How the Pulitzer Prize destroyed itself – Latest News
This week Mosab Abu Toha, a Hamas apologist and serial fabricator who vilified feminine Israeli hostages and justified their kidnapping on Oct. 7, gained the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for a sequence of essays about Gaza in The New Yorker.
It is unsurprising, as a result of the Pulitzer Prize has turn out to be an irremediable joke.
You’d suppose that the Pulitzer, administered and awarded by Columbia University, would need to restore its tattered status after awarding a slew of debunked items that unfold the Russia-collusion hoax.
They went in one other direction.
The Pulitzer for “public service,” as an example, went to the leftist propaganda website ProPublica for “exposing the fatal consequences of abortion bans.”
ProPublica is probably the nation’s main purveyor of Potemkin journalism, which entails dressing up political propaganda with neutral-sounding journalistic verbiage to create the impression that you just’ve carried out real reporting.
Its abortion tales are maybe the sloppiest and sleaziest of its catalog, even worse than its string of pitiful smears in opposition to Supreme Court justices.
In a healthy setting, journalism faculties would use them as prime examples of hackery and conjecture.
Take its award-winning story on Amber Thurman.
In August 2022, the 28-year-old North Carolina lady checked herself into a suburban Atlanta hospital emergency room, complaining of extreme ache. She was affected by an an infection brought on by the stays of twin fetuses she had aborted by capsule 5 days earlier.
The very first thing you’ll discover when studying ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters is that they fail to offer a single on-the-record source who maintains that abortion legal guidelines slowed or stopped medical doctors from offering medical help for Thurman.
Not one.
Indeed, a reader should plow by to the 57th paragraph of the article to seek out this throwaway line: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide [emergency help].”
Not clear? That’s a exceptional concession to make deep into a story.
The headline, after all, guarantees to show that “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care.” Have, not might have.
Anyway, by “not clear,” the reporters imply no testimony exists to assist the implication that a dilation and curettage process, through which the lining of the uterus is scraped to take away tissue, was delayed as a result of medical doctors had been nervous about Georgia’s abortion law.
Whenever the story hits a juncture at which any actual reporter would really feel compelled to offer corroboration, ProPublica switches to interviewing anonymous “OB-GYNs in states that outlawed abortion” or pro-abortion activists who offer politically motivated guesswork.
We call that a “column” in the business.
To confuse readers, ProPublica repeatedly conflates miscarriages with elective abortions.
And right here’s the factor: The fetuses had already been destroyed. There was completely no legal foundation for any physician, not even one confused about the supposed ambiguities of abortion legal guidelines, to fail to provide Thurman all the care she needed.
That looks as if a very important reality that ought to have been talked about someplace in a 3,400-word investigative piece.
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I don’t care the place you stand on abortion, that’s not journalism. Yet that is the kind of hackery that wins you a Pulitzer as of late.
The solely inarguable fact in the Thurman case is that she died from problems brought on by abortion drugs.
That’s the headline. That’s the buried lede.
Knowing this, ProPublica feels compelled to guarantee readers that there are solely “rare complications” from abortion drugs — “extremely rare” even.
ProPublica, funded by a deep-pocketed progressive group, exists to create faux tales for politicians to make use of as oppo materials.
You might keep in mind when many political consultants assured us that the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization resolution and ensuing state-level abortion limitations would ceaselessly sink the total GOP?
Well, much less than a week after the Thurman story hit, Axios reported that Senate Democrats would launch a “blitz on emergency abortion care . . . after ProPublica reporting on death of Georgia woman.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris talked about Thurman on many events.
It must be mentioned that ideological bias doesn’t forestall a journalist from making arguments that depend on details.
It is implausible, nonetheless, that any real journalist may probably consider ProPublica’s Thurman story was well-reported, or that Abu Toha’s essays enlightened anybody.
And the incontrovertible fact that the Pulitzer Prize rewards this type of clear hackery solely additional destroys its already battered credibility.
David Harsanyi is a senior author at the Washington Examiner.
