Sen. Ted Cruz slammed the Pulitzer Prize Committee for
awarding the New York Times the top honor in commentary for
its 1619 Project.
The 1619 Project aimed to reexamine the legacy of slavery
in the United States and was timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of
the first Africans in Virginia. Critics of the project, including some historians,
have argued that the series is based on a flawed premise: that American
colonists revolted from England with the goal of maintaining slavery in
America.
"Pulitzer especially beclowns itself," Cruz
tweeted Monday. "Prize supposed to go to work that 'adheres to the highest
journalistic principles.' NYT’s 1619 project is explicitly not journalism; it
is propaganda."
He continued: "NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet was
caught in a leaked transcript admitting it blatantly political: “We built our
newsroom to cover one story [Russia collusion] & we did it truly well. Now
we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different
story.”
In the series' opening essay, award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about how Africans who came to the colonies in bondage have shaped the idea of traditional American values.
"We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that
we could never be American," she wrote. "But it was by virtue of our
bondage that we became the most American of all."
An editor's note was still present at the bottom of the
essay as of Monday, which reads, "A passage has been adjusted to make
clear that a desire to protect slavery was among the motivations of some of the
colonists who fought the Revolutionary War, not among the motivations of all of
them."
Other critics were quick to voice disgust that the prize
honored the 1619 Project.
