Earlier this evening while CabinGirl and I lay blogging in bed and the FinnMan discovered her earrings, she mentioned that the Washington Post had won four Pulitzer Prizes. “Doesn’t that, you know, cheapen the prize,” she asked. I distractedly responded, “Yeah, I can’t think of anything they did in 2009 that warranted a prize.”
That was that. Just a casual exchange of thoughts on a matter neither of us gave a shit about. But, Kathleen Parker? Why? Because she had the temerity to point out that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment to professional women everywhere? Is that all it takes? Can I haz prize, too, if I just say ‘vaginaism’ and “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven.”
I think I’m not flattering myself when I say that if I were using my limited talents for the Republican cause, I’d already have some trophies, and a slot on cable news. The talent disparity between right and left is so vast in every creative endeavor that it’s a walk in the park to make a living on the right. They’ll hire anyone who can take dictation.
Yep. And if you are a right-winger, you can say almost anything outrageous or offensive and still be invited onto the best TV shows. If you are a left winger and say something like “blow job” then you are blacklisted for life.
I seem to remember many of the Washington Post’s “reporters” making the same comments about a certain president winning the Nobel Prize.
My Hometown hero won a Pulitzer. If you think the Left doesn’t have a creative voice, you are sadly mistaken. Fiori’s cartoons are brilliant. Here is his winning entry:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/12/09/fiorescience.DTL
I think BooMan is saying that talent is predominantly on the Left. But I liked the cartoon.
It’s not called “wingnut welfare” without reason.
And the Pulitzers have already been devalued.
As an editor whose investigative projects were nominated for five Pulitzers (won none) and mentored three Pulitzer winners (including two announced yesterday), I know of what I speak in saying that what is at work is less a talent disparity than a commitment to core journalistic values.
It is difficult to rationalize journos with conservative Republican points of view exposing a rogue police narcotics squad in Philadelphia or the mismanagement of natural-gas royalties owed to thousands of land owners in southwest Virginia, the subjects of two of the prize-winning stories.
There has been considerable bloviating over Kathleen Parker’s prize for commentary, most of it misplaced. She may not be at the level of past winners like Eugene Robinson, Nick Kristof, Anna Quindlen, Jim Hoagland and Jimmy Breslin, but she has grown as a pundit and writer and deserved the award.
Yup, pretty much ‘cept you’re forgetting that most of the right readership needs talking points that are re-read to them & dots, what dots? since it takes time to sink in. Their readership is just not wired for curiosity much less doing anything with curiosity.
Boo,
I’m so smart I didn’t even know who Kathleen Parker was. I thought maybe somehow she was Dorothy Parker, or if not Dorothy Parker then maybe Dorothy Thompson, except that Dorothy Thompson wrote her last column in 1961. So I upped an read this here piece in the American Prospect
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=constant_comment
written long before there was any talk of a Pulitzer Prize, But by the time I finished the article I was persuaded that, yes, she did deserve one. Maybe I’ll just start reading her stuff now.