If you were to pick the biggest story of 2024, it would probably be Donald Trump’s election victory. But if you were a Pulitzer Prize committee member and your job was to pick the award-winning news of the year, the first attempted assassination of Trump would be a pretty good choice.
The committee did that, which made total sense. What did not make sense were the specific award winners. Then again, Pulitzer Prizes have become so politicized that we’ve come to expect obnoxious left-wing choices for the “honor.” In this case, the winners in the photo and breaking news categories fit the usual mold.
I’ll start with the photo (above). Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci’s photo of Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents after being shot, defiantly raising his fist and shouting “fight, fight, fight,” was clearly the picture of the year. Maybe the decade. EVERYONE remembers that iconic visual — one of the most striking photos in American history — and you could make the case that it won him the election.
But it didn’t win the Pulitzer.
To be sure, the photo that did win was certainly deserving. New York Times photographer Doug Mills captured the moment that the bullet whizzed past the president’s head after grazing his ear. That’s a remarkable accomplishment, albeit one almost totally by chance. “I kept hitting on the shutter,” Mills said, reflecting on his award and work. He said he talked to one of the paper’s editors and advised her, “This might have been near the moment where he was shot. … She called me back like five minutes later and said, ‘You won’t believe this.’ She goes, ‘We actually see a bullet flying behind his head,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh.’”
To think of the alternative had Trump not slightly turned his head as the shot was fired is to shudder that the unthinkable would have been caught on camera.
Mills’s picture is incredible for its timing and detail, as well as the fact that he bravely stood his ground when shots were being fired in his direction. However, the left-wing bias comes through in that the Vucci photo makes Trump look like an American hero, and that simply wasn’t going to win the award. (By the way, Vucci testified against Trump in March after the White House kicked the AP out of the press pool over that whole “Gulf of America” thing. That good-soldier act still didn’t earn him the prize.)
The more egregious example of the Leftmedia’s propaganda is that of the breaking news win for The Washington Post. The same paper that broke Watergate and has been dying to take down another Republican president ever since led its assassination story with this headline: “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally.”
Uh, “loud noises”?
It’s not necessarily everyone’s first instinct when hearing a gunshot from 100 yards away to think it’s a gunshot. Fireworks or some other racket is a believable alternative. Yet the paper’s breaking news included a photo of a bloodied Trump, which kind of undermines the “loud noises” bit. It was obvious after a few seconds that it was gunshots. Those shots from an assassin’s rifle wounded Trump, as well as two other crowd members, David Dutch and James Copenhaver. One shot killed firefighter Corey Comperatore, who died shielding his wife and daughter.
Media outlets “reported cautiously about what had occurred,” insisted the WaPo’s Paul Farhi two days later. “It wasn’t immediately clear what was unfolding.” No, the gravity of the situation was obvious in plenty of time to avoid a silly “loud noises” headline, but The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, and other Leftmedia propagandists ran with it anyway.
Oddly enough, the Post doesn’t mention “loud noises” at all in its self-congratulatory write-up about its prize.
The Washington Post, you may recall, won (and never returned) a Pulitzer for its fake news on the Russia collusion hoax. Along with The New York Times (which also won for fake history about the 1619 Project), the two leading left-wing DNC propaganda rags won their prizes for reporting falsehoods and sticking to them for months and years.
“No passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the Pulitzer board said in a statement after reviewing those prizes. “The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”
Other than the entire story being fake, it was accurate. No wonder it won the Pulitzer. And no wonder Americans have less trust in the legacy media than ever.
Exit question: Rather than Pulitzers for nonsensical reactions, how about an intrepid reporter somewhere digs into details about the would-be assassin? Here we are, approaching a year later, and we still know basically nothing about him.
