CHAPTER 19
EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS
1980–1989: Considering the Company View
How shameful it is for the Knight family and its organ, The [Charlotte] Observer, to take the side of OSHA and the oppressive bureaucrats against the magnificent Southern textile industry. It is sickening to see the gutless minions of the news media siding with a few crybaby Americans who obviously are looking for a handout from the very hand that fed and clothed their families.
—W. B. PITTS, PRESIDENT, HERMITAGE INCORPORATED, CAMDEN, SOUTH CAROLINA
Business and technology were on the mind of every reporter and editor in the 1980s, if only because computers were starting to take over their newsrooms. The machines on their desks started carrying names like IBM or Apple rather than Remington, Royal, or Underwood. The once-incessant clacking of typewriter keys—a background noise used in the movie of All the President’s Men to suggest the machine gun–like media firepower—did, in fact, cease. The muted tapping that replaced it reminded journalists of the sound of calculators. Overnight, it seemed, the newsroom turned as quiet as an insurance office.
The lack of clamor was deceptive. Reporters were still inspired to pursue investigations in the spirit of Watergate. The best news organizations remained both vigilant and aggressive, and increasingly they created either formal or informal teams to pursue major projects. Reporters also added computer-assisted reporting to their arsenal. By 1989, when the Anchorage Daily News won a second gold medal, Howard Weaver—by then the managing editor—was using a Macintosh to crunch statistical data that illustrated the plight of native Alaskans. The computer also helped coordinate assignments and deadlines for his far-flung staffers. Compare that to the system used to plot out its 1976 series on the Teamsters. “We drew flow charts with colored pencils to show inter-relationships amongst people,” says Weaver.1
The topics of Public Service Prize-winning stories ranged widely in the decade. Two were religion stories. Two looked closely at ethnic groups. And two involved the military. Reporters especially dug into what they called the business angle of the stories. But these were not the classic General Motors, Xerox, or Microsoft articles from the financial pages. Instead news organizations explored the role of companies in environmental affairs, the finances of churches, and the military-industrial complex.
The classic government corruption stories of city hall graft or malfeasance in the state house all but disappeared from the list of winners. But federal agencies and the military came in for plenty of questioning, as did various jurisdictions implicated in damaging the health and welfare of Americans.
Two Cheers for Charlotte
Knight Ridder’s Charlotte Observer had a pair of winners in the 1980s. In 1980 the Observer’s staff became intrigued with health issues in the giant Carolina textile industry. Factory workers intimately knew the plague of nearly invisible cotton dust that led to an asthma-like condition known as byssinosis, or “brown lung.” But government, industry, and even medical professionals seemed to ignore the problem. The idea for the Observer’s stories actually originated with the textile workers’ union, a source that editor Richard Oppel viewed suspiciously. “In a way this was the wine from poisonous fruit, because the union had an ax to grind,” he says. “But I’m a believer that you don’t discount information as long as it’s verified. A fact is a fact, wherever you get it from.”2
Over months of investigation, a team of reporters, led by veterans Howard Covington and Marion Ellis, studied the potential dangers of cotton dust. Medical reporter Bob Conn and Robert L. Drogin also participated, along with Washington correspondent Robert Hodierne. Deep into the research, they remained stumped because of the lack of a proven link between the dust and various established ailments. But state government regulations were designed to limit exposure to the dust, and inspections were not being performed as required. That much was clear.
The paper was able to document obvious cases of workers handicapped by exposure to cotton dust, and the Observer used photographs extensively. “The pictures showed men who looked like they were ninety years old, but who were forty-five years old,” Oppel says. Sometimes these victims had to rely on oxygen tanks. The Observer’s eight-part series started on February 3, 1980, and was called “Brown Lung: A Case of Deadly Neglect.” It contained twenty-two articles and eight editorials.
