Free Republic

In 1977, William McPherson earned the top honor in the writing world when he was honored with a Pulitzer Prize.But nearly four decades later, the former Washington Post critic now hovers on the brink of poverty thanks to a failing pension and a bit of bad luck on the stock market.In a heartbreaking essay for The Hedgehog Review, McPherson describes what it's like to become poor in old age-as part of a overlooked group who are neither middle or lower class.Former teachers and even lawyers who can't pay their bills but aren't on the streets begging for change.Surprisingly, he says...

Tony Auth, 72, of Wynnewood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and mainstay of The Inquirer's editorial page for four decades before resigning in 2012 to become a digital artist, has died. Mr. Auth had been under treatment for metastatic brain cancer. David Leopold, his friend and curator, said he died at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on Sunday, Sept. 14, four days after his supporters announced a fundraising effort for an archive devoted to his work at Temple University. Mr. Auth's remarkable career began in 1971 when the fledgling artist from California flew in to Philadelphia to interview for...

A federal judge in Newark has thrown out a lawsuit against the New York Police Department for spying on New Jersey Muslims, saying if anyone was at fault, it was the Associated Press for telling people about it. In his ruling Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martini simultaneously demonstrated the willingness of the judiciary to give law enforcement alarming latitude in the name of fighting terror, greenlighted the targeting of Muslims based solely on their religious beliefs, and blamed the media for upsetting people by telling them what their government was doing. The NYPD’s clandestine spying on daily...

Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent more than two decades at The New York Times, where he displayed range, rigor and lucid writing as a White House correspondent, as Jerusalem bureau chief and as an editor, died on Tuesday in Washington. He was 61. The cause was acute undiagnosed leukemia, resulting in respiratory failure from pneumonia, said his wife, Sabra Chartrand. Mr. Brinkley was a son of David Brinkley, the widely respected television news anchor, and he established his own journalism reputation early in his career. In 1980, while working at The Louisville Courier-Journal, he won a Pulitzer...

On April 8, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi headlined a Boston conference on ''media reform.'' She was joined by four other congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. The 2,500-person event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, one of more than 180 different media-related organizations that receives money from liberal billionaire George Soros. Soros, who first made a name for himself in investing and currency trading, now makes his name in politics and policy. Since the 2004 election, the controversial financier has used his influence and billions to push a laundry list...

With two Pulitzer Prizes to her name, Dana Priest is one of the Washington Post’s most celebrated reporters. Until Monday, when the Post published the first installment of a bombshell series on post-9/11 intelligence industrial complex, national security blogger William Arkin was hardly known to the paper’s readers. But from a media perspective, Arkin’s role as co-author of the series might be the more important. It marks the first time one of the Post’s bloggers – lately the cause of controversy because they sometimes blur opinion and reporting — has had a byline in one of the paper’s big, investigative...

Elliott Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who fused European and American modernist traditions in seminal but formidable works, and who lived to hear ovations for music that was once thought to be anything but listener-friendly, died Nov. 5 at his home in New York City. He was 103.

They called him Punch, and he earned the sobriquet. A Marine, he came home from serving in the Pacific theater, then in the Korean Conflict, to help run the family business, which in the case of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was the New York Times. Imagine that -- somebody with a military background running the Times. Even harder to imagine these days, when the good gray New York Times has become as pretentious as it is ideological, is that it once had a publisher with a sense of humor. Punch Sulzberger used to say his family never worried about him when...

Book Gives Details of 1932 'Killing by Hunger' in UkraineROME, NOV. 17, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The sober skies and short days of November remind Romans that this is the month to pray for the dead. It seems fitting that this month opened with a presentation of new documents regarding one of the most tragic -- and virtually unacknowledged -- events of the modern age, the Ukrainian Famine. "The Holy See and the Holodomor: Documents from the Vatican Secret Archives on the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine" by Father Athanasius McVay and Professor Lubomyr Luciuk was released Oct. 26 with...

