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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's. Well, no, Jerry's not here. Man, talk about habit. Ben's here. It's the reign of Ben still. And that makes this these days stuff you should know.

That's right. The episode in which we talk about a major award. Yeah. That's not a leg lamp, but the Pulitzer Prize. It's an award with much prestige attached. They will be giving out the next round on May eighth, probably not too long after this episode comes out, in 23 different categories at a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City.

Did you say Pulitzer? Pulitzer.

What do you say?

That's what I say now. I said Pulitzer for the vast majority of my life, though.

Do you know which is right?

I think Pulitzer.

Okay. Yeah.

We've been corrected enough times I think it is Pulitzer. You got it right.

All right, good. They are, and we'll go over all the categories, but what you should know about the Pulitzer Prize is they are distinguished works of American works in a variety of categories. And I don't think even until yesterday, I fully realized that it was such a strictly American award.

I didn't either, which is ironic because it was the brainchild that was founded by Joseph Pulitzer, who was a Hungarian immigrant.

Yeah.

But loved America. Loved America so much, he moved to Missouri and didn't leave for a while.

Yeah, he was born into a wealthy family, April 10, 1847, and was a real ambitious dude. He came over to fight in the American Civil War for the Union. Yeah, that's something. And did, in fact, enlist for a year in the Lincoln Calvary. But he became a newspaper publisher at the age of 25. And by At the time he was 31, he was the owner of this St. Louis Dispatch, a major paper.

Yeah, the dispatch is still around.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing. I didn't see how he ended up in New York, but eventually, he made his way to New York, and with his experience running a paper, took over the world, the New York world, which was just a New York paper in 1883 when he started. But under his tenure, it became the first national newspaper, like USA Today of its time.

Yeah. Like I said, he was a tireless worker, but he also suffered from poor health for most of his life. I'm not sure exactly what it was because I saw that noises were a big deal. So he would have rooms that were just vaults, basically. So he could sit in silence. But this poor health, and I think he had failing vision, too, he eventually, at the young age of 43, technically retired as editor-in-chief of the world, but still really maintained a pretty tight control over that paper.

Right. So today, we think of Joseph Pulitzer. We associate his name with Distinguished Works of Journalism, like the cream of the crop of journalism every year. And that, it turns out, is largely by design, because Joseph Pulitzer, at the time he was alive and running the New York world, was well known for being essentially the guy who helped create yellow journalism using hyperbole, using sensationalism, writing front-page stories about people's divorces, just scandal tabloid stuff. This guy helped establish tabloid journalism in the United States. And it might not have been quite so pronounced, his brand of yellow journalism, had he not had a rival who was actually in perfect Star Warsian fashion was actually his protege, protege turned rival, a guy named William Randolph Hearst.

That's right. And they had the New York Journal, American, was the big paper for Hearst at the time. And they were in a real neck and neck battle to sell newspapers there in New York and really went at it yellow journalism style.

Yeah. So yellow journalism, it turns out, has to do... We must have talked about it in our comics episode or whatever. There was the yellow kid was a character on a comic called Hogan's Alley, and the world and the Journal American both had versions of this cartoon, essentially, one ripped off the other. So this was known as the competition between the yellow kids, which came to be known as yellow journalism, right? And they would just pull out all the stops. And apparently, this race to the bottom is largely blamed for starting the Spanish-American War, essentially, or at least getting America behind the whole thing. So there was real repercussions to it. People's lives would be ruined. And so the idea that Joseph Pulitzer's name is associated with the greatness of journalism is really one of the better cases of, I guess, whitewashing your image over time.

Yeah. I mean, he did believe in great journalism. He said, At one point, my idea is to recognize that journalism is or ought to be one of the great and intellectual professions. And there's more to the quote, but he had this idea that he revered this journalism, maybe because he wasn't doing it. And in 1892, he approached Columbia University President and said, Hey, how about we get a graduate school of journalism going? There isn't one in the whole world. They said, No, thanks. So the University of Missouri School of Journalism became the first one. In 1908, the Nobel Prizes were launched in 1901. Right after that, Joseph Pulitzer said, Well, why don't we have our own Awards for Journalism? This is 1902. Two years later, in 1904, in his will, he said, Hey, Columbia, here's 250 grand, which is about nine million bucks today. Establish these prizes. And Columbia had a new president at the time, and they said this guy named Nicholas Butler. He was like, Yeah, that sounds great. I'll take that money. And I'll also the $2 million that you're going to give us for that graduate school that we now think is a good idea, which is about $71 million today.

