And apparently, this race to the bottom is largely blamed for starting the Spanish-American War, essentially, or at least getting America behind the whole thing. So there was like real repercussions to it.

People's lives would be ruined. And so the idea that Joseph Pulitzer's name is associated with like the greatness of journalism is really one of the better cases of, I guess, whitewashing your image over time. Yeah. I mean, he did believe in great journalism. He said at one point,

"'My idea is to recognize that journalism is or ought to be one of the great intellectual professions. And there's more to the quote. But like he was, he had this idea that he revered this journalism maybe because he wasn't doing it. And in 1892, he approached Columbia University president and said, hey, how about we get a graduate school of journalism going? There isn't one in the whole world.

They said, eh, no thanks. So Missouri, the Missouri University, Missouri School of Journalism became the first one. In 1908, the Nobel Prizes were launched in 1901. And right after that, Joseph Pulitzer said, well, why don't we have our own awards for journalism? This is 1902. Two years later in 1904, in his will he said, hey, Columbia, here's 250 grand, which is about nine million bucks today, establish these prizes.

And Columbia had a new president at the time and they said this guy named Nicholas Butler, he was like, yeah, that sounds great. I'll take that money. And I'll also take the $2 million that you're going to give us for that graduate school that we now think is a good idea, which is about 71 million bucks today. Pete Slauson That's right. So, very wisely, Joseph Pulitzer, he helped establish his legacy. He steered what his name would be remembered for by creating the foremost prize for journalists, right? He didn't live to see it though, right?

No, I believe, I don't know what year he died, but it was before 1917? Yeah, he died in 1911. Okay. So he didn't even, I think the graduate school opened a year after that, and then the Pulitzers didn't start until six years later. Okay, so he probably died with his fingers crossed. And it actually paid off because not only did he, he did two really smart things, Chuck.

One, he created a panel, a board, to oversee the Pulitzer Prizes. And he very wisely said, it's up to you guys to let these prizes evolve with the times. Don't let them just be stuck in like 1904 type stuff. Like we want them to just kind of grow and evolve, and they have over time. That was very smart.

And then secondly, he tied them not just to journalism, but to drama, to music, to fiction, to poetry. And at the time, the American arts were considered far inferior to Europe, but they were still considered vastly superior to American journalism. So by hitching the wagon of journalism to this more revered and legitimate form of expression, he raised journalism as well, the profile of journalism.

And it worked. I mean, it was really sharp how he set all this up, because it paid off in aces. Yeah, I think music came after him, because his initial eight awards were four for journalism and then four book and drama awards, compared to the 23 categories we have today, 15 in journalism, five in books, one in drama, one in music, and one for graduate fellowships in journalism.

And I say, we take an early break. What? Yeah, and go over these categories. All right, let's do it. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. Western nations like the US and Europe. Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China.

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Guest at that dinner here these podcasts and more on your free iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts So we're going to go over all 23 categories. Dave helped us with this. So we'll just tell you a little bit about him because there's so many and maybe mention like some notable winners or maybe this past year's winner. This is going to be a four-parter. Yeah. One thing you will notice is that he was a populist guy. Joseph Pulitzer was very sort of progressive populist,

even though he was a wealthy dude from a wealthy family. He really wanted to identify with a common person. And the winners, as you'll see, still have a very sort of populist progressive bit to them. Yes, very much so. To this day, and it's, you know, through Columbia University still. So it's not, you're not going to see Alex Jones

winning a Pulitzer Prize, you know, for one of many reasons. Such a shock. Wow. Yeah. So the first one, the Big Daddy, as they call it at Columbia, is the Public Service Award. This is the only Pulitzer award that comes with

an actual engraved medal, right? Yeah, that's what they expect you to do when they hand you the medal. As Dave, who helped us with this, he put it, it's like the MVP of Pulitzers. So if you win this one, usually it's for an entire organization. Sometimes they'll mention like the lead writer if it was basically the work of one person. But usually it's like the New York Times newsroom or the Washington Post newsroom or once in a while the Wall Street Journal's newsroom. Usually one of the big news services organizations are the ones who win the public service award. That's right. That's the big daddy. So, there's also the Breaking News Reporting Award.

