Nothing should be more surprising than the fact that the National Enquirer is touting the fact that its reporting on the John Edwards baby-daddy story has been "nominated" for the Pulitzer Prize.  A better question might be whether there has ever been a year when someone from that rag hasn't been "nominated," since quite literally anyone who has had something published can be nominated for the Prize, so long as anybody (including the aspiring prizewinner himself) fills out the necessary application.  It's the lowest-hanging fruit of the awards season.

Two of the three Finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism (both from the L.A. Times) nominated themselves, beating out the critics who had the official nomination from the paper. [link via LA Observed] But of course, we already knew that all it takes to get "nominated" for a Pulitzer is an application and a $75 fee.

Lipscombing, Part trois:

"MacPherson, a former staff writer for the Washington Post and a past Pulitzer nominee, devoted more than a decade to creating this biography with exceptional rigor, devotion and fairness."

--Joe Conason, reviewing Myra MacPherson's biography of I.F. Stone in Salon. This website seems to imply that she was "nominated" for having written the 1984 book, Long Time Passing, but the Pulitzer website does not indicate she was a nominated finalist in either 1984 or 1985. (See here and here for other examples of this sad form of journalistic resume-padding)

Lipscombing: I have corrected my post, below, on Max Blumenthal's article on the Washington Times, to note the bogus Pulitzer claim made by his main source, George Archibald.

[UPDATE (9/28)]: According to Mr. Archibald, the Pulitzer "nomination" was actually submitted by his employer, the Washington Times. As I've noted before, it's not a real nomination, any more than an Academy member nominating a buddy is a true "Oscar nomination", but it does add context, both to the claim and to Archibald's perceived importance with his former employer.

[UPDATE (9/29)]: Now Archibald's bio at HuffPost is stating that he "went on to win four Pulitzer Prize nominations from Times editors." I'm not a professional journalist, so what I want to know from those of you who are is whether this sort of thing, which looks like resume padding to the layman, is actually considered to be an honor within your ranks. Do writers at the same newspaper compete with each other for the coveted honor of being nominated by their employer?

Here's something to think about the next time you read an article about civil rights or immigration policy in the Washington Times. Concerning editor-in-chief Wesley Pruden and managing editor Francis Coombs:

But even as it has enjoyed cozy relations with Washington politicos, from its earliest days the Times has been a hothouse for hard-line racialists and neo-Confederates. Pruden, who started at the paper in 1982, was their wizard. His father, the Rev. Wesley Pruden Sr., was a Baptist minister who served as chaplain to the Capital Citizens Council in Little Rock, Arkansas, the leading segregationist group in town. When President Dwight Eisenhower sent Army troops to protect nine black teenagers integrating Little Rock's Central High School in 1957, Pruden Sr. reportedly told an assembled mob, "That's what we've got to fight! Niggers, Communists and cops!"

In 1993 Pruden gave an interview to the now-defunct neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, which routinely published proslavery apologias and attacks on Abraham Lincoln. Pruden boasted, "Every year I make sure that we have a story in the paper about any observance of Robert E. Lee's birthday.... And the fact that it falls around Martin Luther King's birthday."

"Makes it all the better," interjected a Partisan editor.

"I make sure we have a story. Oh, yes," said Pruden.

(snip)

When Coombs joined the Times in 1988, he became a charter member of Pruden's neo-Confederate cabal. Reared by a military family in rural Virginia, Coombs attended a private high school and William and Mary College, where he was known as a hard partyer with a vast collection of rock-and-roll records. After graduating Coombs cut his teeth at several Virginia papers and the States News Service. He pursued journalism as an extension of his family's military tradition. His motto, which he would recite time and again in the Times newsroom: "Journalism is war."

In his 1993 Southern Partisan interview, Pruden proudly recounted Coombs's speech that year at the Capitol hailing Confederate President Jefferson Davis. "I read the speech and it was quite good," Pruden told the Partisan. "I was originally asked to speak, but I was going to be out of town and Fran filled in for me. He was telling me what a thrilling thing it was to stand there and sing 'Dixie' in the statuary hall of the U.S. Capitol. I would have liked to have been there just for that."

While Coombs sympathized with Pruden's Lost Cause nostalgia, his politics were even harsher. "The thing about Wes is, he has other vices," said a Times senior staffer. "He loves a good meal, loves to have his ego stroked, he loves women, the social scene. As for bashing blacks and Hispanics, he shares Fran's views, but he has other preoccupations. Fran is the really hard-core ideological white supremacist."

