By honoring The Washington Post with its most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize Board appeared intent on sending a message to two people: Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.
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On Monday, the Post received the Public Service Award for its reporting on the chaos unleashed by Elon Musk and his DOGE assault on the federal government. One of the lead reporters in that effort was Hannah Natanson, the target of an extraordinary raid by the FBI last January.
Natanson’s apartment was searched by agents in an attempt to identify one of her sources — a shocking move given that journalists are generally summoned to court and given an opportunity argue against being forced to turn over their documents. The judge who granted the search warrant later admonished the Justice Department for failing to tell him that the action was illegal under a 1980 law.
The award was a sign of respect for the Post’s journalists, whose billionaire owner, Bezos, has spent the past several years dismantling what he’d built up during the previous decade. Bezos has utterly trashed the paper’s opinion section. And though he has reportedly maintained his hands-off approach to news coverage, he cut his money-losing newsroom by nearly half in February of this year.
The message from the Pulitzer Board: The Post was still a great paper in 2025. Will it continue to be in 2026?
Holding Trump to account
Trump was also at the center of two other Pulitzers. The New York Times won in the investigative-reporting category for its “deeply reported stories that exposed how President Trump has shattered constraints on conflicts of interest and exploited the moneymaking opportunities that come with power, enriching his family and allies.”
And Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald received a special citation “for her groundbreaking reporting in 2017 and 2018 that exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s systematic abuse of young women, the justice system that protected him, and, over time, his powerful network of associates and enablers.” Why did it take so long? The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:
Alan Dershowitz, the attorney and television personality who helped broker Epstein’s original [plea] deal, wrote a letter to the Pulitzer committee that year, urging them not to honor Brown’s work.
Oh. Of course, we don’t know whether Dershowitz’s intervention was decisive. But it’s a reminder that the Epstein story, and the Trump regime’s ongoing cover-up of the Epstein files, remains very much with us.
Indeed, in Brown’s most recent newsletter, she predicts that Epstein’s co-offender, Ghislaine Maxwell, will receive a commutation or a pardon and be released from prison. Why? “There are plenty of people who want to make sure that whatever evidence Maxwell has stays buried for eternity,” Brown writes.
Jill Lepore and the Constitution
Harvard historian and journalist Jill Lepore added a Pulitzer to her long list of accomplishments Tuesday, as her book “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” won in the history category.
I haven’t read it, largely because it came out just as I was finishing the audio version of her outstanding one-volume history of the United States, “These Truths,” which I wrote about here. But I’ve heard her talk about “We the People,” and she has explained that one of her major themes is that we have lost the ability or the will to amend the Constitution as the founders had intended.
Certainly some changes are in order today, especially with regard to the Supreme Court and the Electoral College.
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