Less than a week after Donald Trump Jr. named #PizzaGate conspiracy theorist and alt-right personality Mike Cernovich as a chief contender for the Pulitzer Prize, the prestigious journalism award instead went to several actual reporters whose work was fully deserving of the accolade. What’s more, many of the announced recipients were awarded for work that was largely critical of Trump Jr.’s father and his presidential campaign — including the Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold, whose journalism chiefly covered the New York real estate mogul turned politician’s problematic charitable group, the Donald J. Trump Foundation.
According to the Post, Fahrenthold won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting specifically “for his pioneering work exposing the distance between image and reality in Donald Trump’s philanthropy.” Throughout the 2016 campaign, Fahrenthold kept a public log of every single one of Trump’s alleged charitable donations to various organizations and events via his Twitter account. Combined with occasional (but diminishing) access to the Trump campaign, additional reporting and monstrous amounts of fact-checking, he discovered some pretty awful things about Trump’s claims (i.e. most were false) and immediately found himself on the receiving end of the eventual president’s attacks.
Meanwhile, ProPublica — the “left-wing blog” that recently got into an online argument with Press Secretary Sean Spicer — will share the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with the New York Daily News. Together, the digital and print outlets investigated widespread cases of the New York Police Department’s alleged misuse of an archaic nuisance law. Per the New York Times, which also won three awards, the joint winners “found that the Police Department almost exclusively targeted households and shops in minority neighborhoods,” which resulted in a re-examination of the law and new reforms.
Multiple New York Times reporters also won Pulitzers. You can read the full list of winners here.
(Via New York Times and Washington Post)