Media top headlines June 11
Jeffrey Toobin returning to CNN with an awkward interview, Vice President Harris snapping at anchor when she was pressed on visiting the border, and Glenn Greenwald tearing into Jim Acosta over Trump photo-op round out today’s top media headlines
The New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize in the public service category Friday for its coronavirus coverage, but many critics feel the award "has lost all meaning" after going to the liberal newspaper.
"The Pulitzer Prize has become just another incestuous left-wing institution that awards its friends and ignores merit," Spectator Washington editor Amber Athey told Fox News.
The paper has had a rocky few years from a public relations standpoint, with negative headlines ranging from ex-opinion editor Bari Weiss leaving the paper because she said colleagues bullied her to the debacle surrounding an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that resulted in the editorial page editor resigning amid internal outrage. While the paper has generated plenty of negative publicity, some of the Times’ recent gaffes are directly related to the coronavirus coverage it’s being honored for.
NThe New York Times received the Pulitzer Prize in the public service category for its coronavirus coverage, but many critics feel the award "has lost all meaning" after going to the liberal newspaper.
The paper got mixed up with Cotton once again in February when he suggested coronavirus may have originated in a Wuhan lab. The paper called it a "fringe theory" in a story that lumped it in with conspiracy theories and declared that Chinese authorities insist the outbreak began in a market where wild animals were sold.
Apoorva Mandavilli, who covers coronavirus stories for the newspaper, tweeted last month, "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here." She eventually deleted it, but she didn't back off from her argument.
However, since the Times shut down Cotton’s theory and even before Mandavilli sent her tweet, other experts and journalists have suggested there is strong evidence that the coronavirus pandemic resulted from a leak from a Chinese lab.
Experts are now calling for a deeper probe into the pandemic's origins, noting the Wuhan Institute of Virology's experiments on bat coronaviruses, prior red flags being raised about the riskiness of the experiments there, and the Chinese government's continued deceit and suspicious behavior when asked for critical documents and information by investigators.
Former star Times health reporter Donald McNeil Jr., was a key figure in the paper’s coronavirus coverage until he left the paper in February, after a report of supposedly offensive remarks on a student trip he made in 2019 caused an uproar among the paper's staff. McNeil has since accused the paper’s management of panicking and botching the situation, which stemmed him from reportedly using a racial slur in the context of asking a question about its usage. Regardless of who was at fault, McNeil no longer works with the group that won the prestigious award partially because of his contributions.
OUSTED NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER DONALD MCNEIL SLAMS NEWSPAPER'S LEADERSHIP, CULTURE IN SCATHING ESSAY
McNeil wrote he was buying into what the paper once called a "fringe theory."
"We still do not know the source of this awful pandemic," McNeil wrote in a Medium post. "We may never know. But the argument that it could have leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology or a sister lab in Wuhan has become considerably stronger than it was a year ago, when the screaming was so loud that it drowned out serious discussion."
McNeil did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Times’ taking home the Pulitzer.
McNeil added a lengthy deep dive into the origins of coronavirus that he worked on when still employed at the paper was never published.
"The decision to award the New York Times for its coronavirus coverage after they called the lab leak hypothesis a ‘conspiracy theory’ – and reportedly refused to publish one reporter’s real investigation into the origins of the virus – is just the latest proof that the award has lost all meaning," Athey said.
The Times was awarded the Public Service honor for "courageous, prescient and sweeping coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond, and filled a data vacuum that helped local governments, healthcare providers, businesses and individuals to be better prepared and protected," according to the Pulitzer website.
Many others took to Twitter to criticize the decision:
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Fox News’ David Rutz and Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.