If Friedman’s work has changed at all since September 11, it’s that he’s made an effort to explain the world to ordinary readers — not just to government officials and opinion leaders.
"What I’ve tried to do is not just tell my readers who the terrorists and their supporters are, but to tell them who we are," he told Mpls St. Paul magazine, which profiled the Minnesota-boy-made-good on the eve of the Pulitzer announcements. "And my reaction has been very gut-level Middle American. It’s been a very Minnesota reaction." He explained the difference this way: "Used to be my dentist would read my columns. Now the hygienist is reading them too." Not to mention listening to him on Imus in the Morning, which, with some 15 million to 20 million listeners each week, has a considerably greater reach than the Times.
Friedman’s enemies are not just on the left; critics on the right have long complained about his harsh coverage of Israel’s policies in the disputed territories, especially his writings about the current prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
According to Mpls St. Paul, one of the first interviews Friedman ever did for his high-school newspaper, the Echo, was with a visiting Israel general — Sharon. Friedman’s first Pulitzer was awarded, in part, for his reporting on Sharon’s role in a massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
So there was something cosmically appropriate when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia used Friedman’s column earlier this year to unveil his Israeli-Palestinian peace plan: normal relations with Israel in return for the restoration of the 1967 borders and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Abdullah’s plan has been criticized as cynically self-serving (Saudi Arabia needs to burnish its image given that 15 of the 19 terrorists of September 11 were Saudi citizens). Moreover, he hypocritically blames Israel for the current round of violence, which in reality was set off by Palestinian terrorists after Yasser Arafat walked out of peace talks in mid 2000.
Nevertheless, it is significant that Saudi Arabia, among the most recalcitrant of the so-called rejectionist bloc, is willing to make peace with Israel on any basis — and significant, too, that Abdullah used Friedman as the intermediary. It was reminiscent of the late 1970s, when the legendary anchor Walter Cronkite mediated live, during the CBS Evening News, between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
A little over a year ago, Washingtonian magazine ranked Friedman as the seventh-most-influential journalist in the country (number one: NBC’s Tim Russert), calling him "perhaps the closest thing to a modern-day incarnation of Walter Lippmann."
Interestingly, when Mpls St. Paul asked Friedman about that, his reaction was not to genuflect in mock humility but to point out Lippmann’s faults: "Because what do we remember most about Walter Lippmann today? That he got the Vietnam War dead wrong!"
Pulitzer notes
• As worthy a winner as Friedman is, it was disheartening to see the Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff left out in the cold once again. Hentoff and Michael Daly, of New York’s Daily News, were both finalists in the commentary category — which means that Hentoff and Molly Ivins, of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, are still the two best columnists never to have won a Pulitzer.
• It’s been quite a run for Howell Raines, who became executive editor of the Times just days before September 11. Last week, the trade magazine Editor & Publisher honored Raines as its "editor of the year" (last year’s winner: Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, then executive editor of the Miami Herald). And for those who were surprised by the once-gray Times’ winning two photo awards, E&P notes that Raines is considerably more interested in photos than most of his predecessors. In fact, his first instinct after the terrorist attacks was to pull his camera out of his apartment and take a photo. "And then I literally remember having this conversation with myself: ‘Your photographers are doing their jobs. You need to get to the office,’ " he told E&P.
• New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser on Tuesday blasted the Pulitzer judges’ decision not to honor the now-famous photo of three firefighters with the flag taken by Thomas Franklin, of the Hackensack (New Jersey) Record. (Franklin’s photo was one of two finalists.) "The Pulitzer committee yesterday told the City of New York, our selfless firefighters, 3,000 victims of this nation’s bloodiest terror attack, and the American flag to go to hell," she wrote, adding: "Was it the American flag that spooked the current gaggle of Pulitzer committee members? Or was it that the firemen were all white guys?" Please. The truth is that Franklin was a victim of the Pulitzer rules, under which it is perfectly all right to pit one photo by one person against a portfolio of great work shot by an entire team of photographers.
• Among the few papers ever to win three Pulitzers in one year — the record until this week — was the Globe, in the waning years of the Tom Winship era. In 1980, op-ed columnist Ellen Goodman received the Pulitzer for commentary, television critic William Henry won for criticism, and the Spotlight Team won a "special local reporting" nod for a 10-part series on why the MBTA was "the most expensive and least productive major public transit system in the nation." (Well, at least it’s not the most expensive anymore.) Henry, who’s deceased, later worked for Time magazine.
• You’d like to think that the Wall Street Journal’s last-minute smear campaign was not the reason that the Seattle Times fell short in the investigative-reporting category. The Times had reported that patients in an experimental cancer-treatment program at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center were neither fully informed of the risks nor told of their doctors’ financial interests in the experiments — and that some died when conventional treatment might have prolonged their lives.
The six-part series was attacked on the Journal’s op-ed page by an assistant managing editor at the Journal, Laura Landro, a cancer survivor who’d been treated at the Hutch — and who failed to disclose her status as a major benefactor of the center.
Landro, of course, had every right to blast the Times series for what she saw as its inadequacies. But by unleashing her barrage just before the Pulitzers were announced, she created the impression that she was trying to use the power of the Journal to influence the judges.
Worse, she cheapened the award for the eventual winner — a three-reporter team for the Washington Post that exposed horrific shortcomings in DC’s child-protective services.
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dan@dankennedy.net
