PULITZER PRIZES: The Grammy Awards of Journalism? “Whether the beat was race, refugees or the environment, the prescription was almost always the same: more expert administrators and many more grants and subsidies for selfless global truthtellers like them, along with doing more to suppress disinformation from the bad guys. Accordingly, the arts prizes went largely to poets, playwrights, et al peddling variations on the same theme. . . . If one takes the old plaques seriously, or the promotional hosannas I put together, recent awardees have tended toward the appalling. But if the prizes are mainly a moving target for status striving they’re doing about as well as ever. Regardless, it’s past time any residual regard for the Pulitzer Prizes evaporate. After a century plus they’re as captured and corrupt an institution as any—not that they don’t still recognize some legit reporting, but that they’re no longer grounded in a conception of the common good that most Americans of either party would recognize. Instead they’ve become shiny talismans of shopworn narratives from Davos and the Hamptons, such that you hardly have to read the awardees to know what line they’re selling.”