Snowden’s revenge: Journalists win Pulitzers for his NSA leaks

from foxnews

By Howard Kurtz 

Published April 14, 2014

FoxNews.com

Snowden’s Revenge: Journalists Win Pulitzers for His NSA Leaks

Ed Snowden, the fugitive from justice now hiding out in Moscow, didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize today. But his handiwork was rewarded in dramatic fashion.

The chief beneficiary of Snowden’s NSA leaks, liberal columnist Glenn Greenwald, shared the most prestigious of the prizes, the public service award, although it was issued in the name of the Guardian (which published his work along with that of colleagues Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill). Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, who also dealt extensively with Snowden, was given a Pulitzer for public service as well.

There had been some pregame chatter that the judges, operating under the auspices of Columbia University, might bypass the Guardian and the Post out of distaste for Snowden and his role in the leaks. But that was never a likely scenario.

Some conservative critics are sure to denounce the awarding of the Pulitzers because Snowden broke the law to furnish the journalists with hundreds of thousands of pages of classified material on the NSA’s massive surveillance program. Many are no fans of Greenwald, viewing him as a left-wing activist on national security issues, although in this case he functioned as a reporter and the accuracy of his work was not seriously challenged.

Snowden has managed to have it both ways in this debate: portraying himself as a truth-telling champion of civil liberties while avoiding the consequences of his actions by fleeing the country. Some big-name Republicans have called him a traitor.

But if the Pulitzer standard is breaking the most important and newsworthy stories of 2013, there is little question that those leaks utterly transformed the global debate over surveillance, and prompted President Obama to propose new restrictions on the way the NSA operates in pursuit of terrorists.

Whatever one thinks of Snowden, journalists often receive leaks from questionable characters as a way of getting their hands on solid information. The papers based in London and Washington were doing what news organizations do best, exposing what was being done in the name of the American people, even when that embarrassed the administration, as it surely did when it came to listening in on calls by Germany’s Angela Merkel and other foreign leaders.

We don’t know whether the FBI’s Mark Felt acted from truly public-spirited motives when he gave Bob Woodward secret information on Watergate, leading to a Pulitizer for the Post. And for more than three decades, the man dubbed Deep Throat remained a secret source.

Snowden, however, outed himself soon after Greenwald (a frequent critic of the establishment media) began publishing his scoops. So the debate over today’s Pulitzers is very much a debate over the former NSA contractor. But it did not stop the awards to two newspapers that did the difficult work of translating those complicated documents into groundbreaking exclusives.

In other awards, the Boston Globe won for its aggressive coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings. The Post won a second prize for Eli Saslow’s reporting on poverty in America. One non-traditional organization, the Center for Public Integrity, won a Pulitzer for a year-long probe of how doctors and lawyers worked against coal miners afflicted with black lung disease.

The New York Times, which often dominates the prizes, did not do so this year, but captured two awards for photography.