Almost as significant as the prizes to stories emanating from a whistle blower, was the award to an investigative report into coal miners who were denied black lung disease benefits by one of the new not-for-profit media organizations, the Center for Public Integrity. A CPI reporter, Chris Hamby, won that one.
The ink on his award was not even dry before ABC News, a network I used to work for, muscled in with a high profile media claim that since they aired a story based on Hamby's reporting, they deserved the Pulitzer too. The embarrassingly loud demand for credit by outgoing ABC President Ben Sherwood was gently, and then indignantly rebuffed by the Center's Director, Ben Buzenberg,
According to Talking Points Memo, Buzenberg said: " I don't take well to being bullied by anybody or threatened by anybody. We just stuck to the facts."
Buzenberg explained that the Pulitzer committee did not award the prize for broadcast pieces and told ABC to cease its demands.
"The Center is prepared to show in great detail how little ABC's Brian Ross and Matt Mosk understood about even the most fundamental concepts and key facts and how they repeatedly turned to Chris to advise them or, in some instances, to do their work for them," he wrote in the letter.'
He noted in a letter to ABC, " Though you have framed the issue as the Center seeking to diminish ABC's contributions, the reality is quite the opposite: ABC is seeking to take credit for a large body of work that it did not produce. These are the facts, as confirmed under the very strict Pulitzer Prize rules by the Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler again just yesterday."
Having worked at ABC for eight years and written about the experience in my book. The More You Watch, The Less You Know, I could identify with Buzenberg's taking umbrage at network arrogance and bullying.
In my experience, TV executives see their shops as if they are military units under the control of the men who control the control rooms. (After reports leave the control room, they pass through the even more Orwellian sounding "Master Control.") These news chiefs would not do well on school report cards evaluating their ability to "work well with others."
The TV networks are desperate these days for legitimating recognition in a media world that has fragmented, and in which they no longer have the commanding position.
That is not say, that they don't also relish insider recognition and pats on the head from people in power.
At the same time that the newspaper world had recognized its obligation to recognize the Snowden story--sans Snowden, of course, who the Moscow Times reports has run out of money in his forced exile but may finally have a new job--a major network disses Snowden.
CBS News, once known as the network of Edward R Murrow and, then, Walter Cronkite has veered in another direction since it canned Dan Rather after a star chamber proceeding to punish him for a story showing that president Bush lied about his military credentials.
Today, predictably, CBS has gone the other way on the Snowden story too. That shouldn't be a surprise for an outlet that appointed Pentagon groupie Lara Logan as its chief foreign correspondent, only to be called on their attempt to cover-up her erroneous Benghazi report that gave credence to right-wing spin on the subject.
More recently, CBS produced a two part pro-NSA story on 60 Minutes, reported by John Miller who acknowledged on air that he has worked for the Director of National Intelligence, but, then after it ran, left the network to become an intelligence chief at the New York Police Department.
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