And The Award Goes To...The Circuit Court Of The Nineteenth Judicial Circuit In and For Okeechobee County, Florida
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Smith tells the story of the strange controversy over a journalism award that’s been going down in a Florida courthouse.
Ben is Editor-in-Chief of Semafor and co-host of the Mixed Signals podcast. He used to be tThe New York Times media columnist and was founding editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News.
Sign up for our newsletter to read the lengthy listener criticism that helped inspire Brian to do this episode: www.kcrw.com/questioneverthing
“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's award season right now, and that's what we're going to get into today. A strange story |
| 0:04.7 | about an award that is unfolding as we speak. Sure, at their best awards celebrate actual, |
| 0:10.5 | timeless excellence, but there's no avoiding that there's still a reflection of the fields they |
| 0:15.3 | spring from, of the turf wars and politics and biases going on inside an industry at the moment when an award is given. |
| 0:22.7 | Case in point, Beyonce didn't get a single country music award nomination for Cowboy Carter in September. |
| 0:28.5 | A scandal. But then a couple weeks ago, at the Grammys, she won album of the year for it, |
| 0:33.8 | which as we know, she had never won until this year, despite all her years turning up bangers. |
| 0:39.5 | That's a snapshot of the music industry right now, and the country music industry, the fault |
| 0:44.7 | lines within them, between them. |
| 0:48.1 | Journalism has its own Grammy Awards. |
| 0:50.8 | The most prestigious honor in our industry is the Pulitzer Prize. |
| 0:55.3 | And today on the show, |
| 1:00.6 | we have a story about someone who is furious about an award the Pulitzer's gave and has been trying for years to get them to retract it. Something the Pulitzer's do not do easily. |
| 1:06.5 | The most egregious, widely reviled Pulitzer ever was Walter Durante's reporting in the New York Times about how great Stalin was. |
| 1:13.9 | They refused to retract that after reviewing it because they agreed it was despicable. |
| 1:17.7 | But they said, you know what? It doesn't seem like he was lying. |
| 1:22.1 | This is Ben Smith. He runs the news site semaphore. |
| 1:25.7 | Before that, he was the New York Times media columnist. And before that, he was editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News. I'm going to talk to Ben about one story he's been sniffing out, about the journalism award controversy happening right now. There was just a big update yesterday, actually. A lawsuit of Trump's that I'm guessing you may not have heard of. A truly one-of-a-kind case. |
| 1:44.9 | He is suing the Pulitzer Board. |
| 1:48.1 | From placement theory in KCRW, I'm Brian Reed. |
| 1:51.0 | This is Question Everything. |
| 1:53.0 | Stick around. |
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