2022 Pulitzer Prizes

https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2022

by hhs • 4 years ago

35 55 4 years ago

Every single book revolves around an ethnicity issue except one about poverty.

This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about.

aarestad• 4 years ago

Wouldn't you agree that they're worth talking about _right now_?

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

They're worth talking about right now. But they're not the only thing worth talking about right now.

jimbob452• 4 years ago

As someone who doesn't have a dog in this fight, the Hunter Biden laptop story represents a far stronger embrace of journalistic ethics in the face of adversity than any of the stories that were actually awarded. For a publication to stand by a story while facing extreme financial repercussions and censorship is impressive.

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

No, they have been talked about ad nauseam for the past few years.

austhrow743• 4 years ago

Why is _right now_ a time when they're more worth talking about than any previous time?

gaws5• 4 years ago

devindotcom• 4 years ago

The winners are:

A fictional story about the Netanyahus

A recasting of Hamlet in the American South

The origin of a treaty in a conflict between early colonists and indigenous peoples & A 500-year history of Cuba (tie)

Biography of a man living in the Jim Crow era

Poems about working class life in the Rust Belt

Book-length nonfiction about growing up homeless and poor

And there are plenty of counter-examples in the runners up too. It's not even close to every single book. There are other things to talk about, and talking about them won Pulitzers.

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

@colechristensen is mostly correct, let's look at the descriptions in the announcement for the first three books you mentioned.

The Netanyahus: "historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience"

Fat Ham: "grapple[s] with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty"

Covered with Nigh: "A gripping account of Indigenous justice"

And for the rest, I think the description you provided hints that collective identity is an important element of the books. (except perhaps for "Cuba: An American History" and "Invisible Child")

burkaman3• 4 years ago

Was the link updated? None of the books at the current link seem like they "revolve around an ethnicity issue", at least from the short summaries on the page.

jimbob452• 4 years ago

I think it was. When I clicked earlier, it was only showing the journalism awards (or maybe my scroll just broke halfway down? Hard to tell).

Bud2• 4 years ago

Hard to explain such a tendentious and careless take, especially when you apparently didn't even take the ten seconds necessary to check whether you were even right about your basic premise.

joshcryer2• 4 years ago

Honestly, it's no wonder The Pile produced models have to be "bias adjusted."

Please, pick, at random, any date on that page and you can say the same thing about any of the subject matters. Here. I just did it. 2003. Middlesex. Book about a girl that's not a girl. 1982. Rabbit Is Rich. Book from a series that explores drugs, identity, religion, this one has alcoholism themes. 1976. Humboldt's Gift. Story about commodification and culture.

The whole point of the Pulitzer for books novels and music is to encourage and highlight the unique stuff. The fact that they may reflect the current themes of those times should not be surprising or bothersome.

whymauri• 4 years ago

I did the same thing! For the 1970s awards. One is about a black bartender and the racial tensions of the Civil Rights era. Another is about the experience of womenhood and loneliness. One about Gandhi and the Indian experience. The biographical piece was about Huey Long, an advocate for wealth taxes and redistribution.

The thing is identity is so broad that you can fit anything as being 'identity' media, especially the kind of emotionally compelling/captivating works that would win a Pulitzer.

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

Yes, it has always been biased and far from ideal (e.g. see @chernevik's comment about Walter Duranty). But I think it's getting worse.

I wish there was some metric like Oscar's viewership for Pulitzer, so we could chart the decline of their prestige in recent years.

The closest thing I can think of right now is Google n-grams: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pulitzer&year_...

ramesh31• 4 years ago

This is the kind of thing people are pushing back against, there's just more to life than exploring identity issues. Not that they aren't somewhat important, but there are indeed other things to talk about.

The Pulitzer is an American award. To talk about American culture is to talk about race. Only it isn't that obvious when you're the one that's considered default. The rest of us don't get a choice.

99_003• 4 years ago

Stories that won in the past. Has anything come of the investigations into Trump's taxes, criminal inquiries, or connections with Russian interference?

0 out of 3 is not a good record.

