Pulitzer Losers

Real investigative reporters get the short and dirty end of the stick, as is the case with Claudia Rosett:

April 24, 2006 -- The Pulitzer Prizes, the Academy Awards of journalism, were announced last week; The Washington Post and The New York Times scored heavily, as always.

In the recent past, Rosett has detailed, in part:

* How U.N. funds intended for victims of Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait instead ended up in Iranian, Syrian and Palestinian Authority hands.
* How the U.N. has indirectly helped advance North Korea's nuclear-weapons program.
* How the U.N. refugee agency sabotages North Korean refugees' efforts at liberation.
She began her Oil-for-Food work in earnest in 2004, wading through the muck of U.N. corruption and reporting back with shocking dispatches that detailed, just as an example, how the U.N. financed the weaponry currently being used against U.S. troops in Iraq.
Back when she worked at The Wall Street Journal, Rosett received Pulitzer nominations for her coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and for her reporting on the 1996 Russian presidential election.

Alas, today - nothing.

Instead, the Pulitzer Prize committee has lately preferred the work of reporters who endeavor effectively to undermine the U.S. government's antiterrorism efforts.

And yes, we all know who those "reporters" are. Expose state-secrets that can harm the security of the United States, and bet your bottom dollar that instead of being sentenced to life in prison, today's hacks are rewarded.

Dana Priest of The Washington Post won the "Beat Reporting" award "for her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government's counterterrorism campaign." Her report led the E.U. to demand that these European nations cease assisting the United States.

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times won the "National Reporting" award "for their carefully sourced stories on secret domestic eavesdropping that stirred a national debate on the boundary line between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberty." (Ever since, federal officials have reported a dropoff in the terrorist calls they were monitoring.)