That's right. So very wisely, Joseph Pulitzer, he helped establish his legacy. He steered what his name would be remembered for by creating the foremost prize for journalists, right?

He didn't live to see it, though, right?

No, I believe. I don't know what year he died, but it was before 1917?

Yeah, he died in 1911. Okay. So he didn't even... I think the graduate school opened a year after that, and then the Pulitzer didn't start until six years later.

Okay, so he probably died with his fingers crossed, and it actually paid off because not only did he... He did two really smart things, Chuck. One, he created a panel, a board, to oversee the Pulitzer Prizes, and he very wisely said, It's up to you guys to let these prizes evolve with the times. Don't let them just be stuck in 1904 type stuff. We want them to just grow and evolve, and they have over time. That was very smart. And then, secondly, he tied them not just to journalism, but to drama, to music, to fiction, to poetry. And at the time, the American arts were considered far inferior to Europe. But they were still considered vastly superior to American journalism. So by hitching the wagon of journalism to this more revered and legitimate form of expression, he raised journalism as well, the profile of journalism, and it worked. I mean, it was really sharp how he set all this up because it paid off in aces.

Yeah, I think music came after him because his initial eight awards were four for journalism and Four Book and Drama Awards compared to the 23 categories we have today, 15 in journalism, five in books, one in drama, one in music, and one for graduate fellowships in journalism. And I say we take an early break. What? Yeah, and go over these categories.

All right, let's do it.

Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeartRadio over the past year. I'm giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest new songs coming in the summer of '24. Witness, music Music history. Iheart Innovator Award recipient, Beyoncé. Iheart Icon Award Recipient, Share. And performances by Justin Timberlake. Green Day. Tlc. Jolly Roll. Laine Wilson. Tate And your host, Ludacris. Our 2024 iHeart Radio Music Awards. Monday, April first. Watch on Fox starting at 8:00 PM, 7:00 Central. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world.

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Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stuck, it's stuck, it's stuck. You should know. We're going to go over all 23 categories. Dave helped us with this, so we'll just tell you a little bit about them because there's so many, and maybe mention some notable winners or maybe this past year's winner.

This is going to be a four-parter.

Yeah. One thing you notice is that he was a populist guy. Joseph Pulitzer was very progressive populist. Even though he was a wealthy dude from a wealthy family, he really wanted to identify with a common person. And the winners, as you'll see, still have a very populist, progressive bit to them.

Yes, very much so.

To this day, and it's through Columbia University still. So you're not going to see Alex Jones winning a Pulitzer Prize for one of many reasons.

Such a shock. Wow. Yeah. So the first one, the Big Daddy, as they call it at Columbia, is the Public Service Award. This is the only Pulitzer Award that comes with an actual engraved medal, right? Yeah, that's what they expect you to do when they hand you the medal. Dave, who helped us with this, he put it, it's like the MVP of Pulitzers. Yeah. So if you win this one, usually it's for an entire organization. Sometimes they'll mention the lead writer if it was basically the work of one person. But usually it's like the New York Times Newsroom or the Washington Post Newsroom, or once in a while, the Wall Street Journal's Newsroom. Usually, one of the big news services organizations are the ones who win the Public Service Award.

That's right. That's the big daddy. So there's also the Breaking News Reporting Award. Obviously, it's about breaking news. It is for a story that, quote, as quickly as possible captures events accurately as they occur, and as time passes, illuminates, provides context, and expands upon the initial coverage. One notable winner was the Denver Post the year the Columbine Massacre happened, or the New Orleans Times, Pica Yune, for their coverage of Katrina in 2006, that thing.

Yeah. Journalism, what journalism is supposed to be. They have a special award for that.

Yeah. Newsy journalism.

There's also investigative reporting, which you don't really need to spell out because it is what it is. But for this year, the Wall Street Journal one, they had a series of articles, and that's a recurring theme. Very frequently, the winners have had a series of articles rather than just one big wapper of an article. And that's actually by design, as we'll see. But there was a series of articles about the conflicts of interest between people at 50 different federal central agencies and the stocks of the companies that they regulated and how they use that information to basically trade publicly. You remember our COVID episode where we started shouting about how some of the senators who were debriefed on COVID and then went and sold stocks should be locked up? Yeah. It was about that, basically.

