The Snowden Pulitzer

By Amy Davidson, The New Yorker

16 April 14

warding the Pulitzer for public service to the Guardian and the Washington Post should go down as about the easiest call the prize committee has ever had to make. It would have been a scandal, this year, if there had been no Pulitzer related to the documents that Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, leaked to several reporters. This was a defining case of the press doing what it is supposed to do. The President was held accountable; he had to answer questions that he would rather not have and, when his replies proved unsatisfying to the public—and, in some cases, just rang false—his Administration had to change its policies. Congress had to confront its own failures of oversight; private companies had to rethink their obligations to their customers and to law enforcement; and people had conversations at home and at school and pretty much everywhere about what they, themselves, would be willing to let the N.S.A. do to them. Justice Scalia recently said that he fully expected these issues to be before the Supreme Court soon, because we’ve had a chance to read the Snowden papers. And journalists have had to think about their own obligations—to the law, the Constitution, their readers, and even, in the practice of reporting in the age of technical tracking, to sources they might expose or make vulnerable. Any one of those aspects would be a major public service. How could that not be Pulitzer material?

And yet, the Post itself acknowledged that some people might be angry, noting that the documents were classified and came from Snowden, “who has fled to exile in Russia, lending a controversial edge to this year’s awards.” Congressman Peter King, in character, tweeted that “Awarding the Pulitzer to Snowden enablers is a disgrace.”

He’s wrong. What is meant by “enabling”—that the reporters involved were Snowden’s mousy little couriers? The public-service successes wrought by these stories were not inevitable. As explosive as the papers would have been on their own, with no mediation, the shape of the scandal has also been a function of careful journalism. It didn’t have to play out this way: either paper could have bungled it. They had to be judicious and brave. Each has more documents than it has published, and has been scrupulous about what it shares, making sure to give a sense of what the acronyms and connections mean. (In a way, the Pulitzer is also for what the papers have not made public.) Each has also reported out the stories, which includes going to the government for comment—listening to what it has to say, dealing with its pressure sensibly and not reflexively—and then publishing certain things that it has been told it should keep secret. The newspapers have been called criminal. As Janine Gibson, the editor-in-chief of Guardian US, said after the award announcement, “It’s been an intense, exhaustive, and sometimes chilling year working on this story.”

The Post and the Guardian’s peers could have left them alone and exposed. Instead, half a dozen other outlets have had some part of the papers, and many more have followed up on the leads that they present. But imagine an alternate history, with journalists charged with crimes, official explanations and claims of outrageous damage unchallenged, and a couple of bad court rulings tightening the parameters on freedom of the press. It’s not farfetched. (Look at Snowden’s situation.) This Pulitzer was deserved in part because publishing the papers was a risky thing to do, not despite it.

It makes sense that the prizes went to the papers, and not just to a few of the dozens of reporters and editors who worked on this story. That’s not to quarrel with the George Polk Award, which went, last week, to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill, for the Guardian, and Barton Gellman, at the Washington Post, who had the main bylines on the big stories, and who took the earliest gambles. (If one were forced to choose the single journalist who most made the story happen, it would be Poitras.) But it’s good that the Pulitzer committee is used to recognizing teams, because that’s what this one took. The Post said that its contingent included twenty-eight people (including Julie Tate, late of The New Yorker); the Guardian mentioned, in addition to Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill, Gibson, Stuart Millar, Paul Johnson, Nick Hopkins, and ten others.

If one looks over the list of Pulitzer winners for public service, starting in 1918, it is striking how well this prize fits in. A good proportion have to do with government corruption, whether it involves money or power. The Times won for publishing the Pentagon Papers, in 1972, and the Post for its Watergate investigation, in 1973. In 1942, the Los Angeles Times won not for a particular story but for fighting a judge’s contempt order—he wanted to keep the paper from saying what it thought he should do in a case—up to the Supreme Court, where it was consolidated with another case. The paper won; Justice Hugo Black wrote that its editorials did not pose a “clear and present danger.” The decision was 5-4—again, things that seem obvious afterward are often closely fought. The 1942 Pulitzer citation praised “its successful campaign which resulted in the clarification and confirmation for all American newspapers of the right of free press as guaranteed under the Constitution.”

This year, there were two Pulitzer citations for public service, one for the Post and one for the Guardian; each paper was praised in a slightly different way. The Post’s coverage was said to be “marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.” The Guardian’s coverage was lauded for “helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.”

This reflects something that one hears said about the papers’ respective approaches, mostly from American journalists; it’s not clear that the distinction is there in the pieces themselves. It may reflect a tonal preference, or even, ever so slightly (one fears), a certain parochialism. It’s like when you’re told once too often which sister is the smart one and which is the sassy one. But the Guardian had plenty of insight and authority, the Post aggressiveness and spark-setting. The citation language is the point where the Pulitzer committee may have been just a degree too defensive. Otherwise, the award is impeccable.