And the Pulitzer goes to...

As Barack Obama accepted his Nobel Prize for peace this week, I was reminded of just how disingenuous these awards can be. In his speech, the president did a reasonable job of trying to reconcile the fact that he was escalating a war in one country and presiding over a war in another, and the fact that he is winning a prize for peace. The audience was still left to scratch its head and wonder if there might have been a more deserving if less attention grabbing choice. I'm left to wonder who the committees for some of these prestigious awards might pick as winners if they kept true to the guiding principles of their founders. For example, Alfred Nobel held the patent for dynamite and owned a large arms manufacturer, but has a prize for peace given in his name. (The story is that Bertha von Suttner, a women Nobel loved and corresponded with for years, convinced Nobel to include the peace prize in his endowment for the awards. She won the award herself in 1905.) In a few short months, the winners for another prestigious award will be decided. The Pulitzer is given to authors in many categories, with a focus on journalism. Should the committee wish to live up to the legacy of Joseph Pulitzer, than one of its awards should certainly go to Fox News' own, Glenn Beck.

The good people at Columbia University who administer the award would like us all to remember the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (still a major paper), the journalism school at Columbia, and the bequest for the awards themselves when we remember Joseph Pulitzer. That, of course, isn't the whole story. In 1883, Pulitzer purchased the New York World, a relatively unsuccessful New York based paper. While the paper had perhaps the nation's first investigative journalist in Nellie Bly, the hard hitting new stories generally weren't what garnered the attention. Pulitzer introduced the nation's first color supplement to a newspaper, had popular contemporary comic strips, and sold advertising space. All the while, the paper was damned by contemporaries as a sensationalist paper. When William Randolph Hearst burst onto the scene in 1895 with his New York Journal, the two engaged in a ruthless circulation battle that sullied the reputations of both men. The charge is always made that Hearst helped to incite the Spanish-American War, but Pultizer's role in those events can not be ignored. Each was motivated by his own greed and drive to out sell the other. Stories were routinely exaggerated or outright fabricated to increase national pride or demonize the Spanish for their presence in Cuba. When the American battleship, Maine, exploded in the Havana harbor in 1898, the public was enraged. The explosion itself was an accident, but the World and Journal both claimed to have confidential information that proved the ship was destroyed by Spanish agents. This proved to be completely false, but not until after popular sentiment coerced President McKinley into military action against Spain. Both papers enjoyed record setting sales during this entire scandal, of course.

So who in modern journalism carries on this tradition of sales at the expense of truth? It's true that most news outlets are more concerned with increasing profits than the ideal calling of the journalist: pursuit of truth. However, most of these do so by concentrating on public interest stories of little value to the national discussion on important issues. There is one man who carries on the tradition of Pulitzer and Hearst, and that man is Glenn Beck. What makes Beck different is that he fully admits he is being speculative and offers nothing but wild conjecture. For example, in 2006 Beck interviewed the first Muslim Congressman in our nation's history. He asked:

"OK. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I've been to mosques. I really don't believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I -- you know, I think it's being hijacked, quite frankly. With that being said, you are a Democrat. You are saying, 'Let's cut and run.' And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know you're not. I'm not accusing you of being an enemy, but that's the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

This is the kind of program Beck developed. He plays on the fears at the root of the American psyche. He is a rabble-rouser cut from the mold of Hearst and Pulitzer at their lowest. However, those men did what they did in the endless pursuit of profit and circulation. For Beck to really fit this mold, his nightly fear mongering needs to net him large amounts of money. According to watchdog group Media Matters, after urging his viewers to invest in a safe product like gold, advertisements ran for Goldline International. As it turns out, Goldline and 3 other gold sellers (Rosland Capital, Merit Financial, and Superior Gold Group) are long time advertisers on the Beck program. Goldline assured Fox News that Beck was not paid for an endorsement, nor is he a spokesperson for the company. Both of these would be egregiously unethical and grounds for dismissal from Fox. Comedy Central's The Daily Show, then aired a video of Beck specifically endorsing Goldline International in a commercial. So Beck creates sensationalist journalism designed to foster a climate of economic fear and doubt, suggests that his viewers buy gold to keep their money safe, and is then paid by the gold sellers for this advocacy disguised as public service.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2010 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in the category of Commentary, Glenn Lee Beck.