Yeah, exactly. One is for explanatory reporting. If it's a really complex topic that someone can break down in a great way. One for local reporting. So, yeah, that speaks for itself.

Yeah. And this is where it's much easier for a smaller organization to shine. Yeah, sure. That's good.

What else?

There's also national reporting, again, usually goes to the larger organizations just because they cover more of the nation. International reporting, same thing. And then feature writing, where you're They're also credited for bringing in style, taking a topic and actually making it more readable in some ways. There's just a certain flair to it. It's like the TGI Fridays of Pulitzer's.

Yeah.

I thought I'd get a bigger reaction out of you than that.

You jerk. Commentary, that is for columnists, but it is not editorial columns. That's another one. Criticism, if you're drama critic or a restaurant critic or someone like that, like Roger Ebert, One-One in 1975.

So did our old friend Michiko Kakutani, who, as Dave helpfully pointed out as a she for me, because I got it so, so wrong before.

So so wrong. Which we already corrected, Dave.

What else?

We do have one for editorial writing. This is for either editorial boards or op-ed writers. Right. Illustrated Reporting. This is a fun one because that's for editorial cartoonists.

Yeah, that's what they used to call it. And then they changed it to illustrative reporting and commentary. And for this year, Mona Chalabi, one for the New York Times, she had a series illustrating Jeff Bezos's wealth. And they were all pretty clever and interesting. So were the finalists, the runners up, too. But she had one that showed, so it compared the average Amazon employee's wages to Jeff Bezos's wealth. And so the average Amazon Amazon employee made 37,930 dollars in 2020. And at that rate, to reach Jeff Bezos' wealth of 172 billion, they would have had to have started working in the Pleasine epoch, 4.5 million years ago. It really drove it home to me.

Yeah, those are always fun. I was going to say, Oh, was it just a sack of money in the shape of the United States or something?

No, it was much more detail than that. Much more clever.

That's how you went to Pulitzer.

Exactly. But I mean, the runners up, too, were just good stuff. Like, go look up illustrative reporting and commentary, Pulitzer stuff, and you'll be like, Wow, this is amazing that people do this.

We should do one on political What do they call them? Cartoons?

Yeah. Editorial cartoons?

Yeah. We should do one on that whole thing. That'd be a fun one, I think.

Okay. Yumi's uncle is an editorial cartoonist, a well-known one in Japan.

No way.

Way. Wow.

All right, we're definitely going to do it then.

Okay.

That's the deal.

Cool. I have.

There's breaking news photography. That's obviously, usually some tragedy is unfolding, and someone will snap a Iconic photo. Different from the feature photography award. This is like a photo series, usually, that tells a story. That's feature photography.

It's more flipbooky than the breaking news photography.

And then finally, everybody introduced just a few years ago, audio reporting. They don't call it the podcast award, but that's what it is.

Well, it includes podcast, but it can also include local Yeah, public radio features and stories and all that. That's a huge expansion, because before it was all print, it was all writing, as we'll see. So that's a big new one. And there's another new one coming down the pike that allows broadcast outlets, like say your local MBC Affiliate is a really great reporter that writes on their website, that reporter will now be eligible for Pulitzer stuff.

That's cool.

Then there's also the whole book section, which is interesting.

Yeah. The Prize for fiction. It used to be called the Prize for novels, but now it's fiction. Usually, it's about American life. It says preferably, but it's American author, generally with a story about Americans, Americaning.

Yeah. Every year, they pick that year's great American novel, basically.

Yeah. Remember, I said I was reading a novel for the first time in a while recently. I picked this book because that's sometimes when I'm after a novel, and it's been a while, I will go to the Pulitzer list, and that's exactly what I did. I'm reading Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which one in 2018, and it is so funny and great.

Awesome. I love it. From In Living Color to Pulitzer Prize.

No, David Alan Greer. Come on.

That's right. There's also one on history. A one on biography, also pronounced biography.

By the way, your man, Charles Mann has not won the Pulitzer. I looked it up. I was like, Surely Josh's guy won this award.

For history, yeah, no. He's more focused on Mesoamerican. This is United United States American.

I think that counts.

I agree. But apparently, the Pulitzer Committee is not interested in that thing.

He went, which was yours, 1491?

Yeah, and then the follow-up was 1493.