FULL TITLE - St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact, Lane DeGregory win 2009 Pulitzer Prizes For the first time in its 125-year history, the St. Petersburg Times has won two Pulitzer Prizes in a single year. Staff writer Lane DeGregory, 42, captured the feature writing category for "The Girl in the Window," a moving account of a Plant City child whose mother kept her locked in a filthy room, and the adoptive family who worked to overcome her feral beginnings. The Times staff won the national reporting prize for PolitiFact, a Web site, database and "Truth-O-Meter'' that tests the validity of political...

Public Service: Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier. Breaking News Reporting: The Seattle Times staff. Investigative Reporting: Barbara Laker and Wendy Ruderman of the Philadelphia Daily News and Sheri Fink of ProPublica, in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine. Editorial Writing: Tod Robberson, Colleen McCain Nelson and William McKenzie of The Dallas Morning News Fiction: "Tinkers" by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press) Drama: "Next to Normal," music by Tom Kitt, book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey Commentary: Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post

(CNN) -- Enquiring minds want to know: Will The National Enquirer win a Pulitzer Prize? It could happen. On Monday afternoon, print journalism's highest honors will be announced, and among the candidates for investigative and national news reporting prizes is that bastion of supermarket check-out lanes, home of Elvis and Roseanne, The National Enquirer. It's being considered for its work breaking the John Edwards sex scandal, a story it followed when much of the so-called "mainstream media" was looking the other way. The Pulitzer committee originally questioned the Enquirer's submission because of a dispute over whether it was a "newspaper"...

The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday. Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.Jones' reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's...

Ghost writer revealed!

Author’s note: On May 24th, the start of the Memorial Day weekend, I sent the protest reproduced below to the Pulitzer Prize Committee. If Boycott NYT readers also find this award outrageous, the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism is Nicholas Lemann (lemann@columbia.edu). The address: Columbia School of Journalism, 2950 Broadway, NY, NY 10027. My journalistic colleagues (and there really are some good ones though most are even older than me!) characterize the Pulitzer Committee as “stubborn as mules and dumber than rocks.” The reason: the committee never acknowledges a mistake or rescinds an award, no matter how egregious...

Retired military analysts are reacting with outrage that the Pulitzer committee awarded one of its prestigious prizes for a story discredited by an independent investigation, special correspondent Rowan Scarborough reports.

Hryhory Haraschenko tells the stories feverishly, in a voice that brooks no interruption, gesticulating wildly with veined hands. He hauls out his stash of carefully bundled newspaper clippings, witness' tales and pencil-drawn maps. ... At 89, Haraschenko is among a dwindling number of Ukrainians who survived the Soviet-era famine of the early 1930s. Like other survivors and some historians, he regards the starvation -- known here as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger" -- as an act of genocide engineered to wipe out the Ukrainians. He wants it discussed, and he wants it recognized by the world. "Russia is afraid...

Ukraine's Pursuit of Genocide Designation Upsets Russians Who Say Others Died, Too MOSCOW -- Relations between Russia and Ukraine, bedeviled by disputes over natural gas supplies and NATO expansion, have lately been roiled by one of the great tragedies of Soviet history: the famine of 1932-33, which left millions dead from starvation and related diseases. Ukraine is seeking international recognition of the famine, which Ukrainians call Holodomor -- or death by hunger -- as an act of genocide. When Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin forced peasants off their homesteads and into collective farms, special military units requisitioned grain and other food...

It’s all the rage with Democratic presidential candidates – vilifying the haves to win over the have-nots. However, the class warfare card is also in play for recent Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post columnist. Pearlstein participated in an online chat on the Post’s Web site April 8. Although he did not advocate direct government action, he told reader it’s time ostracize CEOs “making obscene salaries.” “No, not time for government intervention, actually,” Pearlstein wrote. “But it surely is time for people to treat CEOs who behave in this way like social and political paraiahs [sic], which is...

Investor's Business Daily cartoonist and Senior Editor Michael Ramirez won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday, his second win of the nation's most prestigious journalism award and the newspaper's first in its 24-year history. Ramirez won the 2008 award for a "distinguished cartoon or portfolio of cartoons published during the year, characterized by originality, editorial effectiveness, quality of drawing and pictorial effect." In awarding Ramirez, the Pulitzer panel lauded his "provocative cartoons that rely on originality, humor and detailed artistry." We couldn't agree more. "Michael is in a league of his own and at the top of his game," said Wesley...