Obviously, this is about breaking news. And it is for a story that, quote, as quickly as possible captures events accurately as they occur and as time passes, illuminates, provides context, and expands upon the initial coverage. One notable winner was the Denver Post, the year the Columbine massacre happened or the New Orleans Times pick a you for their coverage of Katrina in 2006, that kind of thing. Yeah. Journalism, what journalism is supposed to be. They have a special award for that.

Yeah. Newsy journalism. There's also investigative reporting, which you don't really need to spell out because you know, it is what it is. But for this year, the Wall Street Journal one, they had a series of articles and that's a recurring theme. Very frequently, the winners have had a series of articles rather than just one big whopper of an article. Yeah.

And that's actually by designers, we'll see. But there was a series of articles about the conflicts of interest between people at 50 different federal agencies and the stocks of the companies that they regulated and how they use that information to basically trade publicly. Like you remember our COVID episode

where we started shouting about how some of the senators who were debriefed on COVID and then went and sold stocks should be locked up. Yeah. It was about that basically. Yeah, exactly. One is for explanatory reporting. If it's like a really complex topic that someone can break down in a great way.

One for local reporting. So yeah, that speaks for itself. Yeah, and this is where it's much easier for a smaller organization to shine. Yeah, sure. That's good. What else? There's also national reporting. Again, usually goes to the larger organizations just because they cover more of the nation.

International reporting, same thing. And then feature writing, where you're also kind of credited for bringing in style, like taking a topic and actually making it more readable in some ways. There's just a certain flair to it. It's like the TGI Fridays of Pulitzers. Yeah. I thought I'd get a TGI Fridays of Pulitzers. Yeah, I Thought I'd get a bigger reaction on even

You jerk Commentary that is for columnists, but it is not editorial columns That's another one Criticism like if you're a you know drama critic or a restaurant critic or someone like that like Roger Evert one one drama critic or a restaurant critic or someone like that like Roger Ebert 1-1 in 1975. So did our old friend Michiko Kakutani who as Dave helpfully pointed out is a she for me because I got it so so wrong before. So so wrong which we already corrected. Dave. Yeah.

What else? We do have one for editorial writing. This is for you know either editorial boards or op-ed writers. Illustrated reporting. This is a fun one because that's for editorial cartoonists. Yeah, that's what they used to call it and then they changed it to Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. And for this year, Mona Chalabi won for the New York Times. She had a series illustrating Jeff Bezos' wealth. And they were all pretty clever and interesting. So were the finalists, the runners-up, too. But she had one that showed, so it compared the average Amazon employee's wages to Jeff

Bezos' wealth, and said that the average Amazon employee made $37,930 in 2020. And at that rate, to reach Jeff Bezos' wealth of $172 billion, they would have had to have started working in the Pliocene epoch, 4.5 million years ago. Really drove it home to me. Yeah, those are always fun. I was going to say, like, oh, was it just a sack of money in the shape of the United States or something? No, there was much more detail in that, yeah.

That's how you win a Pulitzer. Exactly, but I mean, the runners-up, too, were just good stuff, like go look up Illustrated Reporting and Commentary Pulitzer stuff, and you'll be like, wow, this is amazing that people do this. We should do one on political, what do they call them? Cartoons?

Yeah, editorial cartoons. Yeah, yeah, we should do one on that whole thing. That'd be a fun one, I think. Okay, Yumi's Uncle is an editorial cartoonist, a well-known one in Japan. No way. Way. Wow.

All right, we're definitely gonna do it then. Okay. That's the old deal. Cool, I have something in mind. There's breaking news photography. That's obviously is some, usually some tragedy is unfolding and someone will snap a iconic photo. Different from the feature photography award.

