ANALYSIS/OPINION:
On April 7, it was announced by the Pulitzer Prize committee that this year’s winners would be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the news barely registered. This week, the 2020 winners were announced even though America remains in the midst of a national health crisis, and the news still didn’t break through. It wasn’t long ago that awards such as this were discussed outside elitist circles — similar to the Academy Awards, the Nobel Peace Prize and Time magazine’s person of the year — but the luster’s come off these days.
Due to a more educated public, alternative news sources and social media, the American people have a clearer understanding of the liberal bias inside the fake news divisions of the mainstream media. This was caused by the election of the ultimate political outsider Donald Trump, who’s made it a priority to call out fake news.
Other so-called prestigious awards are also being met with a more skeptical eye from the public at large. When you consider President Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize after being in office for just nine months and 17-year old environmental activist Greta Thunberg won Time’s person of the year last year, why would folks continue to take these awards seriously?
The American people have grown sick and tired of establishment liberals patting themselves on the back at annual black-tie award ceremonies where they proclaim their own importance and ask us to believe it. This is part of the reason why President Trump refuses to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and other stuffy establishment gatherings.
Now, the ongoing outrage over the FBI’s corrupt and grossly improper handling of their investigation into former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has brought the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting back into focus.
Pulitzer’s website indicates the award that year was given to “Staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post” for reporting “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 election and its connections to the Trump campaign …” It goes on to describe the winning journalism as “deeply sourced” and “relentlessly reported.” Once again, Trump Derangement Syndrome carried the day.
Pulitzer.org lists 20 news reports from the two news organizations on various aspects of the so-called Russia investigation between February and December of 2017, three of which named Mr. Flynn in the headline. Since these awards, the Trump-Russia saga has been exposed as a hoax brought to you by the fake news and a political witch hunt that wasted millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars.
Evidence now confirms that Mr. Flynn was framed by crooked cops at the top of the FBI in a concerted effort to “get” Mr. Trump. As it turns out, the only thing Mr. Flynn did was work on Mr. Trump’s winning campaign in 2016. For that, the FBI and the office of special counsel Robert Mueller sought to destroy his life for more than three years for something they knew wasn’t true. We now know it took the notorious and disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok to re-kindle the Flynn probe in 2017 when the FBI investigation was about to be closed.
The Washington Post and The New York Times should return these awards if Pulitzer doesn’t have the standards to take them away. This is crucial — if credibility still matters. A further review of the articles the Pulitzer committee referenced as their rationale for giving out the awards shows how incredibly baseless and partisan the entire anti-Trump Russia narrative turned out to be. In fact, the central pillars of the Russia charade that allowed the mainstream media and their allies in the Democratic Party to keep the story alive have since crumbled to the ground.
Not only is Mr. Flynn an American hero, he’s an innocent man. And there’s wide agreement that Mr. Trump did exactly the right thing in firing former FBI Director James Comey when he did. Furthermore, ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier turned out to be a healthy mix of Russian disinformation and propaganda, and special counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia whatsoever.
In the final analysis, these stories didn’t “dramatically” further “the nation’s understanding of Russian interference.” Sadly, they accomplished the exact opposite. Politics corrupted the Trump-Russia investigation, and that’s what has delegitimized the mainstream media and awards for journalism like the Pulitzer Prize. Sadly, the liberal media and their allies in the deep state care more about power than truth and justice.
The report that should have won the Pulitzer Prize was never written. It’s the frightening true story of what Mr. Comey, Mr. McCabe, and Mr. Strzok at the FBI and Mr. Mueller’s team of angry Democrats did to Michael Flynn, an American patriot who served his country honorably for more than three decades. We can only speculate as to how and why the most powerful news organizations missed the biggest story of year. Someone should do a story on that.
• David N. Bossie is the president of Citizens United.