Yeah, he won a big award for that, but not the Pulitzer.

Oh, yeah. No, he definitely deserved it for sure.

Yeah. So you mentioned biography. Yeah. There's also now memoir or autobiography. Sure. Which was brand new this past year.

Yeah, they're just really busting out the new awards, right?

Yeah. They got a poetry award for American Poets. General non-fiction.

That would be what our book won a Pulitzer for.

Right. So non-fiction, but not a memoir or autobiography or biography.

Yeah. I'm not sure if we said this, and I'm not sure if it was spelled out, but it had to have been released in that year.

Yeah.

Okay. Good point. Okay. That's very important. Our book will never win a Pulitzer because it had a shot at winning the The year it came out, and then after that, it's out of the running.

That's right.

Same with drama. There's a drama one that we said, like usually it is a Great American Play. David Mamet won for Glen Gary, Glen Ross. Yeah, they sure did. What's his name? One for Hamilton. Hamilton.

Oh, David Ellen Greer. Lynn Manuel Miranda.

Yes, that guy. Yeah.

Yeah, August Wilson, one for Fences, another great play. So, yeah, great place.

And then Music. And this one's typically controversial because it really reveals just how stuffy the Pulitzer board is on any given year. It almost always goes to a recording of classical music that somebody released that year. And classical music is not exactly America's contribution. These are American awards, don't forget, about America, by Americans, typically. Well, America contributed jazz, rock for the most part, and hip hop, very clearly, as far as music goes. And only one hip hop artist, I'm surprised that there's even one, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer in 2017. A couple of jazz cats have. But for the most part, it's usually classical music. Look for that to continue to change in the future, because from what I can tell, the Pulitzer people are hyper aware of how they are perceived in the intelligence Intelligencia version of pop culture and respond to it subtly over time.

Yeah. What I want to know is how many of our friends in Britain, their heads about to pop off.

That's why I said, I qualified We invented rock and roll. We had a lot to do with it. Hey, man. No, of course we did. Chuck Berry wasn't British.

No, I know. Trust me, I'm with you. Okay. And some can even say that the American Blues is the true birth of what would become rock and roll. Because all those British bands were influenced by the American Blues. Exactly.

Yeah.

To stick it.

Yeah. Take that or British Friends.

You know, it's interesting, though, is the biggest rock bands of the classic rock era, most of those were not American. We had our share. But when you think about the biggest bands in the world, they were Led Zeppelin and The Who and the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and it was mostly British.

So super, duper classic version, not like White Lion or Daukine?

No, no, no.

Because they were American through and through, my friend.

Yeah, I mean, we had Boston and the Eagles and Aerosmith and stuff like that. Sure. But they were-Death Leopard? Yeah. Oh, boy, see.

I'm trolling.

You're taking a write down White Lion Lane.

All right. Should we keep going or should we take a break here?

Let's keep going since we already took an early one.

Okay. If you guys thought it was a slog before, buckle up.

That's right, because we're going to talk about how they choose these. The first step, and I think the main reason we didn't win a Pulitzer Prize, is that we didn't submit our book. You got to submit. They just don't say, All right, every book that's written this year, we'll look at you. You got to pay your 75 bucks and submit it.

Yeah, we didn't have 75 bucks. No, we did. We thought about it. We couldn't get the company to back us or pay us back.

We had to stand off. You I had a standoff of. I was like, I know you got it. You're not going to pay it. I'm not going to pay it.

I noticed Jerry didn't step forward.

Yeah, that's why Jerry needs to bust out the wallet.

Our book would have qualified in every other way. It had to have been Published in a hard copy definitely was. That separates a lot of the self-published ebooks, which apparently are not up for Pulitzer consideration unless you self-publish a book in hard copy. As long as it's in hard copy somewhere, it's eligible to be considered for a Pulitzer. And you, the author, like you said, can suggest it, can nominate it yourself.

That's right. If you're entering in journalism, it has to be in a news outlet that publishes regularly, so it can't be the zine you put out when you feel like it. That can be online-only versions. It doesn't have to be in paper form, but it has to be a legit qualifying website.

Yes, for sure. And then now, like I was saying, broadcast media outlets, their writers can be eligible for stuff posted on their websites. But there's nothing for documentaries. There's nothing for video-only journalism. I predict this changing within this decade.

Yeah. There'll be just one for content creator.

