Two Pulitzer Ironies

When this year’s Pulitzers were announced earlier this week I was gratified to see the Wall Street Journal win what many minds regard as the best of the best; the Pulitzer for public service reporting. The category implies a relevance much broader than, say, Pulitzers for editorial cartooning or even novel-writing.

But two ironies jumped immediately to mind:

One, from beginning to end the Journal produced 17 stories laying out the details of a scandal that eventually effected 150 companies, and all the way along the paper’s reporters and news editors were hectored and diminished by the paper’s notoriously retrograde opinion page. Here is a nice analysis of all that.

The second irony was/is that the key scoundrel in the Pulitzer-winning story was Minnesota’s own United Health and its fair-haired CEO, Dr. Bill McGuire. Now, as the above linked-to essay explains, the Journal brought serious and seriously-talented resources to bear, once tantalized by a relatively obscure Professor’s wonky conjecture.

So … I have to wonder, as I continue to watch what can only be described as willful avoidance on the part of the Star Tribune to — at the very least — add context and background on the US Attorneys scandal – Rachel Paulose “connection”, if we aren’t witnessing something very like the chumpy cheerleading that passed for reporting as UnitedHealth and McGuire amassed staggering fortunes amid runaway health care costs in a national crisis.

In days of yore, investigative reporters’ noses would begin twitchy instinctively at numbers like UnitedHealth and McGuire were regularly posting. Those of course were the days when second-tier papers like the Strib encouraged their reporters to take time to stick their noses in where they weren’t appreciated, on the off-chance that following the money might lead to a story effecting the entire community.