The Pulitzer Prize announcements Monday had great historical significance for the Boston Globe, winner of the coveted Public Service gold medal for exposing the enormity of the problem involving sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests.
While the Globe is emphasizing that it won its 17th Pulitzer, it also became one of only a half-dozen active newspapers to have earned three or more Public Service awards over the 86-year history of the prizes. The Globe won in 1975 for its coverage of Boston’s school-desegregation crisis, and in 1966 for a campaign preventing the confirmation of a politically connected Massachusetts jurist to a federal judgeship. (The other multiple winners are the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with five; The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, with four, and Newsday and the Washington Post, with three.)
In some ways, though, the Globe‘s win was nearly as big for the Pulitzer gold medal itself. In honoring the Globe, the Pulitzer Prize board identified a story with the clout that newspaper pioneer Joseph Pulitzer had in mind when he designed the Public Service medal in his 1904 will to be the cornerstone of his journalism prizes — recognizing “the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered by any American newspaper during the preceding year.” Its coverage has had impact far beyond Boston, where Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as a result of the scandal. The Globe‘s work spawned similar investigations across the U.S., and the calls for church reforms have been reviewed in Rome. In that sense, the reach of this prize is reminiscent of the most famous of all Public Service Pulitzer winners: The New York Times in 1972, for publishing the Pentagon Papers, and the Post in 1973, for its Watergate coverage.
Further, like the very best work honored with gold medals over the years, the Globe went far beyond pure reporting in this campaign. Its four-member “Spotlight Team,” led by Walter V. Robinson and beefed up with additional reporters (led by projects editor Ben Bradlee Jr.) during the church investigation, largely unraveled the church’s deep-seated protectionism of abusive priests, and sensitively detailed the heartbreaking cases of victims, of course. In its newsroom celebration Monday, though, Globe editor Martin Baron gave special credit to the paper’s lawyers for “masterful legal work” in getting the court cases against the church unsealed, a clear break in the case.
In another sense, 2003 is a rare year for the Public Service category in that most of the American journalism world — including some editors among the two strong Public Service finalists, the Pensacola News Journal and the Detroit News — actually expected the Globe to walk off with the gold. (The Wall Street Journal had its entry in the category moved by the Pulitzer jury to explanatory reporting, where it won for coverage of corporate accounting scandals.)
Taken as a body of work, the Public Service prizes have been divided among large and small winners over the years, reflecting a truly eclectic selection of topics. The New York Times, winner of the 2002 gold medal for its stunning “A Nation Challenged” coverage stemming from the September 11 terrorist attacks, also won the first Public Service prize awarded, in 1918, for its World War I reporting. (No gold medal was voted in the first year of the Pulitzers, 1917, one of four times that no Public Service Pulitzer was awarded.) Tiny papers garnering the gold medal have included 1998’s Grand Forks Herald, for coverage that helped its North Dakota community recover from flooding, blizzard, and fire; 1995’s Virgin Island Daily News in St. Thomas, for exposing corruption in the local criminal justice system; and 1979’s Point Reyes Light, a California weekly that investigated the Synanon cult.
Two of every five winning newspapers over the years have been cited for their disclosures of local, regional, or national corruption, in government, or sometimes in business. (Boston’s first gold medal went to the old Boston Post in 1921, for exposing the first Ponzi scheme, perpetrated by one Charles Ponzi.) One of five Public Service winners tackled a major human rights issue. Three winning papers have focused on the Ku Klux Klan, for example: the old New York World in 1922, the Columbus Enquirer Sun in Georgia in 1926, and jointly in 1953, the Whiteville News Reporter and Tabor City Tribune, North Carolina weeklies.
In many areas, of course, coverage meriting the Public Service Pulitzer has evolved significantly over the decades. Stories that help improve the environment are now more frequent, and make up more than 10 percent of all gold medals awarded. The first was in 1941, for a Post-Dispatch anti-smoke campaign that resulted in a move away from polluting high-sulfur coal, and dramatically cleaned the air in St. Louis — a campaign initiated by editor Joseph Pulitzer II, son of the benefactor of the prizes. Much more recently, the Sacramento Bee won in 1992 for “The Sierra in Peril,” reporter Tom Knudson’s work examining threats in the mountains of California; the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., won for exposing the environmental and health risks related to its state’s hog industry; and the Times-Picayune, in New Orleans, won for analyzing the threat to the world’s fish supply.
The Washington Post became the only paper to win in consecutive years, 1999 and 2000, first for a series on reckless city-police gunplay, and then for its disclosures, primarily from reporter Katherine Boo’s work, of neglect and abuse in the city’s homes for the mentally retarded. The next year, Portland’s Oregonian won for examining harsh treatment of foreigners by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which led to major INS reforms.
Among other gold-medal winners in history with powerful national consequences, a rival for the Pentagon Papers and Watergate might be the Post-Dispatch‘s expose of graft in the internal revenue system, resulting in the 1952 Public Service Pulitzer. Largely through the reporting of Theodore C. Link, the paper’s stories led to President Truman’s firing of his attorney general, along with 166 firings in the tax agency, and an overhaul that shifted jobs to civil service — leading the old Internal Revenue Bureau to be renamed the Internal Revenue Service. Into that group of landmark stories with wide impact, the Globe‘s Catholic Church coverage fits very well some 18 months after the Spotlight Team first began studying the sexual abuse claims against priests.
“We didn’t know then, and we could not know then, the magnitude of the problem and the depth of the scandal, and the dimensions of the story,” editor Martin Baron told his assembled staff Monday. “And now it’s 900 stories later, and many hours of very hard work later. And now we know. We know that the church covered up, we know that known abusers were continually placed in positions where they could abuse again. We know that victims were ignored or dismissed. We know that abusive priests were coddled. And we know this because of what was done here, in this newsroom and by our colleagues.”
Roy Harris, a senior editor at Boston-based CFO Magazine and a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, is a student of the public-service Pulitzer Prizes. His father, the late Roy J. Harris, won a gold medal for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1950, and helped the newspaper win three of its four other public-service awards. The Globe permitted Harris into the newsroom for Monday’s celebration to assist with the research he is doing of public-service Pulitzer Prizes.
