PRIZE WARS
Challenging Stories
Before the Vote
The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial was headlined righteous in seattle. Appearing four days before the final vote on the Pulitzer Prizes, it was an in-your-face attack on The Seattle Times and its series on flaws in clinical tests at a cancer research center. Newspapers don’t normally engage in such unabashed efforts to kneecap their brethren right before the big race. Still, other kinds of attacks on the credibility of would-be prizewinners are becoming more common, especially in cases involving newspaper investigations of powerful institutions.
Since 1994, the Pulitzer “Plan of Award” has required that submissions be accompanied by copies of “any significant challenge” to their fairness and accuracy. But not everyone regards newspapers as reliable conduits for complaints about the newspapers’ own work. Added to this level of distrust are the high stakes: more than any other accolade, a Pulitzer can confer an aura of legitimacy on an investigative series. For people who feel they’ve been treated unfairly, the possibility that the newspaper could be rewarded with a Pulitzer represents insult added to injury. For these reasons, targets of such reporting have begun to turn directly to the Pulitzer board and its juries, with what administrator Seymour Topping calls “preemptive challenges” intended to discredit potential nominees before they can win prizes.
Among the complaints filed with the Pulitzer office in recent years is a letter from two onion farmers in Orange County, New York, objecting to what they called distortions in New York Daily News editorials about the plight of migrant workers (submitted for a Pulitzer in 1999 but not selected as a finalist); a protest from prosecutors accused of misconduct in a Chicago Tribune investigation of the justice system (a finalist for the Public Service award in 2000); and a lengthy letter from the sheriff of Prince George’s County, Maryland, claiming thirty-five major factual errors in a Washington Post series about abuses in the county’s police department (a finalist, along with The Seattle Times, in the Investigative Reporting category this year).
The most elaborate complaint on record so far is a point-by-point rebuttal of a six-part series by the reporter Sam Roe (now at the Chicago Tribune) for the Toledo Blade. The series, titled “Deadly Alliance: How Government and Industry Chose Weapons Over Workers,” accused government and industry officials of putting production ahead of worker safety in the manufacturing of beryllium, a metal used in nuclear bombs, among other things. It was published in March and April 1999.
Brush Wellman Inc., the nation’s only beryllium producer and the primary target of the series, responded with a 185-page critique titled “A Chronicle of Reckless Reporting: How a Newspaper Chose Fiction Over Facts in Its Search for the Sensational.” The document weighs about as much as a small phone book and reads like a legal brief. It was prepared by the Washington law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, which specializes in the defense of corporate clients involved in media disputes. Copies were sent to the Columbia Journalism Review (which had awarded a Laurel to the series) as well as to the Pulitzer office and to the administrators of other journalism contests. Anticipating that the Pulitzer judges would not have the time or inclination to study the entire tome, the law firm summarized its contents in a fourteen-page cover letter, inexplicably stamped “Confidential — Not for Publication.” The package was waiting for the seven members of the Investigative Reporting jury when they met to select finalists for the Pulitzer in that category in March 2000.
“Our charge was to take what were probably 150 entries — many of them multipart investigative series — and pare that down to three in two and a half days. And one of them has this big lead weight attached to it,” says David Boardman, an assistant managing editor at The Seattle Times and a member of that jury. “It was pretty intimidating.” The jury nominated the series for a prize anyway. (It lost out in the final judging to an Associated Press investigation into the death of Korean civilians at No Gun Ri; attacks on the credibility of that work surfaced in U.S. News & World Report and other media barely a month after the prize was awarded.)
Coincidentally, Boardman was the project editor for the Pulitzer entry that carried the heaviest lead weight at the start of the judging process this year — the Seattle Times’s five-part, 30,000-word series by reporters Duff Wilson and David Heath about clinical trials conducted by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (“the Hutch”) in Seattle. The report, titled “Uninformed Consent,” was published in March 2001. It alleged that patients undergoing experimental bone-marrow transplants at the Hutch in the 1980s were not fully informed about the risks of the trials, and were given drugs in which the center and its doctors had a financial interest.
The Hutch, the largest bone-marrow transplant center in the world and an iconic institution in Seattle, vigorously disputed the charges, turning to a local public-relations firm, Gogerty Stark Marriott Inc., to help manage the fallout. As part of that task, David Marriott, a partner in the company, contacted the administrators of five major journalism contests to ask if the judges checked the accuracy of work submitted to them. “When an individual, company, or organization comes under heavy, heavy scrutiny from the media, it’s hard to respond because there is no forum for them to respond in,” he says. “It’s not a fair fight, so to speak. They don’t have many other ways to voice an opinion about stories that are written about them except to contact directly those who are giving the awards.”
The inquiries were for informational purposes only, Marriott says — “just to find out how the judging works.” Only in the case of the Pulitzers was the cancer center involved in a direct appeal to the judges. Hutch officials and lawyers worked closely with a trade group called the Association of Independent Research Institutes (AIRI) in preparing a thirteen-page complaint listing thirty-one “Major Factual Errors” in the Times’s reporting. (Randall Main, Hutch vice president and chief financial officer, is president-elect of AIRI.) The complaint was sent to the Pulitzer board under the AIRI imprimatur in January 2002.