Coombs believes immigration is "the number-one issue in America today," and he has played an instrumental role in pressing far-right positions into the mainstream. In a move that many sources considered emblematic, on August 22 Coombs splashed a favorable review of Pat Buchanan's book State of Emergency across the paper's front page. Buchanan's book is a diatribe calling for an immediate moratorium on all immigration, to stave off the demise of Western civilization. "There were a lot of other things going on [in the news] that day," a Times senior staffer said. "Any other paper would have reserved that for the book review section, but Coombs had to have Buchanan on the front page." Coombs, the staffer continued, "will literally stand there and scan websites and look for anything that's anti-Hispanic, that's immigrant-bashing, and he will order the editors to go with it." According to Archibald, in 2001 Pruden issued a memo instructing reporters to stop using the term "illegal immigrant" and instead use "illegal alien"--a lead the rest of the conservative media soon followed.

From an excellent piece by Max Blumenthal in the Nation...[UPDATE (9/24): One of the main sources for this article is a writer named George Archibald, who is described as having been "nominated" for four Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure at the Washington Times. In fact, no one by that name has ever been a nominated finalist, and the Times has only one nomination to its credit in its history, a 2003 nomination for photojournalism.]

Huh?

Angelenos and news-crits: Before you rush to agree with LAT columnist Tim Rutten's self-satisfiedly righteous denunciation of the evil, greedy absentee-owning Tribune Company: 1) Do you really think Dean Baquet couldn't put out a high-quality Los Angeles newspaper with a mere 800 editorial employees (instead of the current 940)? The Washington Post operates with about 800 editorial employees. It's pretty good! 2) If you are a reporter at the LAT, do you really want to work at a paper owned by Eli Broad, Ron Burkle, or David Geffen--three of the local billionaires you should be covering? They aren't known as people who like bad press. ...

P.S.: The LAT has become a much better paper under Baquet--better than it ever was under the Chandlers--while it's cut back staff. Does that bolster the argument against cutting?

--Mickey Kaus

Wow, where does one start? First, the metropolitan area of Los Angeles has a population of almost 18 million people, making it more than twice the size of the D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan area. Besides the fact that the Post isn't half the newspaper it was in the '70's, a good newspaper in Los Angeles should have quite a bit more editorial employees than one in D.C., especially one whose circulation is almost 20% higher.

Second, having a local billionaire sign your paychecks is going to represent no more of a potential conflict of interest than having a publicly-traded corporation do so, and its interest in the bottom line uber alles. At least having Eli Burke or Ron Burkle running things at Times-Mirror decreases the likelihood of having advertisers trying to censor unfavorable articles, an inevitable result of having a publicly-traded corporation in charge, where everything is constantly and monomaniacally geared towards maximizing profits for the shareholders. If the trade-off is not aggressively investigating your billionaire patron, I'll live with that.

Lastly, that the LA Times is better now than it was in the Chandler Era (and thus, the best that it's ever been; the pre-Otis Chandler Times was a joke) is not only news to those who continue to subscribe to it, and have to read the bare-bones sports and metro sections, but it's also news to regular readers of Mickey Kaus, who has been unsparing in his attacks on the paper the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), both before and after the promotion of Baquet in July, 2005.

In fact, as recently as last May, Kaus approvingly cited this reaction from one of his readers:

Alert and anguished L.A. reader "G"--not me! And not Brady Westwater neither!--writes:

Two more Pulitzers are going on the wall at the L.A. Times, which means the editors at Spring St. can delude themselves, for at least another year, with the belief they are putting out a decent newspaper.

Prizes, which award either prestige or cash, are meant to reward, and thereby encourage, good behavior. ... And, at their best, the Pulitzer Prizes encourage papers to pursue serious journalism. The possibility of a Pulitzer is a good reason for an editor at a small paper with a limited budget to let a reporter spend a lot of time investigating a local scandal. ... But at large papers ... the Pulitzers are reinforcing bad behavior. At the LA Times, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and every other large paper in the country, editors year in and year out mount big projects with Pulitzers in mind ... (Did you make your way through even one of the NYT's Pulitzer-winning Race in America series? I didn't think so.) Typically these projects are snoozes which have their largest readership among Pulitzer judges. ... But at the WSJ and NYT, that's okay. Both papers are excellent despite their Pulitzer pursuits.

