Glittering Prizes
Eight of the twelve Pulitzer Prizes in journalism awarded last week went to dailies on TIME's ten best list--two each to the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal--and the winning entries generally reflected the papers' strengths.
The Los Angeles Times, which prides itself on massive projects, won in public service for a 27-part series, Latinos, based on more than 1,000 interviews and reported and edited by Mexican Americans on the staff. Editorial Cartoonist Paul Conrad, 59, an acid-penned liberal, won his third Pulitzer in 20 years for japes at U.S. military activity and the nuclear arms race.
The New York Times, which is a magnet for authoritative specialty writers, won for criticism by Architecture Critic Paul Goldberger, 33, and for national reporting by Science Writer John Noble Wilford, 50, on topics ranging from astronomy to Star Wars space weapons.
The Boston Globe, which has an aggressive social conscience, won for "special" (usually investigative) local reporting on race relations. One series criticized institutions, including the Globe, for poor minority hiring, and concluded, "Boston today is the hardest metropolitan area in America for a black person to hold a job or earn a promotion." News Photographer Stan Grossfeld, 32, won for portraits of suffering citizens in Lebanon.
The Wall Street Journal, which has broadened its definition of business-related coverage, won for international reporting by Foreign Editor Karen Elliott House, 36, who probed Middle East politics in interviews with Jordan's King Hussein, and for commentary by Vermont Royster, 70, who also won in 1953 for editorial writing. Royster's subjects included the Viet Nam War veterans' right to pride and the legacy of Martin Luther. Other awards: in general local reporting, to Long Island's Newsday for examining federal intervention in the medical treatment of severely handicapped children, most notably in the much litigated case of Baby Jane Doe; in editorial writing, to Editor Albert Scardino, 35, of the weekly Georgia Gazette (circ. 2,500), largely for attacks on official wrongdoing; in feature writing, to Seattle Times Reporter Peter Mark Rinearson, 29, for describing the development of the Boeing 757 passenger jet; in feature photography, to Anthony Suau, 27, of the Denver Post, primarily for pictures of mass starvation in Ethiopia.
The Pulitzer administrator, Robert Christopher, complained of "a trend among the 1,199 journalism entries for stories to run interminably." Conceded Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship, a Pulitzer board member: "Often we ask readers to take too big a bite." The board overruled several jury choices, including fiction: it chose William Kennedy's novel Ironweed, the story of a baseball player turned drifter, over Thomas Berger's The Feud. The board also debated rejecting David Mamet's play Glengarry Glen Ross, because of scatological dialogue among its conniving real estate salesmen. Other awards went to Poet Mary Oliver's American Primitive and Composer Bernard Rands' Canti del Sole for tenor and orchestra. Louis Harlan won in biography for Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915, and Harvard Sociologist Paul Starr in nonfiction for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. A citation was given to Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) for his 44 children's books. For the first time since 1919, no history work was judged worthy of an award.