By that point, the series had already begun to collect accolades, including the Associated Press Managing Editors public service award and a Laurel from cjr. Even more came in as the spring awards season moved into full swing: the George Polk Award for medical reporting, first place in investigative reporting from the National Headliner Awards contest, the Roy W. Howard Award from the Scripps Howard Foundation, and the $25,000 Goldsmith Prize from Harvard University.
It was this accumulation of prizes that apparently drove Laura Landro, an assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, to denounce the series in a column titled “Good Medicine, Bad Journalism,” published March 19. Landro noted in the column that she was a cancer survivor who was treated at the Hutch in 1992. She did not mention that she is also a financial supporter of the institution, saying later she felt that information was irrelevant. She wrote that she had been “dismayed” to see the Times collect prestigious awards for work she described as “fundamentally false.” Instead of “racking up prizes,” the series “should be used as a textbook case on how the media can convey biased and misleading information about biomedical research. It left out crucial facts, distorted others, and ignored everything that didn’t fit its sensational thesis.”
For example, she said, the Times ignored the fact that the Hutch was the first center of its kind to stop the experimental transplants when it became clear they weren’t working. She also said there was no evidence the center or its doctors were driven by financial interests in conducting the trials; that it’s “impossible to say” if the patients who died would have lived had they received conventional treatment, and the patients — rather than being dupes — were “clearly informed” about the risks of the experiments they participated in. Landro’s column did not elaborate in support of her charges.
The column triggered a fusillade that recalled the sulfurous exchanges between Joseph Pulitzer and his contemporaries in an earlier era. Michael R. Fancher, executive editor of the Times, defended the series in a column titled “Good Journalism, Bad Critique” (published in both papers), pointing out that Landro had not cited a single factual inaccuracy in the reporting; the Journal responded with a sneering editorial (“Tort-Lawyer Journalism”) that implied the Times had an overly cozy relationship with lawyers suing the Hutch; when the Times complained that the editorial was “misleading and fundamentally unfair,” the Journal fired back with an even snippier editorial (“Righteous in Seattle”), concluding that “what really needs correcting is reporting standards in Seattle.”
One bone of contention in this internecine squabbling was a letter Landro wrote to the Times shortly after the series was published, making many of the same points she subsequently raised in her column. The Journal accused the Times of trying to evade the spirit of the Pulitzer rules by not publishing the letter, and thereby not having to pass it on to the judges. Times executives say the letter was one of “hundreds” received by the paper; priority in choosing letters for publication was given to those from local readers. The Times’s submission to the Pulitzer Board did include a letter from Landro that was published in the January/February 2002 issue of cjr, faulting the magazine for awarding a Laurel to “a most undeserving journalistic effort.”
The debate brought new attention to an old issue: how best to ensure that Pulitzer entries are accurate and objective (and original, given several plagiarism scandals). The Pulitzer Board has resisted calls that it take a greater role in vetting the submissions, stipulating instead that the newspapers themselves take note of relevant criticism. But the board has also become more open to direct appeals from third parties.
The challenges certainly make the Pulitzer judging process more cumbersome. Since the board typically invites the entrant to respond to any complaint, a Pulitzer entry might consist of the initial stories themselves (which, in the case of complicated investigative series, can easily amount to 20,000 words and more), stories about the impact of the stories (police probes, legislative actions, lawsuits, and so forth), rebuttals to the stories, and rebuttals to the rebuttals. “It’s a very difficult situation for a juror,” says Pete Carey, an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News (and a Pulitzer winner himself) who served on this year’s Investigative Reporting jury. “It took me two and a half hours to read all the Hutch stuff the first time. If this becomes some sort of legal or p.r. specialty, I don’t think that would necessarily be a good thing. That could interfere with the process.”
On the other hand, many journalists — including Carey — are willing to err on the side of tolerating, if not inviting, outside views about the merits of contest entries. “It’s actually kind of useful to see all that stuff,” Carey says. Douglas Clifton, editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and another member of this year’s Investigative Reporting jury, acknowledges that a complex, voluminous complaint might weigh against an entry, especially in the latter stages of the judging, when members of the jury are “looking for a reason to take something off the table.” (It might also be discounted as overkill, or generate sympathy from jurors who have been on the receiving end of what they considered groundless, ham-handed attacks). Even so: “How can you say a challenge to the accuracy or conclusions of a piece could be an encumbrance to the process?” Clifford asks. “It’s a basic form of fairness. It would be like saying in a trial, having the defense present a case would be an encumbrance to the judicial process.”
Complaints about the Times’s Hutch series apparently had no effect on the judging process. “On the merits, in competition with the other entries, The Seattle Times simply lost out,” Topping says. The Investigative Reporting Pulitzer for 2002 went instead to three writers for The Washington Post, for a series exposing problems in the city’s child welfare system.
For Duff Wilson, co-author of the Times’s entry, the decision was a second near-miss. He was nominated as a finalist for a Pulitzer in the Public Service category in 1998 for a series about toxic waste that was being recycled as fertilizer. That series, too, was subject to a complaint filed with the Pulitzer Board, although Wilson was not given a copy of it or a chance to respond to its contents. He thinks the current system, with its provisions for a rebuttal from the newspaper, is an improvement. “These p.r. responses can get pretty slick and disingenuous, if not downright lying,” he says. “These people play hardball, and sometimes they throw spitballs.” Still, he thinks the board should remain open to “legitimate” challenges. “Sometimes these discussions really help,” he says. “They might have prevented some embarrassments in the past. The more talking, the better.”
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
