Three Pulitzer controversies
Cooke, Duranty, and Laurence are three former journalists united by the condition of being Pulitzer Prize winners who later came under threat of having their Pulitzers revoked for creating invented or misleading stories.
Cooke, writing for the Washington Post in 1980, wrote of a supposed eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy living in Washington D.C, basing the story on anonymous sources. Public reaction to the story led to a police search for Jimmy and to claims by the mayor that Jimmy had been placed in treatment and later died. Cooke received the Pulitzer for her reporting on the story, but shortly after admitted that Jimmy had never existed and was an invention by Cooke, who returned her Pulitzer and resigned from the Post.
Duranty, writing for the New York Times in the early 1930s, produced a series of reports on the condition of the Soviet Union at the time. Duranty first came to prominence as a journalist by way of an exclusive interview with Joseph Stalin, and was thereafter sympathetic to the USSR and Stalin in particular, leading to his reports denying the failures of Stalin’s Five-Year-Plans up to and including denial of the famines in the Soviet Union at the time. His work came under fire largely posthumously, said to have influenced the United States’ recognition of the Soviet Union through misrepresentation, though the Pulitzer Prize board did not revoke the award after calls for such, citing no evidence that the deception was deliberate.
Laurence was a later Times journalist during the 1940s, and held a position as the official historian of the Manhattan Project, the only journalist to directly witness atomic bomb testing and the bombing of Nagasaki. Laurence received two Pulitzers for his reporting, but was posthumously criticized for glossing over the effects that atomic bombing had on Japan, particularly by disputing and denying the long-term effects of radiation sickness and radioactive fallout. Despite calls for such, his Pulitzers were not revoked.
In all three cases, affiliations of the reporters were insufficiently checked by their supervisory staff, allowing for possible bias and falsification which creates a violation of ethical standards. Such standards can only be enforced when claims are checked and double-checked consistently before an article goes to print. Anonymous sources, while necessary in some reporting, must be verified at least internally, while claims as to the state of affairs in far-off locales must be backed by sources other than the journalist’s own experience.
