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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Pulitzer whys

How two first-rate pieces of economic reportage got downsized. Plus, Eileen McNamara's passion, and a poetic injustice.

by Dan Kennedy

The Pulitzer snub was not unexpected, but it was curious nevertheless.
Last year, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer produced remarkable pieces of economic reporting that helped explain in clear, understandable terms the human consequences of corporate downsizing and globalization.

The Times's March 1996 series, "The Downsizing of America," was a massive, seven-part effort involving a dozen reporters, overseen by managing editor (and former Inquirer editor) Gene Roberts.

The Inquirer, if anything, was even more ambitious. The two-time Pulitzer-winning team of Donald Barlett and James Steele, who have since departed for Time magazine, spent several years researching what ultimately turned out to be a 10-part series, "America: Who Stole the Dream?", published last September and expanded into a book.

Both series were bitterly attacked by conservative critics. And with low unemployment and low inflation creating an atmosphere of complacent prosperity, it's become intellectually faddish to sneer at concerns about free trade, immigration, and Wall Street's obsession with the bottom line.

Perhaps the Pulitzer judges are just trying to prove that they're in step with economic trends. In any case, it was notable that neither series brought home the gold, although the Inquirer's was recognized as a finalist in the public-service category.

Yet economic insecurity remains central to most people's lives. After all, unemployment and inflation were low a year ago, when Pat Buchanan's pitchfork peasants were storming to victory in New Hampshire. The resentments that Buchanan exploited -- falling wages, especially among the less educated, and rising income inequality -- continue to simmer below the surface, ready to flare again at the first sign of an economic downturn.

"I'm at a loss to figure out why Americans were so concerned in January [1996], but aren't now. I think the answer is Americans don't like that kind of bad news," says MIT economist Lester Thurow, an admirer of the Times's series. Thurow, a liberal, blames foreign competition for falling US wages. Like former Labor secretary Robert Reich, he advocates a massive education-and-retraining effort for the bottom 60 percent of the workforce.

These days, though, it would appear that Thurow and Reich have been eclipsed by Thurow's MIT colleague Paul Krugman, who is omnipresent on op-ed pages, opinion journals, even radio talk shows. Though Krugman is a liberal who's worried about growing inequality, he dismisses concerns about globalization and downsizing as statistically irrelevant. In a characteristic 1996 essay in Slate, Krugman wrote: "Both the number of `good jobs' and the pay that goes with those jobs are steadily rising. . . . America's middle class may be anxious, but objectively, it is doing fine."

Neither paper's work, unfortunately, made a lasting impression. The influence of even the mighty Times is limited if its voice isn't amplified by what Jeff Cohen, executive director of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, calls the "echo chamber" of network news programs, talking-heads shows, and the like. (For what it's worth, both series are still available on the World-Wide Web, the Times's at http://www.nytimes.com/specials/downsize/glance.html, the Inquirer's athttp://www.phillynews.com/packages/america96.)

Meanwhile, in the economic trenches, the race to the bottom continues. The latest development: welfare recipients, pushed into the workplace by welfare reform, competing with the working poor for low-paid jobs.

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The professional relationship between Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara, who won the Pulitzer for commentary, and Globe editor Matt Storin is notably rocky, yet they've found a way to co-exist.

McNamara, a veteran investigative reporter and former Nieman Fellow, actually quit the Globe in 1994, miffed in part over the treatment of her book about the case of Margaret Bean-Bayog, a psychiatrist accused of misconduct that may have led to a patient's suicide.

Sources say Storin was not unhappy to see McNamara leave. Yet in 1995, when Metro/Region columnist Bella English departed, Storin welcomed McNamara back to fill English's slot. And because both he and McNamara were willing to put aside their differences, the Globe has its third Pulitzer in as many years.

When reached earlier this week, McNamara declined to comment, citing a pressing deadline: "The phone is ringing off the hook, which is really nice, except that I didn't get a pass on tomorrow's column."

Storin, though, concedes that their relationship remains somewhat difficult. "One thing that will never change is that we're both argumentative and passionate, and we'll always have fights over things," he says. Nevertheless, he characterizes their relationship as one of "mutual respect and high expectations."

A friend of McNamara's puts it this way: "They both have big mouths, and they both spout off."

McNamara is a heart-on-her-sleeve liberal and a first-rate reporter whose work is infused with a well-honed sense of outrage. Her winning entries (online at http://www.boston.com/globe/columnists/mcnamara/pulitzer) cover such disparate subjects as the death of young pilot Jessica Dubroff, the New England Patriots' drafting of sex offender Christian Peters, and her haunting memories of a 20-year-old murder.

The Globe's run of three consecutive Pulitzers follows a drought that extended back to 1985. And Storin deserves considerable credit for the presence of two of the three winners: McNamara and Washington-bureau chief David Shribman, who won the 1995 prize for beat reporting. It was Storin, as executive editor under then-editor Jack Driscoll, who lured Shribman from the Wall Street Journal in 1992 after a previous effort had failed. The third Pulitzer, in criticism, was awarded to long-time architecture critic Robert Campbell in 1996.

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The arts scene is buzzing over the selection of Lisel Mueller for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. It's not just that Boston University's Robert Pinsky didn't win -- it's that Mueller, a 73-year-old German immigrant who lives in suburban Chicago, strikes many observers as a singularly uninspired choice.

"A number of people in the Boston literary community are just outraged," says a prominent member of the poetry world. "She's not someone that people have taken seriously, and it's one of the reasons that nobody knows who she is."

Indeed, even Mueller's hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, seemed unprepared, running a tiny blurb on Tuesday headlined NORTH SUBURBAN POET WINS PULITZER.

And the poetry editor of a major publishing house declined to assess her work. The reason? He hadn't read it.

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The Don't Quote Me archive

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Dan Kennedy's work can also be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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