NY Times Pulitzer for 'highly ideological' view of U.S. history

FPI / May 6, 2020

The New York Times Magazine last year recognized the 400th anniversary of the official start of slavery in the U.S. when it launched what it called "The 1619 Project".

The project asserts that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. It was immediately discredited by historians of all political stripes.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, director of the 1619 Project, has been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her introductory essay to the project.

"That is, the most elite award in American journalism, awarded by journalists to other journalists, went to a discredited historical project that amounts to woke propaganda," Rod Dreher wrote in a May 4 analysis for The American Conservative.

The Pulitzer Center is a sponsor of The 1619 Project.

"Surprise! The project’s lead writer won the Pulitzer Prize," Dreher noted. "To be fair, Pulitzer judges are not employees of the Pulitzer Center, but are leading U.S. journalists. Still, the mutual pud-pulling here is pretty phenomenal. There has not been a more ideologically driven major award since the Nobel Peace Prize committee gave Barack Obama the 2009 award for not being George W. Bush."

Some prominent historians – including some well-known liberals — demolished the 1619 Project’s core claims in interviews with a socialist website. They blasted Hannah-Jones’s assertion that the colonists broke from Britain to preserve slavery.

Hannah-Jones dismissed them with a tweet. In it, she cast racialized suspicion on their objections because they are white, writing: "Trump supporters have never harassed me and insulted my intelligence as much as white men claiming to be socialists. You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are."

The Pulitzer Center says it has put The 1619 Project into 4,500 American classrooms.

"The highly ideological account of American history will serve one goal: advancing identity politics, and the quest for power through identifying and demonizing outgroups despised by the Left," Dreher wrote. "This is a textbook case of seizing and rewriting cultural memory for the sake of achieving power. If we do not possess the historical knowledge to know when we are being bamboozled; if we are too intimidated by allegations of bigotry to object; or if we simply don’t care about the past — then how can we resist the imposition of cultural amnesia?

"If we can’t resist the rout of our cultural memory – if ideologues in power rewrite the past – then our future as a nation and a civilization will be in doubt."

Dreher cited a Politico column by historian Leslie Harris, an African-American woman, who says that when she was asked by the New York Times to fact-check the 1619 Project’s claims, she warned them that Hannah-Jones was flat-out wrong to claim that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery.

"Naturally, Harris says in her column that the greater villains are conservatives who complain about the 1619 Project," Dreher wrote. "But it does go to show how Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones wasn’t going to let truth get in the way of the story she wanted to tell — and neither were her editors. In March, the Times kinda sorta changed its tune on that disputed point in the face of historians’ criticism. Hannah-Jones won her Pulitzer anyway."

Receiving Pulitzers for debunked material is not new for the New York Times.

The New York Times and Washington Post won a joint 2018 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for their coverage of the bogus Trump-Russia investigation.

In March of last year, President Donald Trump tweeted: "So funny that The New York Times & The Washington Post got a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage (100% NEGATIVE and FAKE!) of Collusion with Russia - And there was No Collusion! So, they were either duped or corrupt? In any event, their prizes should be taken away by the Committee!"

Last year, CNN was presented a Cronkite Award for “journalism” from USC’s Norman Lear Center for the town hall the network held after the Parkland, Florida shooting.

The official title of the CNN town hall was “Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action.”

"It wasn’t journalism and wasn’t even presented as such. It was gun-control advocacy by its own terms," HotAir.com noted in March of last year.

CNN Communications tweeted after the award announcement: "CNN's Parkland Town Hall has been honored with a @CronkiteAward. Congrats to @jaketapper and team who helped "advance the national conversation on gun control and violence."

HotAir noted: "Yes, 'advancing the conversation.' You may remember this as the event at which Parkland student Cameron Kasky stood up and told Marco Rubio to his face that he couldn’t look at him, knowing his support for the NRA, without seeing him behind the barrel of the gun firing at his murdered classmates. (Kasky now regrets some of his rhetoric.) This was also the event at which Sheriff Scott Israel stepped into the role of moral authority to lecture a national audience on gun violence. Israel later lost a no-confidence vote of the local deputies’ union in a landslide partly for his handing of the Parkland shooting; Ron DeSantis went on to suspend him and is now one of the more popular governors in the country because of it."

Dana Loesch "was suckered into attending" the CNN town hall "in the belief that this would be some sort of civil moderated discussion about the pros and cons of gun control. As it was, she was jeered for noting that some rape victims wished they had a gun during their attack, had people shout 'murderer' at her, and allegedly needed a security detail to exit the event safely."

Free Press International