Amid an increasingly intense debate over the war in Iraq, and the administration that launched it, not a single Pulitzer Prize has been awarded for reporting on the conflict.

The Boston Globe beat the larger national papers in the national reporting category, for a story on how President Bush has used “signing statements” to bypass 750 laws enacted since he took office, and the Washington Post, esteemed for its political reporting since it broke Watergate, was shut out of the prizes completely.

The Wall Street Journal was the only paper to win two awards. It won the Public Service prize for a series on how executives have enriched themselves by backdating stock options, which led to a federal investigation, and its staff received another for international reporting, for the paper’s series on the impact of China’s economic boom.

The online editor of the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last, said he was pleased to see the Journal recognized. “The Journal is like getting an issue of the New Yorker every single day,” he said.

The board recognized several smaller papers, including the Oregonian, which won in the breaking news category for its coverage of a family lost in the mountains; the Birmingham News, which won the investigative reporting award for a series on corruption in Alabama’s two-year college system; and the New York Daily News, which won for its editorials on the health problems of ground zero workers.

In the past, the Pulitzer board has been criticized for giving too many awards to the big national papers; this year’s distribution may represent an attempt to even things out. In one specific effort, the board this year changed the beat reporting category to local reporting, giving smaller papers a stronger chance.

A professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and former editor of the Nation, Victor Navasky, said the absence of the Post from the list of winners and the relative underrepresentation of the New York Times is “a tribute to the integrity of the process.”

“It’s a statement that, at a tough time [financially] for American journalism, there’s a lot of good journalism being done at a lot of papers,” an associate professor of communications at American University, W. Joseph Campbell, said.

The Times won in the feature writing category for a series by Andrea Elliot — a former student, at the Columbia journalism school, of the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, Sig Gissler — on an immigrant imam’s effort to adjust to life in America.

Reporting on Iraq was represented among the nominees, if not among the winners: The Hartford Courant was nominated for reporting about suicides among American soldiers in Iraq, and the staff of the Los Angeles Times was nominated for its coverage of Iraq’s descent into what the paper has called a “civil war.”

The Pulitzer board did honor reporting on terrorism in the arts awards, handing out the prize for general nonfiction to the New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower.”

The award for fiction went to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which Oprah Winfrey also recently announced as her latest pick for her book club.

In the drama category, the Pulitzer board used it prerogative to ignore the nominees chosen by the drama jurors –– three small downtown plays –– and instead gave the award to David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” a drama about a couple coping with the death of their young son, which was produced on Broadway by the Manhattan Theatre Club.