The outcry from industry was loud and long. The letter from a textile company president quoted at the beginning of this chapter and submitted by “gutless minion” Rich Oppel as part of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize entry suggests the level of outrage the series provoked within certain segments of the community.3 The first story began, “Cotton dust—an invisible product of the most important industry in the Carolinas—is killing people.”
After the series, the North Carolina labor commissioner received funding to hire and equip staff members for inspections, and the state industrial commission added deputy commissioners to speed compensation decisions. The governor also ordered changes in the way compensation was granted. By the end of 1980, $4 million in workers compensation for byssinosis was paid out, more than the total paid in the previous nine-year history of the program. Impressed, the Pulitzer board awarded the Observer the 1981 gold medal.
1981—The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer for its series on “Brown Lung: A Case of Deadly Neglect.”4
When “Enough Isn’t Enough”
The Observer had been exploring another local business: Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s PTL television ministry. (The name was an acronym for both Praise the Lord and People That Love.) Tipsters were plentiful, but as a private company PTL yielded few documentary trails for the paper to follow. The Observer stories stretching back to 1976 had raised more questions than they answered. Still, the coverage stirred the anger of the Bakkers and their PTL supporters. Already PTL was claiming, sometimes on the air, that the paper had a “vendetta” against it. As more unconfirmed reports of abuses at PTL streamed in to reporters, however, the Observer kept a close eye on the situation. The hard, verifiable evidence of malfeasance that the paper needed did not come its way for years.
In December 1984, the Observer’s suspicions about Jim Bakker and PTL intensified when former church secretary Jessica Hahn called reporter Charles E. Shepard to talk about having been sexually assaulted by Bakker four years earlier in a Florida hotel room. Shepard, hired by editor Oppel in 1980, was not so interested in the report of a possible sex offense, which would be very difficult to prove. Instead he wanted to pursue the possibility that church money was used to hush her up. And he was especially driven to find that out after Hahn called him three weeks later and retracted everything that she had told him. “She threatened to sue [the paper] if anything was printed,” Shepard wrote later. He later learned why. After one of Hahn’s representatives had threatened PTL with a lawsuit, the organization had offered her money to keep quiet.5
Shepard got information in late 1985 that confirmed that Hahn was paid off with church funds. “What had seemed merely an episode in the private life of a public figure had become a story about misuse of donors’ dollars—the very kind of news the Observer had pursued at PTL since the late 1970s,” according to Shepard. The paper, however, set strict standards for sourcing any stories that alleged improper sexual conduct. “The sex lives of public people are not necessarily news unless and until we can establish that it affects their institutions,” says Oppel.6 Any story about PTL would have to show solid evidence of payoffs. And Shepard’s information did not qualify yet. His source for the payoff allegation had demanded confidentiality, and Shepard could not corroborate the information. Shepard’s later account of the reporting noted that Oppel insisted on for-the-record confirmation and documentary proof of any payoff before it could be mentioned in an article. “That seemed impossible,” wrote Shepard. “PTL had structured the Hahn settlement to avoid a paper trail and seal the lips of those involved.”
In January 1986, the Observer got a good lead about a separate problem facing PTL. Based on documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the paper was able to write stories describing a Federal Communications Commission investigation into PTL’s over-the-air fundraising.
Bakker’s war with the paper escalated. The televangelist launched a crusade against the Observer on his nationally syndicated weekday program with the theme: “Enough Is Enough.” According to Shepard, “He sought to intimidate the newspaper and its parent chain, Knight Ridder, with appeals to his supporters to cancel subscriptions, pull ads and deluge his adversary with letters and phone calls. He hired private detectives to investigate the newspaper’s publisher, editor and reporters and former coworkers he suspected were aiding the newspaper.” Reports of subscription cancellations came to Oppel from as far away as the San Jose Mercury News.
