The Pulitzer Prize for Commentary was awarded yesterday to Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times “[f]or a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America’s story, prompting public conversation about the nation’s founding and evolution.” Andrew McCarthy delivered a prize-worthy comment on the award via Twitter (below).
Not since Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize has there been so perfect …
— Andy McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) May 4, 2020
The award to Hannah-Jones raises one question in my mind. Which is the more rotten institution, the Pulitzer Prize or the New York Times? I’d go with the Times, but that strikes me as a difficult question.
Among the prominent responses to the Times’s 1619 Project are Wilfred McClay’s “How The New York Times Is Distorting American History” in Commentary, Sean Wilentz’s “A Matter of Facts” in the Atlantic, Gordon Wood ‘s letter to the Times along with James McPherson’s interview and Clayton Carson’s interview, all at the World Socialist Web Site, Peter Wood’s “The New York Times Revises The 1619 Project, Barely,” at the National Association of Scholars, and various contributors to “The 1619 Project Exposed: A Special Edition of the American Mind Podcast” at the American Mind. See also the various contributors to The 1776 Project and Paul Mirengoff’s “Slavery and the American Revolution” on Power Line.
UPDATE: Our friend Roger Kimball writes to comment by email: “You ask which is worse, the Pulitzer Prizes of the NYT. I, too, think it doubtful that we have instruments fine enough to decide. Encounter Books is countering with a book called 1620: The True Beginning of the American Republic by Peter Wood (1620 was the date of the Mayflower compact). We are hoping to mount a big campaign for it to dislodge the mendacious 1619 Project from its place in school curricula (it’s current been adopted in whole or part by 4500 schools).” Roger’s New Criterion editorial on the subject is “1619 and all that.”
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