Pulitzer Prize, Meet the WALTER DURANTY PRIZE

We try not to be sore losers at PJ Media.

So after our first ever attempt at a Pulitzer Prize for Christian Adams & Hans von Spakovsky’s series “Every Single One” — revealing how every single Obama Justice Department appointee has been a liberal — lost this April, you won’t hear a peep out of us.   We will not complain even though a 2007 Pulitzer was awarded to a similar series that detailed how 57 percent of Bush’s Justice Department appointments went to conservatives. (Okay, that’s maybe a peep.)

We know the biases of the Pulitzer Prize and did not expect to win.

No, at PJ Media we don’t get mad or complain… we get even.

Starting this year, PJ Media, in conjunction with our good friends at The New Criterion, will be awarding the first annual Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity.

Walter Duranty — it will be recalled — was the New York Times’ Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and 1930s who whitewashed Joseph Stalin’s forced mass starvation of the Ukrainians (the Holodomor) and many other aspects of Soviet oppression.

Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his efforts.

Despite numerous attempts by Ukrainian organizations and others, the prize has never been revoked. Duranty’s photograph remains in its honored place on the New York Times’ wall along with the newspaper’s other Pulitzer winners.

The Duranty Award

The first annual Duranty Prize will be given for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year 2011-2012 (July 1, 2011 – June 30, 2012).

We will be officially accepting nominations from PJM and TNC readers starting May 1, 2012, at [email protected] (but if you want to go ahead now, no one’s going to stop you – the email address is functioning).

A Duranty Prize Committee of seven journalists and writers will then sift the nominations and decide the winner (or winners) to be announced at a ceremony in New York in the Fall.

Committee members are: Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon.

The intention of this award is to highlight the continuing extreme bias and misreporting of our media.  Nominations are welcome in text and video forms, in print or on the web.  The committee would appreciate an Internet link with your nomination.

Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize in the comments section.  You are free to put your nominations in the comments section as well, but in order for them to count, please remember to send them to [email protected].