By Post Editorial Board | New
York Post
Pulitzer malpractice: Apparently, willful error can
now win you the most elite prize in journalism.
As it was designed to do, The
New York Times’ woefully mistaken 1619 Project just won a Pulitzer Prize.
Worse, the award for commentary actually went to Nikole Hannah-Jones for her
essay introducing the series — that is, to the article that brought the most
sustained criticism from historians across the spectrum for its naked errors of
fact.
The project’s central conceit
is that “out of slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America
exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.”
Hannah-Jones even argued that the main reason American Revolution was fought to
preserve slavery — a claim so contrary to the truth that the Times eventually
corrected that part of her essay, though only to add two words: Now it
says “some of” the founders fought chiefly for that reason.
It’s still not true — and the
experts she consulted told her so. Leslie M. Harris, a black history prof at
Northwestern, says she warned Hannah-Jones: “Far from being fought to preserve
slavery, the Revolutionary War became a primary disrupter of slavery in the
North American Colonies.”
Apparently, willful error can
now win you the most elite prize in journalism.
Nor was that her only
distortion. Hannah-Jones also claims that President Abraham Lincoln “opposed
black equality.” As part of The Post’s weeklong Twisted History series on the
1619 Project, historian Allen
Guelzo pointed out that that Lincoln called for black voting rights
and was hailed by Frederick Douglass as “emphatically the colored man’s
president.”
But Hannah-Jones’ project barely
mentions Douglass — a giant of 19th century America — or other great
black freedom fighters. Even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the entire
civil-rights movement get short shrift because they contradict her thesis.
Slavery and Jim Crow are
tremendous stains on America’s history. But Hannah-Jones took it far beyond
that, insisting that they are the nation’s essence. That’s why the country’s
top US history scholars — Princeton’s Sean Wilentz and James McPherson, Brown’s
Gordon Wood, CUNY’s James Oakes — united
to denounce Hannah-Jones’ core claims.
Too bad the Pulitzer committee
now thinks that facts are irrelevant to journalism.
