The Necessity of Maintaining a Standard
- Dennis L. Peterson
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
What good is a standard if it isn't upheld and maintained?
The Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded in 1917 to honor "the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year." The standards by which winners were determined were clearly set forth.
The Pulitzer Prizes were established by wealthy newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer in his 1904 will. Pulitzer, born in Hungary in 1847, came to the United States during the War Between the States as a substitute for a Northern draftee. He collected the bounty promised by the Union agent who had recruited him, enlisting for one year.
After his military service, Pulitzer traveled to St. Louis, providing for himself by doing odd jobs of various sorts. He was a frequent user of the Mercantile Library, where he mastered English. In a chance encounter there with the owners of the financially troubled German-language newspaper the Westliche Post, he was offered a job as a journalist.
Four years later, when he was only 25 years old, Pulitzer bought controlling interest in the paper. By 1878, he was also owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 1883, on a trip to New York, Pulitzer met with infamous financier Jay Gould and purchased the New York World. Under his leadership, it became the nation's largest paper.
The Pulitzer papers became known for their investigative stories that exposed government scandals and corruption. They trended in the late 1890s toward sensationalism, or "yellow journalism," which culminated in a contest between the papers of William Randolph Hearst and Pulitzer's papers to see who could sensationalize more, thereby selling more papers. The poster child for yellow journalism appeared in the form of Spain's rule over its colonies, notably Cuba.
In 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, and the newspapers of both Pulitzer and Hearst, without proof, blamed Spain and began creating public pressure for a declaration of war. The reporting had the desired effect, and the United States was plunged into the Spanish-American War. The papers neither admitted the inaccuracies in their reporting nor apologized to the families of the 4,920 men who were killed or wounded or died of disease during the war.
In 1904, Pulitzer began promoting the establishment of schools of journalism. He also made provision for the prizes that are awarded each year in his name. And he established the standard for the awards: "the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in the right direction." The test of a reporter's work would be "strict accuracy, terseness, the accomplishment of some public good commanding public attention and respect."
On May 3 in 1937 and 1954, two authors received Pulitzer Prizes, one for a novel and the other for a nonfiction book loosely categorized as biography. The prize for the novel went to Margaret Mitchell for Gone With the Wind; the prize for the nonfiction "biography" went to Charles Lindbergh for The Spirit of St. Louis.
Atlanta-born Mitchell had attended Smith College for one year, married, and soon divorced "an abusive bootlegger." She later married a copy editor while writing feature stories for the Atlanta Journal.
Mitchell had begun writing Gone With the Wind in 1926 while recovering from a car accident. The manuscript was accepted by Macmillan even before she finished it. She spent the next six months fact checking and rewriting before it was finally published in 1936.
The book became an instant bestseller, selling more than a million copies in the first six months after it hit the market, an amazing fact considering that it came out in the midst of the Great Depression. It was adapted for film in 1939. The book ranks as the second most read book by Americans, behind only the Bible.
Interestingly, the original title was Tomorrow Is Another Day. Somehow I don't think it would have sold as well with that title.
About the same time that Mitchell was working on her novel, another future Pulitzer winner was embarking on the adventure that would be the subject of his award-winning work. In 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh became the first person to make a solo transatlantic flight.
Just weeks after Lindbergh completed his flight, G.P. Putnam's Sons published his 318-page account "WE." In 1948, Charles Scribner's Sons published his much shorter (only 56 pages) version of the flight titled Of Flight and Life.
But Lindbergh's most famous account was The Spirit of St. Louis, on which he worked for 14 years, and it was published in 1953 by Charles Scribner's Sons. The first 175 pages cover his time as an airmail pilot, his plan to make the transatlantic flight, and the construction of the plane. The rest of the book gives an hour-by-hour account of his 33-hour flight from Roosevelt Field in Long Island to Le Bourget Field in Paris. It earned him the Pulitzer for biography in 1954.
Both of these works, Gone With the Wind and The Spirit of St. Louis, accurately reflected the standards set forth by Joseph Pulitzer when he established the awards. Such has not always been the case. The board has long since abandoned Pulitzer's ideal for excellence in journalism. Two examples prove this point, although others exist as well.
First, in 1932, Walter Duranty of the New York Times wrote about the famine that Stalin's communist state created in Ukraine and downplayed it. The people were starving, he admitted, but Stalin wasn't purposely causing it. That view was debunked long ago, but Duranty's Pulitzer was never revoked. The Pulitzer people failed to uphold their own standard.
Second, in 1981, Janet Cooke, writing for the Washington Post, told the heartbreaking story of an 8-year-old boy who was addicted to cocaine. There was such a public outcry after the story was published that the police began investigating how such a young child could become addicted to such a powerful drug. What they discovered was that the boy had never existed. Cooke had fabricated the whole story. Yet, she had won a Pulitzer, not for fiction but for investigative reporting. Again, the Pulitzer people had failed to live up to their own standard.
Such violations of public trust not only are a travesty but also reduce the value of every subsequent Pulitzer, causing people to wonder if anything receiving the award is authentic and accurate. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), one is left to wonder about not only the accuracy of writings but also the authenticity.
Pulitzer prophesied, "Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.... A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."
Sadly, his prophecy has come true. People today distrust the press, regardless of the medium, almost as much as they distrust politicians, regardless of the level at which they serve and regardless of their party affiliation. They both have failed to live up to the standard.
If you declare a standard, you must uphold it.
(Quotations are from the Pulitzer Prize website at https://www.pulitzer.org/)
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