But by continuing to hand out prizes to the LAT, the Pulitzer committee is complicit in the journalistic disaster in Los Angeles. This is not to say that it's King/Drew series or Kim Murphy's reporting from Russia weren't excellent. ... Or that the four Pulitzers it brought in last year were undeserved. Under [John] Carroll and [Dean] Baquet, the LAT does national politics and foreign reporting about as well as anyone out there.

But for some reason that high quality journalism seems to stop at the Los Angeles County line. Local coverage (that is the daily stuff that isn't in a prize-bait series) is shoddy. Anyone who actually lives in L.A. and is dependent on the local paper for news and analysis of L.A. will be sorely disappointed.

There's every reason to pop champagne bottles and give self-congratulatory speeches in the newsroom today. But tomorrow, please mull this thought over: winning Pulitzers may be the thing that the LA Times does best. Which is a kinder way of saying, no matter how many Pulitzers go up on the wall each year, from the vantage of your local readers, you still put out a lousy paper. [Emph. added]

I suspect declining circulation numbers and heat from the Chicago boys at Tribune Co. may get the message to Carroll & Baquet through the celebratory haze.

If Kaus' opinion of the Times has changed in the brief period since Baquet took over, it hasn't been evident in his writing. Is a front-page that now includes profiles of the Cannibis Babe Attorney really such an improvement? Since when has he liked the paper?

Since even Thomas Lipscomb has backed away from his assertion that he was "nominated" for a Pulitzer Prize, you would think that the wingers who backed him originally would feel chastened, or at least somewhat reticent about returning to the issue. But, lo and behold, there are some who continue to justify the original mendacity, by arguing that, well, everyone lies about being nominated for the Pulitzer. Tom Maguire brings up a USA Today journalist who claims three prior nominations, while Mark Hyman of Sinclair Broadcasting fame opines

Pulitzer receives 1400-1500 nominations in fourteen journalism categories each year. The organization lists on its website 2-3 names for each category of which one is designated the "winner" and the others are called "nominated finalists." Tom Lipscomb was nominated in the 2005 "Investigative Reporting" category by the New York Sun for his work exposing fabrications by John Kerry during the 2004 campaign. Lipscomb didn't finish among the top three. The Pulitzer staff told The Point they prefer the term "entrant" rather than "nominee" for anyone not selected among the top three. But they acknowledge it is common practice for newspapers to refer to everyone entered as having been nominated.

The last sentence is particularly disingenous, since what is "common practice" is for journalists who worked on articles for which the newspaper received a nomination (such as the USA Today reporter referenced by Maguire) to claim that they were "nominated". Technically, that isn't a true nomination either, but it's a far sight more factual than claiming that the thousands who send in entry forms are "Pulitzer nominees". As Ted Remington notes, by that standard Lipscomb could claim with equal validity to have been nominated to be Miss Universe.

Smythe Gets Results: Remember the Pulitzer "nomination" boasted by Swift Boat backer Thomas Lipscomb, whose columns on the subject were touted as the most persuasive on the subject by numerous right wing bloggers. Well, the Pulitzer claim has now been scrubbed from his bio, which now reads that "his work was entered for the Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 2005." In other words, someone (maybe himself) filled out an entry form on his behalf.... [link via Daily Kos]

I see Thomas Lipscomb is still hyping his non-existent Pulitzer "nomination." The first time, it can be excused as excessive puffery; the second time, you really have to call his honesty into question. What is simply inexcusable is that the conservative bloggers hyping Mr. Lipscomb know the truth, and they just don't care.

As I noted several days ago, a possible defense of right wing flack Thomas Lipscomb's claim to being a "Pulitzer Prize nominee" is that since the Pulitzer website only lists "Nominated Finalists", those writers who were merely "nominated" aren't included. Of course, since anyone can nominate anybody for a Pulitzer, boasting about that kind of "nomination" is a joke, and far more disingenuous than anything Lipscomb is accusing Senator Kerry of having done. It would be like Lyndon LaRouche claiming that he was a Democratic nominee for the Presidency, simply because a delegate voted for him at the convention.

And sure enough, someone is now making that defense of Lipscomb. The Swift Boat controversy is a stupid one for the Far Right to be refighting. When bloggers were initially dismissed as pajama-wearing nerds at the outset of the forged documents imbroglio involving 60 Minutes II, it was in large part due to the then-recent Swift Boat controversy, after the allegations made by bloggers defending the Swifties collapsed and were discredited once the mainstream media belatedly investigated. The Swift Boat allegations became a blogospheric disgrace, and helped solidify the reputation that all bloggers, right and left alike, were more interested in winning ideological and partisan battles than discovering the truth.