By the spring of 1986, Bakker had reason to think his intimidation strategy was working. Even the Observer’s publisher, Rolfe Neill, felt the paper was being unfair to the Bakkers. “He felt we were picking the institution apart in a slow death,” says Oppel. Shepard knew better, but proof remained elusive. Oppel allowed him one more chance to try getting corroboration for the information that Hahn had been paid off to keep quiet. “I went back to the phone,” according to Shepard’s account. By March 13 he had gotten a copy of a February 1985 check for $115,000 written by PTL’s lawyer and an on-the-record confirmation from a Hahn representative. Soon even publisher Neill had to agree that the reporting had reached a critical mass. “He was behind us at that point,” says Oppel.
As Shepard prepared his Observer story, managing editor Mark Ethridge III got a call from a lawyer for PTL threatening legal action if the paper published and demanding that Bakker and his number two, Richard Dortch, be interviewed. Of course, the Observer’s past requests for interviews had been rejected. But now the story had to be delayed until the interviews could take place. In the meantime, Shepard learned that the church itself had begun an investigation based on the Observer’s inquiries. Before the paper could run its story on the payoff or the sexual encounter that had precipitated it, Bakker resigned in what the paper called “a pre-emptive strike.”
Then Shepard’s exclusives started: about a $265,000 payoff to Hahn with church funds laundered through a building contractor; about Dortch being the one who negotiated the Hahn settlement; and about how Jim and Tammy Bakker had been paid more than $1.6 million for 1986. Dortch was fired by a new PTL board. Televangelist Jerry Falwell, who took over as board chairman, complimented the Observer’s coverage and spoke of PTL’s “fiscal sins” of the past. And the 1988 gold medal—the paper’s second of the decade—was awarded to the Observer. The medals were installed in a glass enclosure on a pedestal that visitors pass when they walk through the paper’s lobby.
1988—The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer for revealing misuse of funds by the PTL television ministry through persistent coverage conducted in the face of a massive campaign by PTL to discredit the newspaper.7
A Survivor Seals the Story
The military correspondent for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Washington-based Mark J. Thompson, was doing his basic “beat reading” when he first came upon a piece in the trade newsletter Helicopter News. A problem called mast bumping, it said, had caused some accidents involving Huey troop-carrying and Cobra attack helicopters, then the backbone of Bell Helicopter’s business.8 Even from the short story, it was clear that this was a pilot’s nightmare. Under certain operating situations the rotor could tilt too far and strike the mast that attaches the blades to the aircraft, usually causing the mast to snap “and turning the chopper into a coffin for all aboard,” as Thompson puts it. But the position of Bell, which built the aircraft in Fort Worth, was clear. It was blameless. “If this bizarre snafu occurred, it would be either weather, pilot error, or something else that had already gone wrong that had doomed the flight,” he heard from the Bell representatives. “Their basic line was so long as the pilot was smart, it wouldn’t happen.”
Having covered aircraft accidents before for the “Startle-Gram,” as staffers called the then-Capital Cities publication, he was familiar with the pilot error explanation. F-16 fighter planes, also built in Fort Worth, had gone down a number of times, and the reporter had written about how pilots often put themselves in untenable positions in the Pentagon’s hot fighters. As Bell suggested, the helicopter cases were probably the same thing, he thought. Still, the report was worth a check.
While the newsletter had mentioned that a single pilot had survived a mast-bumping crash, he wasn’t identified. Thompson wanted to find out what he might say about the Cobra’s safety. “I remember spending some period of time tracking him down,” says Thompson, who tapped his Pentagon sources for the search, finally locating him at Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland. “I said to myself, Gosh, if he concedes that he did something wrong, that wouldn’t be much of a story.”
