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         The Most Prized Pulitzer I think I am safe in saying that the members of the Board . . . consider the gold medal for public service as easily the most important prize of the year. I feel certain that they share my belief that my father so regarded it. Journalistic public service was my father’s passion. —Joseph Pulitzer II, Pulitzer board chairman, – ghe New York Times’s Pentagon Papers coverage and the Washington Post’s Watergate reporting, honored in  and , respectively, rise like twin peaks above the majestic range of newspaper enterprises that won Public Service Pulitzer Prizes through the last half of the twentieth century. Exactly thirty years later, at the beginning of a new century, two more summits stand out: the Times’s response to the terrorist attacks of September , and the Boston Globe’s revelations, the next year, of the sexual abuse of young parishioners by Catholic priests. Taken together, though, the nearly one hundred Gold Medals not only mark some of the best U.S. journalism since  but also dramatize the course of national events over that period. Indeed, Post publisher Philip Graham’s famous s-era definition of the American newspaper as “a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed” could just as well describe the work honored with the Public Service Prize. Newspapers winning this particular Pulitzer often ventured far beyond recounting events, becoming entwined with their stories. Certainly that was the case with the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the disclosures about abusive priests. Yet pick any decade of Pulitzer Prizes, and other examples emerge of journalists exposing major governmental wrongdoing or exploring new social issues and improving the world around them. History was served with the very first Public Ser-  vice Prize, which was given to the New York Times for its coverage of World War I and encouraged more such saturation reporting of international affairs. Later winning stories delved into the economic malaise in the s, the Great Depression and organized crime of the thirties, another world war in the forties, and civil rights in the fifties. The old Chicago Daily News won in  for reports on birth control services, while Newsday’s study of the global heroin trade led to the  prize. The Anchorage Daily News won in  for exploring the plight of native Alaskans, and the Des Moines Register took on the underreported nature of rape in a project honored in . Often, the Pulitzer board’s selection recognizes a newspaper’s courage in blowing the whistle on those with the power to harm the messenger. The  prize acknowledged Ohio’s Canton Daily News, whose editor, Don R. Mellett, was murdered for his criticism of local politicians who had become too close to a criminal gang. In  the board cited the Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune, two North Carolina weeklies that took both fiscal and physical risks by exposing a local revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Another case involved an even smaller weekly , Marin County, California’s Point Reyes Light, which took on the locally based Synanon cult. The paper intensified its fight after a lawyer who opposed Synanon was bitten by a rattlesnake that group members had stuffed in his mailbox. Of course, the year’s Gold Medal winner hasn’t always glittered so brightly, especially in the early years, as the Pulitzer Prizes struggled to establish an identity. The  Public Service award to the Milwaukee Journal hailed the paper’s opposition to “German-ism” during the Great War, when the Journal argued for schools to stop teaching the German language, for example. Some other early Public Service honorees basically submitted a range of their best stories, without a central theme. (Newspapers also learned slowly what qualities it took to produce a Gold Medal winner. In , the Cleveland News submitted the work it had done to simplify its headline styles. It lost.) Ask winners about the value of awards like the Pulitzers and they will toss in a few caveats. “We don’t write for prizes,” New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. says with emphasis. Nonetheless, by  his paper had claimed five Gold Medals. “We are delighted to win them but our journalism is aimed at enhancing society, not winning prizes,” he reiterates. The cult of self-congratulation that some see in the proliferation of press awards, and to some extent the Pulitzers, certainly has its critics. Among those who find flaws in the Pulitzer process itself, few have sterner reservations than...

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