Or influencer.

Dave makes a point here to watch out for when something claims it seems to be Pulitzer nominated, because if you have submitted, then you're technically nominated. It doesn't mean that you're special because anyone can nominate. If you got 75 bucks and you qualify, you can put yourself in there. I say that they should require people to say Pulitzer submitted.

Right. We can't even claim that.

Yeah. But if you don't win, the only other distinctive honor is if you're one the three finalists, and you can claim to be a finalist.

Yes. If you're a bullet or finalist, you can still tooth that horn for sure, and people will listen.

Yeah. You're like three out of, I think there are 1100 journalism entries per year on average, and about 1400 books.

Yes. So yeah, now we reach step two. Like your work has been nominated. It gets shuffled together with a lot of other stuff and about 100 different jurors. Sometimes repeat jurors from the year before, you don't have to just do it once. And it's not the same people every year for sure. But they're all volunteered jurors. They get assigned to 22 different categories. And yes, we said there's 23, but the photographers who are the jurors judge both breaking news and feature photography. And they are people who are sometimes former Pulitzer winners. They are people who are really well known in their field. I think Roxanne Gay was one of the jurors on this past year's poetry committee, I think. So you're probably pretty good at your job if you're on a Pulitzer jury.

Josh, I have one question, though. What? Are any of those jurors rural jurors?

For the local reporting ones, yes.

Okay, rural jurors? Yeah. That's great. You usually serve a a few years, and then they'll rotate you out. You don't get paid for it. It's a volunteer thing. But if you're on the book side, you are reading a lot of books.

Yeah. Apparently, for the fiction category, there might be 300 books that you have to read through within several months.

Now, I tried and tried to find out if that was real, because what I saw was there are six book juries with five jurors per jury, so 30 different judges, and they send them in 30 book packages. But I didn't know, are they really... It's impossible to read 300 books over the course of months.

Not if you're Pulitzer jury material, my friend.

Is that the deal? Because I was trying to verify that. I thought maybe they read 30 each, and it was all packaged together or something.

I didn't see anywhere that contradicted that. And yes, 300 books is a lot to read. As a matter of fact, now that we're talking about it, that is a preposterous number for one person to read within several months.

I mean, how many books is that a week?

Fifty-two weeks. A hundred, I think. If my math is correct.

That's almost six books a week. Is that possible?

No, it's not, because these people also have regular jobs that they're holding down, too.

Yeah. So I really looked and looked and looked, and I could not find what I'm I'm guessing is that they get 30 books per judge.

Which is still quite a bit, but yes, that's much more manageable than 300.

I hope somebody knows because I really want to get to the bottom of this. There's no way they're reading 300 books.

I wonder if each judge... So this would make a lot of sense. And again, we've never advertised ourselves as experts, and I think we're showing it big time now. But if I were guessing, Chuck, if each one reads 30 books, they pick their favorites and present them to the committee and say, These are some of my favorites, and everybody does that, and it immediately whittles it down to a manageable size. That would make a lot of sense. And then maybe the other ones have to read the books that the other people brought forth?

Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. I was just distraught at how hard it was to find this out because I looked and looked and looked, and I couldn't find out for sure if they each read each book.

That's an ongoing thing, too, from what I've seen that the deliberation process is very secretive. The Pulitzer Committee and Board and anyone associated with it has no obligation whatsoever to be transparent about the judging process at all.

Yeah, that is a criticism. But ultimately, what happens is they will meet in person in February at Columbia, sometimes in March, and they reduce it to the three finalists, and then the board picks the ultimate winner from each of the picks of three. Well, that's not true. They are generally picked from that group of three, but they are not required to pick from that group of three. And there have been many cases, I believe 12 times in fiction, at least, where they did not award a winner at all.

Yeah. Anytime the board decides not to pick somebody, it's considered a huge slap in the face. As recently as 2021, so 2012 for fiction, 2021 for the Editorial Cartoon Prize, the board opted not to choose from the three finalists, Lalo Alcaraz, Marty Tubble senior, and Ruben Baling from Tom the dancing bug. They were the three finalists, and none of them won. But did someone win? No.

Okay, so they did no award it to a...

Okay, got you. No award. And I saw Ruben Bowling was basically like, So, yeah, they're saying No one made Pulitzer-worthy material this year. That's crazy. But I liked Marty Tubel's interpretation. He said that to him, they had so much trouble picking a winner that nobody won. They all spoiled one another's chance because there can be a hung jury. You have to get some percentage of the votes to make it as the winner and not just the finalist.

