Former President Donald Trump blasted the Pulitzer Prize Board for standing by the 2018 prizes it awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of the Russian collusion hoax that appears to have been largely orchestrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign as a distraction from her sordid actions.
Trump had called on the Pulitzer board to rescind the awards granted after the story was proven to be “fake news.”
“The Pulitzer Board has taken away any shred of credibility it had left with its ‘response’ regarding the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, which was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for blatant fake news,” the former president said in a statement.
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax,” Trump added.
A total of 10 reporters from both newspapers received the award “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,” according to the Pulitzer website.
“The truth is that the 2018 Pulitzer Prize was handed out for reporting that merely parroted political disinformation—disinformation that we know was fabricated by foreign operatives and my political opponents,” Trump said in the release, adding, “If the Pulitzer Prize has become a blatant acknowledgment of false, liberal political propaganda, then the Pulitzer Board should just say so.”
The board released a statement that essentially said that the awards stand because the lies that were told were not proven to be lies at the time — or something like that:
The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefully reviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.
These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.
In an interview Monday with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump suggested the Pulitzer Prize has lost much of its meaning.
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax. Why would The Washington Post or The New York Times ever want to admit their obvious mistakes and come clean when their false reporting is being guarded, and awarded, by the Pulitzer Prize, which at one point actually meant something,” he said.
And if the Pulitzer board is not willing to do the right thing, Trump said the New York Times and Washington Post should act on their own.
“These outlets should hand back their prizes without notification from Pulitzer, which would be the honorable thing to do,” he said. “The only way The New York Times and The Washington Post should get a possible Pulitzer Prize would be in a new category — disinformation, for helping to perpetrate a false story created and peddled by ‘Crooked’ Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and certain lowlife Democrats.”
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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