The Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Defamation?

The latest ruling in the suit for libel President Trump is levying against members of the Pulitzer Prize Board suggests that the case could suddenly start to get newsworthy. That’s what we take from the decision by a Florida state appeals court. It refused to grant to the Pulitzer Board a delay in the proceedings until after Mr. Trump is out of office. That increases the chances that the case could go to a trial featuring headline journalists and juicy discovery.What stopped us — and, it appears, the court — is Pulitzer’s claim that to proceed with a trial would be, as the court put it, a distraction to the presidency. How in the world would the Pulitzer Board be in a position to make that determination? It’s Mr. Trump, meaning the president, who is, the court noted, in “the best position to determine if these proceedings would be a diversion and interfere with the obligations of his office.”The court rubbed in the obvious. If Mr. Trump, who is the plaintiff, felt that the case was distracting him from his presidential duties, then he could always ask for a delay — or could even drop the case. “Separation of powers protects the Executive from undue burdens imposed by other branches, not burdens which the Executive willingly accepts,” the court writes. The point is so plain that one wonders what — or if — the Pulitzer Board was thinking.At the core of the case lies the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting given jointly in 2018 to the Washington Post and the New York Times. The prize went “for deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest” that, the Pulitzers said, “dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign,” transition, and “eventual administration.”Yet the subsequent investigation by a former FBI director, Robert Mueller, failed to vindicate the allegations and insinuations in the press of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. While Moscow was found to have tried to interfere in the election, Mr. Mueller’s report, released in 2019, concluded that neither “the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts.”That finding came “despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” Mr. Mueller’s report added. As to questions over whether Mr. Trump and his camarilla obstructed the investigation of the matter, Mr. Mueller’s report was equivocal. Attorney General Barr said that while the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”That’s the context in which the Pulitzer Board stated, as it did in 2022 after two investigations, “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions” relating to the allegations of collusion “were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.” If that’s what the Pulitzer Board thinks, it seems to us they would more logically welcome the prospect of a full and early trial.We don’t mind saying that we have great regard for some of the defendants in the case — David Remnick of the New Yorker, say, Gail Collins of the Times, and Anne Applebaum, whose syndicated Washington Post column appeared in the Sun before we folded our print edition. We’ve read the winning reportage. As to whether, given all that we’ve learned since the prize was awarded, the subsequent defense by the Pulitzer Prize Board amounted to defamation, that’s what trials are for.No wonder the judges are loath to let the Pulitzer Board off the hook. We get the concern over Mr. Trump’s strategy of filing for libel in a string of cases in which Trump v. Pulitzer is but one. Yet in a season when a leading news institution publicly questions, as the Times did in 2016, the logic of objectivity, there could be much to learn by the current case going to trial. We could all — the president, the press, the Pulitzers, and the public — learn a lot.

The Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Defamation?

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