This is like a photo series usually that has a, tells a story. That's feature photography. It's more flip book-y than the breaking news photography. And then finally everybody, introduced just a few years ago, audio reporting. Like there is a, they don't call it the podcast award, but that's kind of what it is. Well, it includes podcasts, but it can also include like local, yeah, public radio, like features and stories and all that. That's a huge expansion because before it was all

print, it was all writing, as we'll see. So that's a big, a big new one. And there's another new one coming down the pike that allows broadcast outlets, like say your local NBC affiliate, is a really great reporter that writes on their website, that reporter will now be eligible for Pulitzer stuff. That's cool. Yeah. Then there's also the whole book section, which is interesting.

Yeah. The Prize for Fiction used to be called the Prize for Novels, but now it's fiction. Usually, it's about American life. It says, you know, preferably. But it's American author, generally with a story about Americans Americaning. Yeah, so every year they pick that year's great American

novel, basically. Yeah, and remember I said I was reading a novel for the first time in a while recently? Yeah. I picked this book because that's sometimes when I'm after a novel and it's been a while, I will go to the Pulitzer list. And that's exactly what I did.

And I'm reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which won in 2018, and it is so funny and great. Awesome. I love it. From In Living Color to Pulitzer Prize. Oh, David Allen Greer, come on. There's also one on history, one on biography, also pronounced biography. Your man, Charles Mann, has not won the Pulitzer.

I looked it up. I was like, surely Josh's guy won this award. For history, yeah, no. That's more, he's more focused on Mesoamerican. This is American, like United States American. Shh, I think that counts. I agree. But apparently the Pulitzer committee

is not interested in that kind of thing. He won, which was yours, 1491? Yeah, and then the follow-up was 1493. Yeah, he won a big award for that, but not the Pulitzer. Oh, yeah, no, he definitely deservedup was 1493. Yeah, he won a big award for that, but not the Pulitzer. Oh, yeah. No, he definitely deserved it, for sure. Yeah. So you mentioned biography. Yeah.

There's also now memoir or autobiography. Sure. Which was brand new this past year. Yeah, they're just really busting out the new awards, right? Yeah, they got a poetry award for American poets. General nonfiction. That would be what our book won a poetry award for American poets, general nonfiction. That would be what our book won a Pulitzer for.

Right, so nonfiction, but not a memoir or autobiography, or biography. Yeah, and I'm not sure if we said this, and I'm not sure if it was spelled out, but it had to have been released in that year. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so the- Good point. Okay, so that's very important.

So like our book will never win a Pulitzer because it had a shot at winning the year it came out and then after that it's out of the running. That's right. Same with drama. There's a drama one that we said like usually it is a great American play. David Mamet won for Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross.

Yeah, they sure did. What's his name? One for Hamilton, Glenn Ross. Yeah, they sure did. Um, uh, what's his name? Hamilton won. Oh, Men... David Ellen Greer. Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yes, that guy, yeah. Yeah, August Wilson won for Fences, another great play.

So yeah, great, great place. And then, um, music. And this one's typically kind of controversial because it really reveals just how stuffy the Pulitzer board is on any given year. It almost always goes to a recording of classical music that somebody released that year. And classical music is not exactly America's contribution.

These are American awards, don't forget, about America, by Americans, typically. Well, America contributed jazz, rock for the most part, and hip-hop, very clearly, as far as music goes. And only one hip-hop artist, and I'm surprised that there's even one, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer in 2017. A couple of jazz cats have. But for the most part it's usually classical music. So look for that to continue to change in the future because from what I can tell the Pulitzer

people are hyper aware of how they are perceived in the in the Intelligencia version of pop culture and respond to it subtly over time. Yeah, what I want to know is how many of our friends in Britain, their heads about to pop off. That's why I said kind of, I qualified it. Should be invented rock and roll. We had a lot to do with it. Hey man. No, of course we did.

Chuck Berry wasn't British. No, I know, trust me, I'm with you. Okay. And some can even say that the American blues is the true birth of what would become rock and roll, because all those British bands were influenced by the American blues. Exactly. Yeah. To stick it.

Yeah. Take that or British friends. It's interesting though is the biggest rock bands of the classic rock era, most of those were not American. I mean, we had our share, but like when you think about, you know, the biggest bands in the world, they were Led Zeppelin and The Who and... OK.

