Pulitzer Prize winners: anti-Arpaio series; New York Times' Spitzer coverage; Obama sycophant; Politifact

The list of this year's Pulitzer Prize winners is at pulitzer.org/awards/2009. The New York Times walked away with five awards, the most in their history.

Strangely, none of the winners or nominees that I could find wrote stories critical of Barack Obama, such as looking into his partly-obscured past, looking into exactly what it was he supported, and the like. Also oddly enough, those that wrote immigration-related stories didn't follow the money but instead their articles broke on the side of supporting illegal activity. Here are some of the winners:

* The New York Times Staff won for best Breaking News Reporting for the March 2008 Eliot Spitzer scandal. If only they'd been available in October 2007! That's when Spitzer's administration changed the Motor Voter rules shortly after pushing drivers licenses for illegal aliens. Yet, a search for site:nytimes.com "eliot spitzer" "motor voter" brings up only about eight pages discussing that issue... all in comments on NYT blogs. Maybe there's a Pulitzer for blog commenters.

* The Politifact site from the St Petersburg Times. Rather than looking into the Obama citizenship issue, they simply jumped to conclusions, spreading disinformation in order to support him. They're also keeping track of Obama's promises, and they already issued a correction about one of them (link).

* Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune for a series against Maricopa County Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio: eastvalleytribune.com/story/135566. I haven't reviewed the many documents in the series, but I'd imagine there are more than a few problems with it, and the overall impact was to enable rather than fight against illegal activity.

* Damon Winter of the NYT won for best Feature Photography for his hagiographies of Barack Obama: link.

* Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson won for best commentary. Recent nuggets from him include "Obama's firm leadership has transcended race" (link). Finding the most obsequious 2008 column from him is left as an exercise. (Paul Krugman was a finalist in the same category.)

* Finalists in the National Reporting category were Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest of the Washington Post for "their relentless exploration of America’s network of immigration detention centers, melding reporting and computer analysis to expose sometimes deadly abuses and spur corrective steps." ICE subsequently wrote a letter complaining about the series. As all the other WaPo stories and their editorials make perfectly clear. the goal of such articles isn't to "spur corrective steps", it's to discourage immigration enforcement.

Comments

"I haven't reviewed the many documents in the series, but I'd imagine there are more than a few problems with it" Pretty ironic that a blog post critical of biases in media coverage has its own bias against a quite important story that YOU have not read yet. I encourage you to read the East Valley Tribune series. It is pretty important and disturbing, regardless of your feelings towards illegal immigration.

Commenter #1: sock puppet alert!

Get this! Kerry to have a hearing to help The soon to be defunct Boston Globe Democrat!!! Gee, maybe he should give them money from his campaign committee??? Just saying!