Well, that's what happened in 2012, for sure, because they actually came out and said for fiction that it was a three-way tie.

That's rare. With the editorial cartoon in 2021, they just stayed mom. They just said, no award is going to be awarded.

Yeah, but how do you have a tie? You could either have an odd number on the board or let that president, because the president of Columbia is always on the board still, they should be the tiebreaker or something.

That is a huge criticism, that that's even possible, that you can not have a winner because they deadlock.

All right. Thumbs down, Pulitzer, for that decision. You need to get with the times.

You hit on something earlier, you thought I was saying the board can, if select somebody that wasn't even nominated by the jury, right?

Yeah. If it's not someone outside that final three.

Yeah. They apparently just need a three quarters vote to either select somebody that wasn't nominated, that was in that category or was in another category, and they move them to a category they think they are likelier to win. That happened with the biography of George Floyd this past year. It was nominated in biography. Apparently, this biography on J. A. Gerhouver was such gangbusters that there was no way even George Floyd's biography was going to win. They moved it to the general non-fiction category, and George Floyd's biography won in that one. So it's like you said, the Pulitzer Committee is very conscious of the messages they're sending out by their awards, for sure. And sometimes they maneuver to speak loud and clear.

All right. I say we take our second break, and we'll finish up with talking about some of the controversies and some of the surprises over the years. Celebrating the music and artists you've loved on iHeartRadio over the past year. I'm giving you an exclusive first look at the biggest new songs coming in the summer of '24. Witness music history I Heart Innovator Award Recipient, Beyoncé. I Heart Icon Award Recipient, Share. And performances by Justin Timberlake. Green Day. Tlc. Jelly Roll. Laine Wilson. Tate McRoy. And your Host Ludacris. Our 2024 I Heart Radio Music Awards, Monday, April first. Watch on Fox starting at 8:00 PM, 7:00 Central. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robay. And me, Simone Voice. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world.

Western nations like the US and Europe.

Mexico will likely have its first female president. And then you have China.

And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters.

He got his yo-yos to Europe in time.

But the longer this drags on, the more worry he's getting.

They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Garra. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Haleya Mohsen.

We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets.

Basically, everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession. But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake.

As someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse.

Listen to the Big Take and Big Take DC on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody, listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's tough, it's tough, it's tough. You should know.

So One of the things that the Pulitzer's are definitely criticized for is the frequency-Same fees? Yeah, the frequency of awards that go to the same news organizations over and over and over again, because the Pulitzer Let's just reward extensive in-depth reporting that you really have to have a pretty decent budget to carry out. And so the New York Times has 132 Pulitzer's over the years. The Washington Post has 70 plus. The Associated Press has 58. So the big news organizations are the ones who usually take home the most, but they have it set up in a way that the local news reporting is much likelier to go to a smaller organization than the bigger guys. But that big one, the Big Daddy, as we said, the Public Service Award almost always goes to, or very often goes to, one of the large news organizations. But that's not always the case, Chuck. It's not always the case.

That's right. In 2017, for editorial writing, the Storm Lake Times one. This is a, speaking of a rural juror, they probably went wild over this because this is a paper that runs twice a week with a staff of nine people with a circulation of about 3,000 in rural Iowa. And it beat the big daddies. It beat the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among others. Yeah.

In 1990, a few years earlier, the Washington Daily News out of Washington, North Carolina, they won because they had a series of articles that exposed that the city council was well aware that the drinking water was tainted with carcinogens and that they were covering it up. And they won a Pulitzer. They had a circulation of 8,644. So in addition to these really good reporting that it would require for a small organization to win the public service pullets or the big one, it's worth pointing out these people are under the most pressure to not publish stories like that. Their friends and neighbors and grocery store shoppers with the mayor, with the city manager, with the chamber of commerce head, the people who can pressure them and say, You're ruining the image of our town. Don't write about office or change the tone of it. So in that sense, those people deserve a Pulitzer even more than, say, a huge organization that can just deflect that stuff. It's under tremendous pressure. There's a difference getting a call from the President saying, I don't want you to run this, than getting a call from the mayor saying, You don't want to run this.