David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times For an exhaustive 18-month investigation of President Donald Trump’s finances that debunked his claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges.

Staff of The Wall Street Journal For uncovering President Trump’s secret payoffs to two women during his campaign who claimed to have had affairs with him, and the web of supporters who facilitated the transactions, triggering criminal inquiries and calls for impeachment.

Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

ibejoeb4• 4 years ago

I don't see the connection here. What do these have to do with '22 awards?

jyrkesh• 4 years ago

Can't speak for OP, but it was interesting for me in that it points to either:

a) speculative reporting that turned out to have less basis in reality than was initially thought (to the point that top-tier award-winning journalism wasn't actually true), or

b) a disconnect between facts on the ground as reported by journalists, and our individual, societal, or governmental inability to effect change based on those facts

My personal take is that it's probably a combination of the two. A bunch of anonymous sources cited by the press throughout Trump's presidency were either never corroborated by public sources, or were flatly proven to be incorrect as more facts came out. But there was also a TON of totally credible, well-sourced journalism in that era that the US federal and state governments have completely ignored, often with the support of their constituents who dismiss even the absolute best reporting as "fake news."

Looking at the 2022 winners, it's personally disheartening for me to think how much of what's listed there will just continue on as the status quo. Though as a counterpoint, it also looks like there's some wins that were already corrected, like the Florida battery plant exposé that (if I take the Pulitzer description here at face value) resulted in new safety measures to protect workers.

burkaman3• 4 years ago

Can you rephrase your question? What came of these investigations is that a lot of people read them and learned something, which is the primary goal of most journalists. Some organizations, like ProPublica, explicitly focus on "impact", but most do not, and I think impact is just one of many things the Pulitzer judges consider.

99_003• 4 years ago

Is what they learned factual? Because none of the supposed wrong doings was judged wrong by any court.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Arguably, the 2022 Editorial Writing winner came from those stories, though it’s not the outcome any of the involved authors would want:

Lisa Falkenberg, Michael Lindenberger, Joe Holley and Luis Carrasco of the Houston Chronicle

For a campaign that, with original reporting, revealed voter suppression tactics, rejected the myth of widespread voter fraud and argued for sensible voting reforms.

gautamcgoel• 4 years ago

Really awesome to see Quanta Magazine and Natalie Wolchover win a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting! They do great work.

mabbo• 4 years ago

Seriously! Her writing is brilliant and it's so nice to see her recognized for it.

_delirium• 4 years ago

The citation is: "For coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research."

So it seems like this is the winning piece: https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-te...

ibejoeb4• 4 years ago

"The Washington Post: For its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation's darkest days."

Indeed. Zero questions remaining. I understand unflinchingly, whatever that is.

Jonovono2• 4 years ago

I wonder how much Bezos paid for that !

gaws5• 4 years ago

Bezos has zero control or sway in any editorial decision made by the newsroom.

Bud2• 4 years ago

WaPo's coverage was indeed excellent. The best that I read anywhere, overall. Good call by the Pulitzer board.

ibejoeb4• 4 years ago

The part where they explained why the capitol police officers were escorting people into the building was perhaps the most vividly compelling.

joshcryer2• 4 years ago

Here's the video that likely got them the Pulitzer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWJO02nNsY

gaws5• 4 years ago

No single piece won the award. A collection of videos, photos, texts, graphics, and other things did it.

chernevik• 4 years ago

Never forget that Walter Duranty and the NY Times got a Pulitzer for "reporting" on the Holodomor in Ukraine -- without ever mentioning the forced famine or deaths of millions.

screye• 4 years ago

I have come to realize that NYT is considered the newspaper of record, not because it is likely to be correct, but because they eventually change their stance to match the consensus. Their shift in reporting on the Rittenhouse case and LabLeak Hypothesis are the most recent examples of this.

Using NYT to figure out the truth while an event is ongoing is usually no better than other NYT-esque media outlets.

gaws5• 4 years ago

The biggest surprise was the WSJ's snub for its Facebook Files coverage.

2022 Pulitzer Prizes

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