...the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, and like mostly British. So super duper classic version, not like White Lion or Dockon. No, no, no. Because they were American through and through, my friend. Yeah, yeah, I mean we had Boston and the Eagles and Aerosmith and stuff like that.

Sure. Def Leppard. Yeah, oh boy, see. I'm trolling. You're taking a right down White Lion Lane. All right, should we keep going or should we take a break here? Let's keep going since we already took an early one. OK, if you guys thought it was a slog before, buckle up.

That's right, because we're going to talk about how they choose these. And the first step, and I think the main reason we didn't win a Pulitzer Prize is that we didn't submit our book. You got to submit. They just don't say, all right, every book that's written this year, we'll look at you. You gotta pay your 75 bucks and submit it.

Yeah, we didn't have 75 bucks. No, we didn't. We thought about it. We couldn't get the company to back us, or pay us back. You and I had a standoff of, it was like, well, I know you got it. You're not gonna pay it.

I'm not gonna pay it. I noticed Jerry didn't step forward. Yeah, Jerry needs to bust out the wallet. One, there are a couple of, like our book would have qualified in every other way, it had to have been published in a hard copy, definitely was. That separates a lot of the self-published e-books, which apparently are not up for Pulitzer consideration, unless you

self-publish a book in hard copy. As long as it's in hard copy somewhere, it's eligible to be considered for a Pulitzer. And you, the author, like you said, can suggest it, can nominate it yourself. That's right. If you're entering in journalism, it has to be in a news outlet that publishes regularly, so it can't be the the zine you put out, you know, when you feel like it. Right. That can be online-only versions. It doesn't have to be in paper form, but it has to be like a legit, you know, qualifying website. Yes, for sure. And

then now, like I was saying, saying broadcast media outlets their writers can can be eligible for stuff posted on their websites But there's nothing for documentaries. There's nothing for video only journalism. I predict this changing in the next within this decade Yeah They'll be just one for like content creator Your influencer. Dave makes a point here to watch out for when something claims to be bullets are nominated because if you have submitted then you're technically nominated. It doesn't mean that you're special because anyone can nominate.

If you got 75 bucks and you qualify, you can put yourself in there. I say that they should require people to say Pulitzer submitted. Right, we can't even claim that. Yeah, but if you don't win, the only other sort of distinctive honor is if you're one of the three finalists and you can claim to be a finalist.

Yes, yeah. If you're a Pulitzer finalist, you can claim to be a finalist. Yes. Yeah. If you're a Pulitzer finalist, like you can still toot that horn for sure and people will listen. Yeah. You're like three out of, I think there are 1,100 journalism entries per year on average. Well. And about 1,400 books. Yes. So yeah, now we reach step two. Your work has been nominated.

It gets shuffled together with a lot of other stuff, Yes, so yeah, now we reached step two. Like your work has been nominated. It gets shuffled together with a lot of other stuff and about 100 different jurors, sometimes repeat jurors from the year before. You don't have to just do it once and it's not the same people every year for sure. But they're all volunteer jurors. They get assigned to 22 different categories.

And yes, we said there's 23, but the photographers who are the jurors judge both breaking news and feature photography. And they are people who are sometimes former Pulitzer winners. They are people who are like really well known in their field.

I think like Roxane Gay was one of the jurors on this past year's poetry committee, I think. So like you're probably pretty good at your job if you're on a Pulitzer jury. Josh, I have one question though. Are any of those jurors, rural jurors? For the local reporting ones, yes. Okay, rural jurors. Yep.

That's great. You usually serve a few years and then they'll rotate you out. It is, you don't get paid for it, it's a volunteer thing. But you got, if you're on the book side, you were reading a lot of books. Yeah. Apparently for the fiction category,

there might be 300 books that you have to read through within several months. Now, I tried and tried to find out if that was real, because what I saw was there are six book juries with five jurors per jury. So 30 different judges, and they send them in 30 book packages, but I didn't know are they really, it's impossible to read 300 books over the course of months.