But it's still it seems different. I feel like the pressure is even greater for smaller news organizations.

So as far as controversies go, there are a few famous incidents That's not incidences, by the way. I've been saying that wrong.

Have you?

Incidents doesn't mean something that happened. It's an incident.

Oh, yeah.

Somebody pointed that out to me.

Yeah, okay.

Believe it or not, someone wrote in and pointed out something that we said that was bothered them.

That's a first.

Anyway, we should talk about these incidents. The first one was from 1981, a woman named Janet Cook. At the time was writing for the Washington Post and was the first Black woman to get a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. Well, I think journalism, period. This was a story called Jimmy's World, about an eight-year-old heroine addict named Jimmy in Washington, DC.

It had such an effect that at the time, Marion Barry was mayor. Marion Barry was mayor of DC forever. He ordered his administration to find this kid and get him away from his parents. It just dropped a bomb on not just Washington, DC, but the whole country. And Janet Cooke made the whole thing up.

Yeah. So it was submitted by who at the time was the assistant managing editor of the Post, a guy named Bob Woodward, none other than. He submitted this thing. She had previously for three years worked for the Toledo Blade, which was her hometown newspaper and Josh's hometown newspaper. Sure. They were like, Wait a minute. She worked here, and we're looking at her bio from the Pulitzer Committee, and this doesn't match up with the bio that she gave us. It says she speaks all these languages. She doesn't speak all these languages. She didn't graduate magna cumlaude from VASER. She didn't have a master's degree from University of Toledo. And so they start... Her old employer started drilling her publicly about this, and she initially said, All right, I fudged my resume some. And literally within hours, it all fell apart. She eventually copped to making up this whole story. This is as Mary and Barry and the DC cops are coming up empty looking for this nonexistent kid. And Mary and Barry is casting public doubt, but it was in a a pickle of a situation.

A dilly of a pickle.

Yeah, it seems like there's no Jimmy, but we're not sure what's going on. I think the sad thing is that, apparently, it's like the Million Little Pieces book that that guy wrote. I read that book, and it was great with a capital G. And in my mind, I was always like, Dude, why did... You just should have called it a novel, and you would have been fine. Apparently, the writing in Jimmy's world was so great. Really famous authors came out and were like, I just wish she hadn't done this. She should have won the Nobel Prize for literature. It was so good. But she put herself out there for a Pulitzer, and that was the fatal flaw.

Yeah. So it took days before she finally fessed up and retracted the story and said that she was returning her Pulitzer, which from what I could tell, she didn't have to do. She could have been like, Thanks for the Pulitzer, chumps. I guess they could rescind it, but she didn't have to give it back. So she did and moved to France and just stayed in communicado for a decade or two. And then Theresa Carpenter, who wrote the story, Death of a Playmate, about the murder of Dorothy Straton in the Village Voice, ended up winning the 1981 Pulitzer for feature writing. She was, I guess, the runner up, and After Janet Cooke gave it back, Theresa Carpenter got it, and that was a really good story. It was definitely Pulitzer-worthy.

Alex Haley was another one in 1977 for his book Roots, which I never knew it had a colon, but- I didn't either. The full title of Roots was Roots: The Saga of an American family. I think I've seen it before on the cover, but they didn't call the mini-series that.

Plus the colon was implied.

Yeah, exactly. It was a novel, but Haley claimed that it was based on his family from his own African heritage that he had researched, and it turned out that that probably wasn't true. It was unverified, and he admitted to plagiarizing parts of Roots from other novels at the time. They did not rescind his Pulitzer, though. It was a special citation. It wasn't the Book Prize, so I think they just let it slide.

Yeah, there's a real campaign to get that special citation even rescinded by some people. But yeah, I had no idea that Roots fabricated in some ways or plagiarized, too. And then there's a guy named Walter Duranty, who inspired so much, I guess, dislike, is a nice way to put it, among journalists, that he was awarded the Pulitzer back in 1932. People still today are calling for that to be rescinded. And then the war in Ukraine flared it back up again after dying off a little. He was the Moscow Bureau Chief for the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer, like I said, in '32, for his reporting on Joseph Stalin and Stalin's dictatorship. Essentially, he was the guy who was presenting Stalin in a really great light to America. He was a huge apologist for Stalin. And it's gross because in his Pulitzer Award, it says that he was awarded for his dispassionate reporting. It was not dispassionate at all. It was in favor of Stalin and Stalin's policies that killed millions people.

