Prize Fight

In 30 years of pinning posies on U.S. men of news and men of letters, the Pulitzer Prize Committee has never managed to please everybody. Typical complaints: the committee picks the obvious winners, it plays favorites, it confuses notoriety with merit. Usually the grumbling about the journalistic awards is confined to the city rooms; last week, in the Cowles Brothers' Minneapolis Tribune, it was right out on the editorial page for everybody to see.

Editor Carroll Binder (rhymes with grinder) was no disgruntled aspirant, but one of the Pulitzer Prize's preliminary pickers. He was a member of a nominating jury to weed out contenders for the $500 prize for international telegraphic reporting. Disregarding the jury's verdict (which recommended a prize to the New York Herald Tribune's Arch Steele), the committee handed the prize to roly-poly Eddy Gilmore, inoffensive Moscow correspondent of the Associated Press (TIME, Aug. 12).* It was the A.P.'s eleventh Pulitzer Prize. And an award to Brooks Atkinson (for a fine series of dispatches on Russia) was the New York Times's 20th.

Binder's beef: it was getting monotonous. He thought Atkinson's work first-class, but added, in an editorial: "A prize to the Times would mean more if comparable work on other newspapers also received due recognition. . . . [And] to single out Gilmore for a prize in the same year in which Atkinson's work is honored is illogical, for Gilmore's correspondence has been as unrevealing as Atkinson's was revealing--as sugary and soft as Atkinson's was tart and crisp.

"With a Russian wife and with the representation of his press association to safeguard in a police state, Gilmore is not to be blamed for leaving the seamy side of Russian news unreported. . . . But why hand out a prize for that kind of work when more independent and discerning foreign correspondents have provided their readers with really distinguished telegraphic reporting ... from Far Eastern and European areas where the going has been far from easy?"

* The committee also rejected the recommendation of the editor-jurors on the best editorial', the best cartoon and the best reporting of the year. Four of the eight final winners (TIME, May 12) were from papers represented on the committee.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.