Not if you're Pulitzer jury material, my friend. Is that the deal? Because I was trying to verify that. I thought maybe they read 30 each and just it was all like packaged together or something. I didn't see anywhere that contradicted that. And yes, 300 books is a lot to read. As a matter of fact, now that you were talking about it, that is a preposterous number for one person to read within several months. I mean, how many books is that a week? 52 weeks.

A hundred, I think. If my math is correct. That's almost six books a week. Is that possible? No, it's not. Because these people also have like regular jobs that they're holding down too. Yeah. So I really looked and looked and looked and I could not find. What I'm guessing is, is that they get 30 books per judge.

Which is still quite a bit, but yes, that's much more manageable than 300. I hope somebody knows because I really want to get to the bottom of this. There's no way they're reading 300 books. I wonder if each judge, so this would make a lot of sense, and again, like we've never advertised ourselves as experts, and I think we're showing it big time now, But if I were guessing, Chuck, if each one reads 30 books, they pick like their favorites and present them to the committee and say,

these are some of my favorites, and everybody does that. And it immediately whittles it down to a manageable size. That would make a lot of sense. And then maybe the other ones have to read the books that the other people brought forth. Yeah. Rot. I mean, lot of sense. And then maybe the other ones have to read the books that the other people brought forth. Yeah. Wrought.

I mean, that makes sense. I was just distraught at how hard it was to find this out, because I looked and looked and looked, and I couldn't find out for sure if they each read each book. So that's an ongoing thing, too, from what I've seen. The deliberation process is very secretive. The Pulitzer committee and board and anyone associated with it has no obligation whatsoever

to be transparent about the judging process at all. Yeah, yeah, that is a criticism. But ultimately what happens is they will meet in person in February at Columbia, sometimes in March, and they reduce it to the three finalists, and then the board picks the ultimate winner from each of the picks of three. Oh, well, that's not true. They are generally picked from that group of three,

but they are not required to pick from that group of three, and there have been many cases, I believe 12 times in fiction at least, where they did not award a winner at all. Yeah, anytime the board decides not to pick somebody, it's a huge, it's considered a huge slap in the face. As recently as 2021, so 2012 for fiction, 2021 for the editorial cartoon prize, the board opted not to choose from the three finalists,

Lalo Alcaraz, Marty Tubal Sr. and Ruben Balling from Tom the Dancing Bug. They were the three finalists and none of them won. And so with the- But did someone win? No, there was no award. Okay, so they didn't award it to a, okay, gotcha. No award. And I saw Ruben Ball. They, like, there was no award. Okay. Gotcha. No award.

Um, and I saw Ruben Bowling, uh, was basically like, so yeah, they're saying, no one, no one made Pulitzer worthy material this year. And that's, that's like, that's crazy. And, but I liked Marty Tubal's interpretation. He said that, um, to him, they had so much trouble picking a winner that nobody won. They all spoiled one another's chance. Because there has to be, there can be a hung jury. You have to get some percentage of the votes to make it as the winner and not just the

finalist. Well, that's what happened in 2012 for sure, because they actually came out and said, for fiction, that it was a three-way tie. That's rare. With the editorial cartoon 2021, they just stayed mum. They just said, no awards going to be awarded. Yeah, but like, how do you have a tie? Like you could either have an odd number on the board

or let that president, because the president of Columbia is always on the board still, they should be the tiebreaker or something. That is a huge criticism that that's even possible that you can't do that, not have a winner because they deadlock. All right, thumbs down Pulitzer for that decision. For sure. You need to get with the times.

