Pulitzers in Perspective

Complaining about any choice of prizewinners is a bit like knocking Santa Claus. It also smacks of sour grapes. Still, people continually complain about the 49-year-old Pulitzer Prizes, most prestigious of all of journalism's innumerable awards. Somewhat sadly, newsmen have come to the conclusion that the Pulitzers are not esteemed as much as they should be.

The 1964 winners, announced last week, were deserving but scarcely the vital stuff of last year's news. The Philadelphia Bulletin's J. A. Livingston won the international reporting prize for an economic analysis of the Eastern European satellite nations; the Wall Street Journal's Louis Kohlmeier received the national reporting award for being the first of many to account for President Johnson's personal fortune; Melvin Ruder, publisher-editor of the Hungry Horse News in Columbia Falls, Mont., won the local reporting award for covering raging floods in the Northwest.

Oversize Scrapbooks. Why are the Pulitzers often a disappointment? For one thing, the prize juries rarely search out good reporting; they sit back instead and examine the flood of entries that comes in: elaborately produced scrapbooks that often weigh as much as 40 pounds and unabashedly play up the skills of some intrepid reporter. Asked how he planned to spend his Prize money, 1956 Cartoon Winner Robert York replied: "I think I'll use it to pay for all the scrapbooks I have submitted year after year. It will come out about even " The Pulitzer juries are large and unwieldy. There is a 36-man group of editors (about four jurors per category) which meets to hammer out the original choices; a 14-man advisory board passes on these choices; and final say rests with the trustees of Columbia University. In 1962, the trustees overruled an award to a biography of Hearst; in 1963, the advisory board turned down a prize for Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? This year no editorial cartoonist was deemed worthy of a prize, and no award was made for music because the advisory board nixed the selection of Jazz Musician Duke Ellington.

Many Excluded. Critics also say that the Pulitzer Prizes have not kept pace with the rapid growth of journalism. Much news coverage is automatically excluded. Television and radio news and news magazines are awarded prizes of their own, but they do not qualify for a Pulitzer; neither does the reporting, some of it incomparable, of the small-circulation magazines. Undoubtedly it takes skill to cover floods in the Northwest, but they seem out of the mainstream of American journalism. So do the Pulitzers.

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