(I once asked Sig Gissler, the longtime prize administrator, why we hadn’t retracted the infamous award to Walter Duranty, the New York Timescorrespondent whose dishonest dispatches from the Soviet Union were critics’ go-to talking point. No way we’d give the right wing that satisfaction, he told me.)
As a free agent now I can’t emphasize enough how empty the prizes had become even a decade ago—Thomas Friedman sauntering from car service up to Pulitzer Hall’s famed World Room—and that was before the bottom really fell out. They were a sad cartoon well ahead of Donald Trump descending that golden escalator.
For years I attended prize luncheons at Columbia’s Low Library as reporter and warm body filling photo ops in exchange for rubbery chicken with mashed potatoes and wine. University President Lee C. Bollinger would boast of his First Amendment scholarship and landmark Supreme Court case, followed by awardees waxing poetic about their own historic significance.
Whether the beat was race, refugees or the environment, the prescription was almost always the same: more expert administrators and many more grants and subsidies for selfless global truthtellers like them, along with doing more to suppress disinformation from the bad guys. Accordingly, the arts prizes went largely to poets, playwrights, et al peddling variations on the same theme.