So you hit on something earlier that you thought I was saying, the board can select somebody that wasn't even nominated by the jury, right? Yeah, yeah. If it's not someone outside that final three. Yeah. They apparently just need a three-quarters vote to either select somebody that wasn't nominated that was in that category or was in another category and they move them to a category they think they are likelier to win. That happened with the biography of George Floyd this past year. It was nominated in biography. Apparently this biography on J. Edgar Hoover was such gangbusters that it was

no way even George Floyd's biography was gonna win, they moved it to the general non-fiction category and George Floyd's biography won in that one. So it's like you said, the Pulitzer committee is very conscious of the messages they're sending out by their awards for sure. And sometimes they maneuver to speak loud and clear. All right, I say we take our second break

and we'll finish up with talking about some of the controversies and some of the surprises over the years. Ooh. ["The Big Take"] The Big Take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. Western nations like the U.S. and Europe.

Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China. And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. He'll get his yo-yos to Europe in time. But the longer this drags on, the more worried he's getting. They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Gura.

I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Saleh Emosen. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets. Basically everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession. But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. Someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse.

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and more on your free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Lately I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or alumnia. How about the one on borderline disorder? A better yet recorder. So, one of the things that the Pulitzers are definitely criticized for is the frequency of awards that go to the same news organizations over and over and over again. Because the Pulitzers reward extensive, in-depth reporting that you really kind of have to have a pretty decent budget to carry out. And so the New York Times has won

132 Pulitzers over the years. The Washington Post has 70 plus. The Associated Press has 58. So like the big news organizations are the ones who usually take home the most. But they have it set up in a way that, like the local news reporting is much likelier to go to a smaller organization than the bigger guys.

But that big one, the big daddy, as we said, the Public Service Award almost always goes to, or very often goes to one of the large news organizations. But that's not always the case, Chuck. often goes to one of the large news organizations. But that's not always the case, Chuck. It's not always the case. That's right. In 2017, for editorial writing, the Storm Lake Times one, this is a, speaking of a rural

juror, they probably went wild over this because this is a paper that runs twice a week with a staff of nine people with a circulation of about 3,000 in rural Iowa. And it beat the big daddies. It beat the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Yeah. In 1990, a few years earlier, the Washington Daily News out of Washington, North Carolina, they won because they had a series of articles that exposed that the city council was well aware that the drinking water was tainted with carcinogens and that they were covering it up.

And they won a Pulitzer. They had a circulation of 8,644. So in addition to like these really good reporting that it would require for a small organization to win the public service Pulitzer, the big one, it's worth pointing out these people are under the most pressure to not publish stories like that. They're friends and neighbors and grocery store shoppers with the mayor, with the city manager, with the

chamber of commerce head, like the people who are, who can pressure them and say like, you're ruining the image of our town, don't write about this or change the tone of it. So in that sense, those people deserve a Pulitzer even more than say, you know, a huge organization that can just kind of deflect that kind of stuff. It's under tremendous pressure. There's a difference getting a call from the president saying, I don't want you to run this, and getting a call from the mayor saying, you don't want to run this. But it's still, it seems different. I feel like the pressure is even greater for smaller news organizations.

So as far as controversies go, there are a few kind of famous incidents that, not incidences by the way, I've been saying that wrong. Have you? An incidence doesn't mean something that happened. It's an incident. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Somebody pointed that out to me. Yeah, okay.

Believe it or not, someone wrote in and pointed out something that we said that was bothered them. That's a first. Anyway, we should talk about these incidents. The first one was from 1981, a woman named Janet Cook at the time was writing for the Washington Post and was the first black woman to get a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Well, I think journalism period. And this was a story about, called Jimmy's

World about an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy in Washington, D.C. It had such an effect that at the time Marion Barry was mayor. Marion Barry was mayor of D.C. forever. He ordered his administration to find this kid and get him away from his parents. It was a huge, it just dropped a bomb on not just Washington DC, but the whole country and Janet Cook made the whole thing up. Yeah. So it was submitted by who at the time was the assistant managing editor of the post, a guy named Bob Woodward, none other than. And he submitted this thing.

