Columbia Journalism Review: Pulitzers Draw a Line in the Sand
Felix Gillett and Paul McLeary
....The New York Times took home several Pulitzers. In the International category, the Times' Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley won for their coverage of China in 2005. The paper took home another prize in National Reporting for their December 2005 story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about the NSA's secret domestic wiretapping program. The piece summarized part of Risen's book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, and caused a stir of its own in the Times newsroom, when public editor Barney Calame was frustrated in his attempts to get executive editor Bill Keller and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., to respond to questions as to why they waited a year to run the story. In early January, CJR Daily noted the controversy, writing that Calame's piece was "a startling and toughly worded demonstration of the public editor of the nation's most important newspaper calling his bosses to task and finding them wanting."...
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Washington Post reporter Dana Priest won in the Beat Reporting category for her account of the CIA's secretive prison system overseas. Priest revealed that the clandestine system, which was set up in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks to help detain future terrorism suspects, included prisons in Afghanistan, Thailand, Guantanamo Bay, and several countries in Eastern Europe.
At the time, under pressure from U.S. officials, the Post decided not to publish the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the program -- a decision we criticized at the time. Nevertheless, Priest's story succeeded at penetrating the shroud of secrecy surrounding the prisons -- and helped shed some light on the murky practices being used therein.
Both the James Risen, Eric Lichtblau story in the Times on secret, warrantless surveillance of phone calls and email by the National Security Agency, and the Dana Priest story in the Post on the CIA network of so-called black prisons in foreign countries where captives are held without trial or recourse, have been denounced by President Bush himself as all but traitorous disclosures. Thus, we seem to have a sort of face-off at the OK Corral between the Pulitzer Board and the Bush White House itself -- one that, among other things, throws into stark clarity the sharply different values that guide each institution....
http://www.cjrdaily.org/behind_the_news/pulitzers_draw_a_line_in_the_s.php
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