'Supermarket tabloid' in Pulitzer revenge shock

With the ‘National Enquirer’ up for a Pulitzer in two categories, is the venerable prize being dragged into the gutter or is good journalism at last getting due recognition in the face of liberal snootiness?

IN THE late 1980s, New York gossip rag City Lightbroke a story about a hit-and-run accident involving a wealthy Wall Street bond trader and a black teenager from the Bronx projects. The story – sensationalist, prurient and totally inaccurate – was seized upon by an opportunistic community leader and a district attorney desperate to win votes. The trader, Sherman McCoy, was thrown to the lions; the journalist, a shiftless, hard-drinking English chap named Peter Fallow, undeservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for his efforts.

The whole of the above paragraph, of course, is fiction – it's the plot of Tom Wolfe's classic novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. This week, however, a real tabloid has been nominated for the real-life Pulitzer Prize – and it's not a made-up story. The National Enquirer, fount of all knowledge on Wacko, Brangelina and Jennifer Aniston, is up for a 2010 Pulitzer for its work in wrecking the presidential ambitions of the US senator, John Edwards, by exposing the extra-marital affair and secret love child he'd been covering up during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The Enquirerhad been doggedly covering the scandal long before the traditional newspapers began reporting on it – a case of throw a story out there and see if it sticks. When asked if the stories were true, Edwards had dismissed them as "published in a supermarket tabloid". Now, that same tabloid finds itself in the running, with such serious publications as the New York Timesand the Washington Post, for the most prestigious prize in journalism. The Enquirerhas been nominated in two categories, Investigative Reporting and National News Reporting. Not bad for a publication whose top headline this week is "Jen and Jessica: Revenge on love rat John Mayer!"

"I think it's sad that the Enquireris being considered for such a venerable prize," says media-watcher Michael Foley, who teaches communications at the Dublin Institute of Technology. "Are they getting the nomination for good investigative journalism or for just being first to break the story? I do think the prize should go to the best story, but the Enquirerisn't always so in love with the truth as it seems to have been for this story. That said, if the Enquirerdoesn't get the prize, I would hope it's not because of snobbery."

Barry Levine, executive editor with the National Enquirer, told ABC News that the nomination was in recognition of "that persistence, that old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting that we exhibited on this story", and defended the paper's "chequebook journalism".

“We pay for tips that pan out . . . We don’t pay an individual if the story can’t be corroborated by independent sources,” he said.

In 2008, the New York Timeswon a Pulitzer Prize for revealing New York governer Eliot Spitzer's expensive call-girl habits. Levine's logic is, if the NY Times can do it, why can't the Enquirer?

Political blogger Paul Staines, better known as Guido Fawkes, told The Irish Times: "The establishment has been forced, no doubt through gritted teeth, to recognise good journalism. It was a good story pursued in the face of much snooty tut-tutting from the rest of the overwhelmingly liberal press."

Not everyone agrees with Fawkes's assessment. Indeed, not everyone – including the Pulitzer Prize committee – was agreed on whether the National Enquirercould accurately be called a newspaper. A month before its nomination, the Pulitzer committee said that the Enquirerwas not eligible for the prize because it called itself a magazine. Under Pulitzer rules, magazines and broadcast entities are excluded from consideration. The committee has since decided that the Enquireris eligible, but Michael Foley is still not convinced of its newspaper-ness.

"The Pulitzer committee should look at the context of the story," says Foley. "When I buy a newspaper, I want to believe that if they say a minister has resigned, then he really has resigned and is not going to appear in my kitchen along with some aliens. With a US tabloid like the Enquirer,I'm not sure what I'm reading. The Pulitzer committee are nominating a story that, if I had read it in its original context, I might not have believed."

The National Enquirerwas founded in 1926 with money borrowed from publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Originally called the New York Evening Enquirer, it was bought by an Italian publisher in 1952 who renamed it the the National Enquirer, turned it into a tabloid and boosted its circulation with lurid tales of sex and murder.

The Pulitzer Prize was established in 1917 at the behest of Hungarian-born publisher Joseph Pulitzer. Though Pulitzer was an advocate of high journalistic standards, he wasn’t averse to a bit of sensationalism now and then. He might even have smiled at the Enquirer’s nomination.