Instead the interview would become seared in Mark Thompson’s memory. Larry Higgins was flying with his co-pilot, who had been killed instantly when the rotor blade sliced through the cockpit. “He spoke very levelly. It wasn’t quite a monotone,” according to the reporter. “He knew what he wanted to say. He wanted me to understand that there was nothing goofy that day. They were test pilots, wearing parachutes and ready for any eventuality, they thought.” Describing the accident, though, he hesitated with his answers. “It wasn’t until I got to the third or fourth order of questions, where I showed him that I knew what was going on there—and that Bell had said that he must have flown outside the envelope—that he began to get angry,” says Thompson. Higgins shot back at him: “You’re damn right the helicopter ended up outside the envelope. The rotor isn’t supposed to come through the cockpit.” Thompson was stunned. For the story, which would take several months to report completely, “that was, to my mind, really the starting gun.” Next came Freedom of Information Act requests and a raft of accident reports and other documents to show him the scope of the problem.
One other interview, with engineer Tom White at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, had an unpromising start. “Can you tell me about these accidents?” Thompson asked. “No, I can’t,” White responded. “Well, what if I sent a FOIA?” the reporter followed up. White hesitated. “I’ve been waiting years for somebody to ask that,” he said. Suddenly Thompson knew he was about to get a wealth of valuable new documents. “White, it turned out, was an early and ardent advocate of the hub spring, a $5,000 modification that would have corrected the helicopter’s problems.”
The first of Thompson’s five parts, with the rubric “Deadly Blades,” ran on Sunday, March 25, 1984, headlined “Design Flaw Mars Bell Military Helicopters.” It began:
WASHINGTON—Nearly 250 U.S. servicemen have been killed since 1967 aboard Bell helicopters that crashed because of a design flaw that remains largely uncorrected even though the Army discovered it in 1973, according to military documents and former Pentagon safety experts.
A top lawyer at Bell Helicopter of Fort Worth acknowledged the seriousness of the matter in 1979 when he urged the company to fix the problem even if it had to spend its own money to do so.
“I consider this matter very serious and, if we do nothing about it, very likely to be the subject of attempts at punitive damages,” George Galerstein, Bell’s chief legal counsel, told company management in a 1979 internal memo.
Galerstein’s prediction has since come true—families of five pilots killed since 1980 in crashes attributed to the design problem have filed suits seeking nearly a quarter of a billion dollars from Bell.
The death toll from the mast-bumping problem might be even higher, the article said: “It could not be determined how many helicopter accidents during the Vietnam War, during which Cobras and Hueys were extensively used, may have been caused by mast bumping.” Bell did try to get the military to make changes but at the military’s own expense.
Executive editor Jack B. Tinsley’s Pulitzer nomination letter noted that “the Army assembled a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the questions raised by the series,” finding that the paper’s account had been accurate. The Army then took steps to correct the problem. “The reaction by Bell and its almost 6,000 area employees has been less positive,” Tinsley wrote. “While the series was running, Bell sent a letter to Star-Telegram publisher Phil Meek demanding that the newspaper remove its news racks from Bell property and apologize for the black eye it had given the company.” The company asked retail outlets around its plant to refuse to do business with Star-Telegram employees, and union representatives launched a drive that resulted in the paper losing about 1,300 subscribers.
Thompson, who later moved to Knight Ridder Newspapers and then to Time magazine, continued to cover defense-related scandals after the Bell reports and after his paper won the 1985 gold medal. “The military,” he says, “is the gift that keeps on giving for reporters.”
1985—The Fort Worth (Tex.) Star-Telegram for reporting by Mark J. Thompson which revealed that nearly 250 U.S. servicemen had lost their lives as a result of a design problem in helicopters built by Bell Helicopter—a revelation which ultimately led the Army to ground almost 600 Huey helicopters pending their modification.9
Flying High
An aviation story of another kind led to the 1987 Public Service Prize. The Pittsburgh Press public health reporter Andrew Schneider had been teamed with Mary Pat Flaherty the previous year on a project exploring the nation’s organ transplantation system, which had earned them the 1986 Pulitzer in Specialized Reporting. In early September 1986, Schneider got a tip that set him on a new course with new teammates.
