Donald Trump notched a win a few days ago when a state judge in Florida denied the Pulitzer Prize Board’s attempt to dismiss the former president’s libel lawsuit, filed in 2022. The case concerns several articles — published by The New York Times and The Washington Post — about the Trump Campaign’s supposed ties to Russia in 2016. The former president’s argument, however, didn’t rest solely on the awarded articles. Instead, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein wrote, “[T]he case focuses more on the board’s decision in 2022 to publicly reaffirm those awards despite repeated complaints by Trump that the stories contained numerous falsehoods and were undermined by the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into those issues.”
Judge Robert Pegg declared that the group’s statement didn’t “address if or how the ‘independent reviewers’ were able to verify the anonymous sources that appear throughout the Awarded Articles and were critical to advancing the larger Russia Collusion Hoax narrative.”
But a semi-respected awards panel wouldn’t reward somebody who didn’t deserve it, right?
The Pulitzer Prize Might Have Standards
In the early 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize Board gave a decorative certificate to The New York Times for 13 articles written by Walter Duranty, the paper’s Moscow reporter. The winning articles spoke highly of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin’s government. According to Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, these stories “relied solely on official Soviet communist sources, ignored the evidence contradicting the government’s propaganda, and covered up the genocide Stalin was committing in the Ukraine.” Of course, the board has repeatedly refused to rescind the tainted honor. Though it admitted in 2003 that Duranty’s reporting had significant issues, it saw no reason to revoke the prize because “all principals are dead and unable to respond.”
Then there’s William Laurence, a science reporter for the Times during World War II. He was on the US government’s payroll, writing about the Manhattan Project. The Guardian noted that Laurence’s work also included writing “positive accounts of the atomic bomb as a reporter as well as press releases for the government, and he called Japan’s reports of radiation sickness ‘propaganda.’ For these efforts, he won a Pulitzer in 1946.”
Here’s another instance – on the creative side this time, but just as important in showing the Pulitzer’s track record: Alex Haley won a prize for his book Roots and was allowed to keep the certificate after he was found guilty of plagiarism.
See, this is business as usual for the Pulitzer people, who have given so many prizes to the two papers in question today that somebody might think the panel’s board members are on retainer. However, Trump is no stranger to defamation cases.
What’s Next?
Politico reported that “The rulings mean Trump’s suit will likely continue into a discovery phase, where the former president’s lawyers will be able to question Pulitzer board members about discussions related to the awards to the Times and Post. Trump’s attorneys are also expected to seek to expose who conducted the two reviews the board said it commissioned that reaffirmed the accuracy of the newspapers’ work.”
When the former president took to his platform, Truth Social, to talk about the case, he iterated past wishes of altering the country’s libel laws, “calling the [1964] landmark New York Times v. Sullivan precedent ‘deeply outdated’ and ‘from a bygone Era, before the Media went Radical and Woke, as they suffer from a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.’” Trump has been bashing the Sullivan precedent since his 2016 campaign, saying he would “open our libels laws,” according to Politico. “So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.”
The Sullivan Law makes it difficult for anybody to sue the press and public figures because, as Liberty Nation News Legal Affairs Editor Scott D. Cosenza details, the plaintiff must prove “that the statement was made with actual malice, that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” In other words, Trump’s chances of winning this case could be slim. Some might argue that he should just ignore the frivolous awards anyway, as most people do, and forget all mainstream media, as many people have. That, of course, isn’t really Trump’s style. Still, the stories involving Russia have already been widely read. Even if he wins the suit and the Pulitzer Prize board issues a new statement and revokes the awards in question, it’s unlikely to change the minds of people whose opinions have already been selected for them.
