The Quiet Pulitzers

The Pulitzer Prizes somehow continue to maintain their carefully nurtured reputation as journalism's highest honor. Yet in recent years the annual awards have often generated more controversy than kudos. The Columbia University Board of Trustees, which oversees the selection process, publicly chastised its own Pulitzer advisory board two years ago for honoring the New York Times's disclosure of the Pentagon papers and Jack Anderson for his columns on Washington's "tilt" toward Pakistan during the India-Pakistan war. Last year, when the Providence Journal-Bulletin 's Jack White gained a prize for revealing Richard Nixon's minimal income taxes, the trustees were upset again: they felt that publication of the former President's leaked tax returns was "Xerox-journalism."

This year the trustees decided to forgo further trouble. They turned their power of final approval or disapproval of the awards over to Columbia President William J. McGill. It was an unnecessary copout. Apparently sensitive to past criticism, the 14 journalists and publishers on the Pulitzer board seemed to go out of their way to overlook a President's resignation, the CIA revelations, gathering disaster in Indochina and complex Middle East diplomacy in an effort to find relatively noncontroversial subjects for their awards for 1974.*

Spies and Taxes. The quiet approach was most visible in the prize for national reporting. Many veteran Pulitzer watchers had placed their bets on the Times's Seymour Hersh for his series on the CIA's involvement in domestic spying, which led to the establishment of a presidential investigatory commission. But the Pulitzer board dropped Hersh (along with 16 other entries) in the third round of voting; according to one member, the Times had presented Hersh's material in an "overwritten, overplayed and underproven" manner. The winner: a series by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Donald L. Barlett, 38, and James B. Steele, 32, exposing inequities in application of the tax laws.

Other awards also seemed to reflect an effort to avoid controversy. The prize for international reporting went to a five-part series in the Chicago Tribune written by William Mullen, 30, and photographed by Ovie Carter, 29, on famine in Africa and India. The Boston Globe won the gold medal for public service for its "massive and balanced" coverage of the school busing crisis. The Pulitzer for editorial writing went to John Daniell Maurice of the Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail for his calming editorials on the textbook controversy in the state's Kanawha County.

The Pulitzer board's only recognition of the major news events of last year was the deserved award to the Washington Star's syndicated columnist Mary McGrory, 57, for her etched-in-acid running commentary on Watergate.

* Among the nonjournalistic winners: Playwright Edward Albee for his drama Seascape; Novelist Michael Shaara for his book The Killer Angels; Biographer Robert A. Caro for his epic The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; and Historian Dumas Malone for his first five volumes of Jefferson and His Times.

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