On a reporting trip in Florida, he received a call from a physician friend with an almost unbelievable tale: a seriously drug-overdosed patient had arrived at Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital, near death, but had been whisked out of intensive care prematurely. Schneider’s friend suspected that the individual removing the patient might have been a pusher. But whoever it was had argued that this patient had to leave the hospital immediately so that he could get back to work—flying for US Airways. Confidentiality rules prevented the hospital from notifying the airline or the Federal Aviation Administration about the pilot’s drug problem. So this doctor called his reporter friend instead, hoping somehow to publicize the situation.
Once back in Pittsburgh, Schneider began looking into the pilot’s past, including his medical record. “He had track marks every conceivable place he could have them. So this had to go back years,” says the reporter, who later moved to the Baltimore Sun. “It raised the question, ‘How could he pass his medical exams?’” The FAA requires six-month examinations of pilots.10
Schneider’s first story, on September 21, examined the USAir pilot’s case. Follow-up articles looked at the rules preventing airlines and the FAA from getting reports about impaired pilots and flaws in the system of physicals. He interviewed the examiner for the overdosed pilot and was told an unconvincing story. The doctor had not suspected any drug use, he told Schneider. The reporter found that in many cases pilot physicals were a troubling joke in the aviation business. “The so-called $50 exam meant that you held the 50-dollar bill out, and if you could see it, the doctor took the fifty from you and you passed,” he says. That cleared the pilot to continue flying. The national press began picking up Schneider’s stories.
Later that month the reporter got a call from a federal government source who had been reading the articles. “He said, ‘You have to come meet some friends of mine.’” It sounded urgent, so Schneider flew to Washington, where a group had congregated with the source in the back room of a Japanese restaurant in Georgetown. Schneider did not know them or what to expect. “They looked as uncomfortable as whores in church. They were just very, very nervous,” he says. His government friend introduced them—top officials from most of the country’s largest airlines, each of whom had serious concerns about pilot medical reporting. They could talk to him only off the record, but what they said was chilling. Each had a number of pilots at his airline who were too sick to fly—heart problems were typical, along with drug dependency—and who could become incapacitated while flying to create a serious hazard to the public. But for various reasons, mostly union agreements, pilots could not be grounded if the FAA said they could fly, the reporter was told. Schneider responded to the airline representatives that there was no way he could do an investigation without pilots’ names. But he assured them that any names provided would be kept in confidence. With their help, Schneider compiled a list of nearly three hundred allegedly impaired pilots.
In spot stories that ran through December 21, Schneider and his teammate on a number of stories, general assignment reporter Matt Brelis, followed leads that presented a picture of a dangerously faulty system. The FAA was created to protect the flying public, not to make life easy for addicted or medically impaired pilots. In an arrangement that reflected the power of the pilots’ lobby in Washington, the FAA refused to compare names of licensed pilots with easily available registry lists showing motorists with license revocations for substance abuse, for example. Even when the FAA did learn of criminal abuse–related behavior by pilots, the agency “closed its eyes,” according to the Pittsburgh Press reports.
The federal air surgeon, Dr. Frank Austin, frequently overruled those few warnings about pilot ailments that made it on the record. That kept impaired pilots flying as well. In an interview with the Press, Austin, a former Navy carrier pilot, defended the pilots’ right to fly and said that in many cases that right had overridden medical information he had been given about individual pilots.
The Press also investigated a catch-22 in the FAA medical regulations. The rules required pilots who were found using drugs to be permanently grounded, without any provision for rehabilitation. With their careers at stake, those pilots who sought treatment in good faith were forced to visit clinics secretly, without reporting it. Some of the private clinics were not medically sound.
Among the reforms that resulted from the Press articles were the removal of Dr. Austin from his post, the installation of provisions for cross-checking pilots and drivers’ registry lists, and a tightening of FAA medical exam requirements.
One other public service finalist, the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, also had a medical theme, examining serious mishaps in the system of Veterans Hospitals.