She had previously for three years worked for the Toledo Blade, which was her hometown newspaper and Josh's hometown newspaper. And they were like, wait a minute, she worked here and we're looking at her bio from the Pulitzer committee and like this doesn't match up with the bio that she gave us. It says she speaks all these languages. She doesn't speak all these languages. She didn't graduate magna cum laude from Vassar. She didn't have a master's degree from University of Toledo. And so they start kind of like her old employer started grilling her publicly about this and she initially said like,

started grilling her publicly about this and she initially said like all right I fudged my resume some and literally within hours it all fell apart she eventually copped to making up this whole story this is as Marion Barry and the DC cops are coming up empty looking for this non-existent kid and Marion Barry is casting public doubt but it was in was in a kind of a pickle of a situation. Right. A dilly of a pickle. Yeah. Like it seems like there's no Jimmy, but like we're not sure what's going on. I think the sad thing is that apparently it's sort of

like the A Million Little Pieces book. Yeah. That guy wrote. Like I read that book and it was great with a capital G. And in my mind I was always like, dude, why did you just should have called it a novel and you would have been fine. And apparently the writing in Jimmy's world was so great.

Like really famous authors came out and were like, I just wish she hadn't have done this. All, you know, she should have won the Nobel prize for literature that was so good, but she put herself out there for a Pulitzer, and that was the fatal flaw. Yeah. So it took days before she finally fessed up and retracted the story and said that she was returning her Pulitzer. Which, from what I could tell, she didn't have to do.

She could have been like, thanks for the Pulitzer, chumps. I don't, I guess they could rescind it, but she didn't have to give it back. So she did and moved to France and just stayed in comunicado for a decade or two. Um, and then Teresa Carpenter, who wrote the story, a death of a playmate about the murder of Dorothy Stratton, uh, in the village, village voice ended up winning the 1981 Pulitzer for feature writing. She was, I guess, the runner-up. And after Janet Cook gave it back, Teresa Carpenter got it. And that was a really good story. It was definitely Pulitzer-worthy.

Yeah. Alex Haley was another one in 1977 for his book Roots, which I never knew it had a colon. I didn't either. The full title of Roots was Roots, colon, the saga of an American family. I think I've knew it had a colon, but... I didn't either. The full title of Roots was Roots Colon, the Saga of an American Family. I think I've seen it before on the cover, but they didn't call it a miniseries that, so... Plus the colon was implied. Yeah, exactly.

Uh, it was a novel, but Haley claimed that it was based on his family from his own African heritage that he had researched. Mm-hmm. And it turned out that that probably wasn't true. It was unverified. And he admitted to plagiarizing parts of Roots from other novels at the time.

They did not rescind his bullets or though. It was a special citation. It wasn't the book prize. So I think they just let it slide. Yeah, there's a real campaign to like get that special citation even rescinded by some people. But yeah, I had no idea that Roots was fabricated in some ways or plagiarized too. And then there's a guy named Walter Durante who inspired so much, I guess, dislike,

is a nice way to put it, among journalists that he was awarded the Pulitzer back in 1932. People still today are calling for that to be rescinded. And then the war in Ukraine kind of flared it back up again after kind of dying off a little. He was the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times who won a Pulitzer, like I said, in 32, for his reporting on Joseph Stalin and Stalin's dictatorship.

And essentially he was the guy who was presenting Stalin in a really great light to America. He was a huge apologist for Stalin. And it's gross because in his Pulitzer award, it says that he was awarded for his dispassionate reporting. It was not dispassionate at all. It was in favor of Stalin and Stalin's policies that killed millions of people.

Yeah, and one of his direct quotes was, it's pretty brutally, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs when talking about the death of Ukrainians. Right. So he still has his Pulitzer. People are still mad about it. Yeah, we did mention the sort of secrecy of how it goes out is always controversial.

And it's like any award, any subjective award, whether it's Academy Awards or Emmys or whatever, they're all subjective. So there's always going to be people complaining that it's not rigged, but just Like you got to be a certain kind of thing to win this award Just like an Oscar bait movie that they throw out at the end of the year There are Pulitzer. I don't know about baits, but you know when these these publications are putting together these series They're like hey you do a good job here, and you know what might be at the end of that road. Right. There's a really great, you can characterize it as a take down very easily by Jack Schaeffer and Politico called the Pulitzer Prize Scam from a few years back.