Lipscomb's credibility on the topic is therefore important. There are no permalinks in his column, so he's requesting that his readers take his accusations against Senator Kerry and the New York Times on faith. Most of the people who read his piece, or read summaries of his piece at other blogs, are not going to be able to go back and do the necessary research on what the public record actually says about whether the Senator contributed to action reports whilst in Vietnam, for example. Lastly, the entire point to his, and other, attacks on the service record of John Kerry is the claim that the Senator exaggerated his military record. It therefore ill-behooves Lipscomb to be exaggerating his own credentials as a journalist.

Claiming that his previous investigations “earned him a Pulitzer Prize nomination” gives the false impression that his work was peer-reviewed and found to be meritorious. At the very least, it calls into question the reliability of his research, and the blind citation of his work discredits the credibility of the blogosphere.

[UPDATE]: Mickey Kaus was not the only blogger to have been conned. Michelle Malkin, Powerline, Democracy Project, Instapundit, Free Republic and Tom Maguire were also hoodwinked, although only Captain Ed was gullible enough (along with the aforementioned U.S. News and Liz Smith) to regurgitate the Pulitzer claim.

More perspective on Thomas Lipscomb's bogus Pulitzer "nomination":

One of the editors dropped by with a list of pieces I might want to submit for a Pulitzer. That’s right! I’ve been nominated for a Pulitzer! Along with a ham sandwich a piece from the Chancre Falls Fistula-Gleaner on the peculiar nomenclature of “twice-baked potatoes.” (I mean, what do you get when you microwave them? Three-time baked potatoes? What’s up with that?) Anyone can be nominated. He handed me a print out of my story slugs and asked me to make a few recommendations. Apparently I wrote 174 stories for the paper last year. They want the top 12. Can’t wait for next year, when I’ll have to choose from 312. (emphasis added)

--noted lefty James Lileks [link via Tristram Shandy]

Huh? Mickey Kaus approvingly links this morning to one Thomas Lipscomb on the Swift Boat allegations from two years ago, calling him "the nation's leading expert on why not all of the Swift Boat veteran allegations against Senator John Kerry are discredited." The column in question states that Mr. Lipscomb has been "nominated for a Pulitzer for his reporting on Kerry during the 2004 elections." Wow, and I always thought the allegations attacking Senator Kerry's war record had been discredited...but since it turns out the person investigating those allegations had been nominated for the highest award given to journalists in this country, we should all have second thoughts on the traitorous coward who almost became our Commander in Chief....

One problem: the Pulitzer Prize website actually lists the people and newspapers who were nominated in 2004, 2005 and 2006, and Mr. Lipscomb's name appears...nowhere. [link via Pamela Leavey] In fact, if you search the Pulitzer archives, not only has Thomas Lipscomb never been a nominated finalist, no one with that last name has been so honored, nor was anyone else for "reporting on Kerry during the 2004 election". According to the website:

Nominated Finalists are selected by the Nominating Juries for each category as finalists in the competition. The Pulitzer Prize Board generally selects the Pulitzer Prize Winners from the three nominated finalists in each category. The names of nominated finalists have been announced only since 1980. Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. No information on entrants is provided.

OK, so maybe Lipscomb was an "entrant" for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. To be an entrant, you have to fill out the entry form, and anyone who has published something in a daily newspaper is eligible. Although "many newspapers prefer to submit entries of particular staff members or achievements," that doesn't matter, since the nomination can be "made by newspaper readers or an interested individual." For example, the brilliant writer who penned this Op-Ed piece for the L.A. Times last October, on the YBK problem, could have feasted on the reflected glory of the most prestigious prize in American letters, had he simply sat down and taken five minutes to fill out the application, and sent it out with the warmest regards to the Nominating Jury. And, best of all, its free it only costs $75.

So I suppose it would be like Jennifer Lopez claiming she was "nominated" for an Oscar for her work in Gigli. Her name wasn't one of the five contenders rattled off on the last Sunday in February, but I'm sure someone (her publicist?) voted for her. It's a neat, harmless way of building up your resume, in much the same way that Tookie Williams was a Nobel Peace Prize "nominee" (actually, it is even less impressive than those two examples, since the Oscar and the Nobel have closed nomination processes). What it has to do with the truth, however, is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: Apparently the Pulitzer nomination claim is an ongoing part of Lipscomb's reputation. Both the U.S. News & World Report and columnist Liz Smith have cited his "nomination" in recent articles about his latest bit of investigative reporting, into the alleged tampering of the Zapruder Film.