1987—The Pittsburgh Press for reporting by Andrew Schneider and Matthew Brelis which revealed the inadequacy of the FAA’s medical screening of airline pilots and led to significant reforms.11
Pulitzer, Reform Thyself
As chairman of the Pulitzer Prize advisory board from 1955 until his retirement in 1986, Joseph Pulitzer Jr. (as the third JP was known) built a reputation as a fair-minded moderator. He rarely tried to dominate a discussion or divert a debate among strong-willed board members. John Hohenberg, the Pulitzer Prize administrator for ten of those years, noted “that he, like his father and grandfather, was an articulate and devoted liberal Democrat of the old school.” In fact the chairman’s only shortcoming, in Hohenberg’s view, may have been “a distinct form of ancestor worship that caused him to oppose any major change” that could lead the Pulitzer Prizes to deviate from what the first Joseph Pulitzer had intended.12 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor also presided over a period of transformation that changed the Pulitzer Prize selection process significantly in the 1970s and early 1980s. He supported reforms vigorously and occasionally took the lead in creating them.
Smaller changes had been made in the early decades, of course: using working journalists in the juries rather than Columbia professors, for example. In the early 1950s, to reduce the domination by the same board members year after year, a maximum term of service was set. (JP Jr., like his father, was specifically exempted from the term limit, which is now nine years.) The board also stopped describing Pulitzers as being for “the best” work, calling the winner “a distinguished example” instead. In the case of gold medal winners, the citation for “the most disinterested and meritorious public service”—the wording of the benefactor’s will—became “a distinguished example of meritorious public service.” (After changing the description on the medal for a time, the original inscription has been restored.)
Larger concerns about the Pulitzer Prizes being tightly controlled by a handful of men remained valid through the 1960s, however. During his board term from 1940 to 1954, the New York Times’s Arthur Krock had been one such powerful board member, according to David Shaw, a Los Angeles Times media reporter who became a student of the prizes. Krock met with board friends for dinner the evening before formal voting on the prizes, where the group prepared their choices for consideration by the full group. Too many prizes for one paper was a Krock no-no. Fellow board member John S. Knight told Shaw about Krock’s message to him when Knight’s paper, the Chicago Daily News, found itself nominated by jurors for prizes in three categories. “Krock just took me out for a little walk and said I might want to be ‘more restrained.’ I got the message,” according to Knight. With other editors in Chicago, they decided which single prize they preferred.13
The reforms that chairman Pulitzer championed in the 1970s bubbled up from news organizations, reflecting their growing awareness that all-white, all-male newsrooms were unacceptable and that diversity in press leadership was something to be sought. By the year JP Jr. retired, the board not only contained both women and minority members but had also established a jury system emphasizing ethnic and gender balance.
Just as dramatic was a major alteration in the relationship of the Pulitzer Prizes to Columbia University—a relationship that his grandfather had designed into his plan for the awards before JP Jr. was born. When the time came to revise that relationship, JP Jr. took charge of the sensitive negotiations that separated the Columbia Board of Trustees from the prize-awarding process.
At Odds Over the Pentagon Papers
The chairman and other board members had begun questioning the role of the trustees during the tumult surrounding the 1972 awarding of the gold medal to the New York Times for its analysis of the Pentagon Papers. Trustees had twice voted down the board’s proposed selection of the Times—objecting that the Pentagon Papers were stolen documents—before Columbia president William McGill talked them out of any decision to veto the prize. In the end, the trustees noted that terms of the Pulitzers allowed the trustees to accept or reject an advisory board recommendation but not to submit an alternate winner. Had the trustees been charged with making awards, they noted, “certain of the recipients would not have been chosen.” Still, they conceded that the Pulitzer advisory board’s “judgments are to be accorded great weight by the Trustees,” and they eventually voted to accept the recommendations.14
There were similar worries about trustees potentially overruling the board the next year when the Washington Post was named the gold medal winner for its Watergate coverage after having been vilified by the Nixon administration. But on April 30, a week before the trustees met, key White House aides to President Nixon resigned and the president’s press secretary issued a remarkable apology to the Post for having accused it of “shabby journalism.” With little discussion, the trustees approved the Post’s prize.