Jack Schaeffer basically is like, how could you possibly compare some of this stuff and find any distinguishable difference enough that says this one's better than this one? An example I came up with is the editorial writing Pulitzer for 2023. It went to a writer for a series on the broken promises of the city of Miami to its citizens, right? The runners-up were one that explained the Yuvali

tragedy and the botched police response. And then the other runner-up was about how domestic white supremacist terrorism affects the United States. How could you compare those three things and be like, yep, this one's better? I mean, because the writing in and of itself is gonna just be top notch to begin with. So then what, you're using the material to judge it by?

Well, how do you compare that material to other material? It just, it is fully subjective and that drives some people nuts. Yeah, I mean, I think with any award like that, the voter, whether it's a board member of the Pulitzer or an academy member is voting on something that speaks to them the most, I guess. Right. And like you said, I mean, it is, if you look at some of the material,

a lot of the material, it is very liberal in its bent. And it shines a light on the kind of issues that liberals would be interested in upset about. And that seems to be generally what the Pulitzer committees tend to, or the juries tend to percolate toward the top. Yeah. I mean, it's Columbia University, it's academia. They have that bent anyway, generally. That, I mean, that joke I made about Alex Jones earlier, I want to be clear. They're not giving him, they're not giving him,

they're not denying him the award because he's a conservative. They're denying him the award because he's a lying liar. There's a difference. For sure. I'm not even sure he qualifies as conservative at this point. Yeah, who knows? You got anything else on Pulitzer prizes? No, I mean, should we put in for a podcast or not? Oh, I don't know, man.

I mean, I feel like in order for us to put in, we would have to do a special, like, four-part series on something. It couldn't just be for, well, it certainly couldn't be for overall excellence. No, definitely not. For a lot of reasons. Definitely not. But yeah, we could do, we'll do a four-part series on jelly beans. Yeah, or maybe we should just submit the episode for the word like. Yeah, that's a great idea. Okay, okay.

We're gonna do that. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the Pulitzer Prize, go read Jack Schaeffer's take down. It's a good place to start because he also gives a lot of background too. And since I said background, it's time for listener mail. This one is from a teacher. We love these. Hey guys, I'm a chemistry professor at the College of Wuster in Ohio.

And he says, Wester not Wooster. But that's another story. One of the joys in my work is chatting with college students in the lab while we wait for experiments to complete, talking about life, current events, random facts. There have been some uncanny similarities between our conversations and your recent topics. Are you guys listening in?

Luckily, most of my recent experience, in my most recent experience you realized the podcast before the conversation. I was never taught much African history and thanks to you walked away from your highly salacious podcast feeling well informed. I shared what I learned with one of my students from Ethiopia and during the conversation they shared an interesting fact of their own. Apparently, there is a bump engineered on purpose in the road at the spot where Haile Selassie's former residence is. So when motorists pass by, they hit the bump and their head bobs and it is so every head

will bow when they drive by his house. Pretty amazing. And I tried to find this out and verified it. I did spend a whole lot of time looking, because fact checking listener mail isn't something I want to put a lot of time into. Right, sure. But hey, if this is true, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, and even if it's not true,

I'm going to go do the same thing in front of my house. Yeah. Is that a way to get all those bags of cement? Yeah, I expensed them too. Awesome. That is from Paul Bonvelle. Thanks a lot Paul. That's a great email. Thank you very much and yes we are watching you and your class keep up the good work. If you want to be like Paul and get in touch with us, we love hearing additional facts that may be so amazing that they possibly aren't true but are still a good idea. If you want to do that, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcast

at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. [♪ music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends, music ends conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search the bright side. Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeart Radio over the past year and giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest new songs coming in the summer of 24.

Witness, Music History, iHeart Innovator Award recipient, Beyonce, iHeart Icon Award recipient, Cher. And performances by Justin Timberlake, Green Day, TLC, Jelly Roll, Laney Wilson, Tate McCray, and your host, The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best informed business reporters around the world. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets and help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. Every afternoon, I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Saleh Emosen.

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