Here’s a brief summary of the contested awards and why they’re disputed.
Pulitzer Prizes were announced on May 5, and perhaps the committee will regret its decisions, since at least four different controversies have emerged in the days since. Here’s a brief summary of the contested awards and why they’re disputed.
The first controversy has already been discussed in National Review. The “public service” Pulitzer was given to ProPublica for its series titled “Life of the Mother: How Abortion Bans Lead to Preventable Deaths.” That series was incredibly deceptive, perhaps most noticeably because it blamed pro-life legislation for the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller. In reality, the primary cause of death was complications after abortion-inducing pills. As Kayla Bartsch put it: “The real story here . . . is how the FDA has slowly but surely removed most of the original guardrails concerning the administration of the abortion pill.” For more details, read her recent piece here.
The second centers on the “breaking news” reporting and photography categories. The reporting award went to the Washington Post for its coverage of the July 13 attempted assassination of then-candidate Donald Trump; critics have pointed out that, in its early reporting, the Post published the unbelievably underwhelming headline “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally.” The photo award went to Doug Mills of the New York Times, who captured a photo of a bullet approaching Trump as he spoke. Some have argued that a different photo of the same event — Evan Vucci’s unforgettable image of a bloodied Trump holding up his fist as Secret Service agents surround him — is more deserving of the prize. Commentator Charlie Kirk declared on social media that “because it made Trump look good, the Pulitzer Prize committee just refused to give it the award for best breaking news photograph of 2024.”
Third, Mosab Abu Toha won the “commentary” prize for his New Yorker essays on the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza.” Now, there’s outrage over his other “commentary.” In a 2024 interview with NPR, Toha said “let’s stop talking about Hamas” and instead “talk about what happened before October 7th,” further accusing Israel of committing “genocide.” Speaking of Israeli hostage Emily Damari in January, Toha wrote in January “How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’).” Damari, who lost two fingers in the October 7 attack and spent over a year in captivity, has publicly denounced the Pulitzer Prizes board, stating that Toha is “the modern-day equivalent of a Holocaust denier.” She further told the board, “You have chosen to elevate a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
Fourth, the “feature writing” Pulitzer went to Mark Warren at Esquire for a “sensitive portrait of a Baptist pastor and small town mayor who died by suicide after his secret digital life was exposed by a right-wing news site.” The “right-wing news site” in question is 1819 News, which exposed F. L. “Bubba” Copeland’s online alter ego as a “transitioning transgender curvy girl” who went by “Brittini Blaire Summerlin.” The news stories revealed that his online posts included transgender-related pornography, photos of himself in women’s underwear, and images of young boys (including members of the local community) that suggested they were undergoing medicalized transition. Bubba/Brittini also wrote short stories, and in one of those, the narrator becomes obsessed with a business owner, murders her, and assumes her identity. To make matters even more disturbing, that business owner in the story was a real local woman who knew Bubba. Warren’s award-winning feature sanitizes many of the gross details about Bubba, and it states plainly that “It’s easy to see that Bubba was wrong and crossed an ethical line in using the names and images of people he knew in his fiction and other posts.” Warren does, however, have some choice words for 1819 News, writing that “[it] wanted the whole world to see Bubba’s posts, without fully understanding what they contained” and “before posting its stories, the editorial team there also didn’t seem to know much beyond the few facts they had discovered, things they saw as sensational and repugnant.” (For the 1819 News stories, see here. For a detailed summary of what Esquire neglected to describe, see this recent piece in Reduxx.)