Chairman Pulitzer had fought strenuously for the Times to win in 1972 and for the Post to win in 1973. But in 1975 he began to press for a change in the trustee–Pulitzer Prize connection. Columbia backed out of its oversight process, instead arranging to have the university’s president represent the school on the board. By 1979 “advisory” was dropped from the board’s title because it was no longer advising anyone on the prizes. The board had the final say.15
Finally, the Finalists
The reforms that Pulitzer championed and achieved within the board had a huge impact too. Gene Patterson, a board member from 1973 to 1984, was instrumental in this modernization—diversifying the board’s membership and increasing disclosure about the selection process. At the same time, the role of the jurors was clarified. They became “nominating jurors” and the board emphasized in its instructions that the panels were not the final decision makers. Jurors were instructed to list their nominations in alphabetical order rather than ranking their top choices. Choosing the top entry was the board’s job.
“There was no particular reformer-in-chief that I remember. We sat around this long table and kicked these things around,” according to Patterson, who died in January 2013. “There was just stuff that needed to be done.” That included increasing the board’s size and geographic representation sharply and adding women, black, and Latino members.
For the first time, a system for publicly naming finalists also was approved. “There was some ancient feeling that it diminishes the Pulitzer Prizes to say there were people who didn’t win. But everybody knew there were. And as editors we stand for the free flow of information,” Patterson said. By identifying finalists, the board also acknowledged the honor that went with being in the running for a prize while giving the jury some credit for its choices. “And the public got a better look at how the Pulitzer works,” he noted. The board meetings remained secret, and board members were told not to discuss the decisions afterward. “Like in a jury, you have to go into a room and talk quite frankly about the entries you have before you. In public, that dries up the spontaneity of the deliberations,” said Patterson.16
In 1985 the Pulitzer board expanded the number of journalism categories from thirteen to fourteen, essentially creating the award lineup that would take the Pulitzers into the twenty-first century. (Explanatory journalism had been added the prior year. Specialized reporting gave way to beat reporting in 1991 and in 2006 was changed to local reporting.) Editorial writing and public service remained the granddaddies of the Pulitzer journalism awards.
More recent Pulitzer board members uniformly praise today’s prize-selection process for its candor and fairness, saying that any vestiges of the past old-boy network are now completely gone. Gene Roberts, who was the executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer when he joined the board in the early 1980s, remembers that “there were one or two little things that I thought could have been interpreted as efforts to back-scratch. But the attempts were noticeably unsuccessful. In that group, the idea of back-scratching was very repellent.”17
The former Chicago Tribune editor Jack Fuller, who was president of Tribune Publishing when his nine board years ended in 2000, says, “One of the great things when I joined the board was to find that some of the folklore was just absolutely wrong. The model was mutual respect, where you could disagree sharply without being wounded, or wounding.”18 Michael Gartner, a board member for nine years ending in 1991, agrees. “Integrity oozed out of the process,” and there were very few predictable winners, because the discussion often swayed opinions. “There were never any lay-downs. You’d go into the meeting thinking, This one’s going to be easy. And Jesus, the vote would be five to five to five,” says Gartner, whose past positions include the editor of the Des Moines Register and the Ames, Iowa, Daily Tribune, the editor of the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and president of NBC News.19
Jurors and board members concede that their peers sometimes seem overly cautious about cutting-edge types of stories, tending to favor familiar formats in selecting the Pulitzers. “Journalism is exceedingly conservative about itself as a profession, and when the prize selection process is done by people who are at the top of the profession, it isn’t surprising that they are also conservative about the winners they pick,” says the former Tribune editor Fuller. And yet the board is extremely sensitive to the emergence of themes that reflect what readers find newsworthy. Increasingly one such ascendant theme was the environment.