Yeah. And one of his direct quotes was, To put it brutally, you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. Can you imagine? When talking about the death of Ukrainians. Right.

So he still has his Pulitzer. People are still mad about it.

Yeah. We did mention the secrecy of how it goes out is always controversial. It's like any award, any subjective award, whether it's the Academy Awards or Emmys or whatever, whatever. They're all subjective. So there's always going to be people complaining that it's not rigged, but just like you got to be a certain thing to win this award, just like an Oscar bait movie that they throw out at the end of the year. There are pullets or... I don't know about bait, but you know when these publications are putting together these series, they're like, Hey, you do a good job here, and you know what might be at the end of that road.

There's a really great... You can characterize it as a takedown very easily by Jack Schafer in Politico called the Pulitzer Prize Scam from a few years back. And Jack Schafer basically is like, How could you possibly compare some of this stuff and find any distinguishable difference enough that says this one's better than this one. An example I came up with is the editorial writing, Pulitzer for 2023. It went to a writer for a series on the broken promises of the city of Miami to its citizens, right? The runners up were one that explained the Uvaldi tragedy and the botched police response. And then the other runner up was about how domestic white supremacist terrorism affects the United States. How could you compare those three things and be like, Yeah, this one's better? Because the writing in and of itself is going to just be top-notch to begin with. So then what? You're using the material to judge it by? Well, how do you compare that the other material? It is fully subjective, and that drives some people nuts.

Yeah. I think with any award like that, the voter, whether it's a board member, the Pulitzer or an academy member, is voting on something that speaks to them the most, I guess.

Right. And like you said, if you look at some of the material, a lot of the material, it is very liberal in its bent, and it shines a light on the issues that liberals would be interested and upset about. And that seems to be generally what the Pulitzer committees tend to, or the juries, tend to percolate toward the top.

Yeah. I mean, it's Columbia University. It's academia. They have that bent anyway, generally. I mean, that joke I made about Alex Jones earlier. I want to be clear. They're not denying him the award because he's a conservative of. They're denying him the award because he's a lying liar. There's a difference. For sure.

I'm not even sure he qualifies as conservative at this point.

Yeah, who knows?

You got anything else on Pulitzer Prizes?

No. I mean, should we put in for a podcast or not?

Oh, I don't know, man.

I feel like in order for us to put in, we would have to do a special four-part series on something. It couldn't just be for... Well, it certainly going to be for overall excellence.

No, definitely not. For a lot of reasons. Definitely not. But yeah, we could do. We'll do a four-part series on jelly beans.

Yeah, or maybe we should just submit the episode for the word like.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Okay, we're going to do that. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the Pulitzer Prize, go read Jack Schafer's takedown. It's a good place to start because he also gives a lot of background, too. And since I said background, it's time for a listener mail.

This one is from a teacher. We love these. Hey, guys, I'm a chemistry professor at the College of Worcester in Ohio, and he says, Wuster, not Wuster. But that's another story. One of the joys in my work is chatting with college students in the lab while we wait for experiments to complete. Talking about life, current events, random facts. There have been some uncanny similarities between our conversations and your recent topics. Are you guys listening in? Luckily, in my most recent experience, you realized the podcast before the conversation. I was never taught much African history, and thanks to you, walked away from your highly Selasi podcast feeling well-informed. I share what I learned with one of my students from Ethiopia. During the conversation, they shared an interesting fact of their own. Apparently, there is a bump engineered on purpose in the road at the spot where where Haleigh Solassi's former residence is. When motorists pass by, they hit the bump and their head bobs, and it is so every head will bow when they drive by his house.

Pretty amazing.

I tried to find this out and verified it. I didn't spend a whole lot of time looking because fact-checking listener mail isn't something I want to put a lot of time into. Right, sure. But hey, if this is true, that's pretty awesome.

Yeah. Even if it's not true, I'm going to go do the same thing in front of my house. Yeah.

Is that all the bags of cement? Yeah, I expensed them, too. Awesome. That is from Paul Bonvillé.

Thanks a lot, Paul. That's a great email. Thank you very much. And yes, we are watching you in your class. Keep up the good work. If you want to be like Paul and get in touch with us, we love hearing additional facts that may be so amazing that they possibly aren't true, but are still a good idea. If you want to do that, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio. Com.

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