Hate and hackery: How the Pulitzer Prize destroyed itself

This week Mosab Abu Toha, a Hamas apologist and serial fabricator who vilified female Israeli hostages and justified their kidnapping on Oct.7, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for a series of essays about Gaza in The New Yorker.It is unsurprising, because the Pulitzer Prize has become an irremediable joke.You’d think that the Pulitzer, administered and awarded by Columbia University, would want to repair its tattered reputation after awarding a slew of debunked pieces that spread the Russia-collusion hoax.They went in another direction.The Pulitzer for “public service,” for instance, went to the leftist propaganda site ProPublica for “exposing the fatal consequences of abortion bans.”ProPublica is perhaps the nation’s leading purveyor of Potemkin journalism, which entails dressing up political propaganda with neutral-sounding journalistic verbiage to create the impression that you’ve done genuine reporting. Its abortion stories are perhaps the sloppiest and sleaziest of its catalog, even worse than its string of pitiful smears against Supreme Court justices. In a healthy environment, journalism schools would use them as prime examples of hackery and conjecture.Take its award-winning story on Amber Thurman.In August 2022, the 28-year-old North Carolina woman checked herself into a suburban Atlanta hospital emergency room, complaining of severe pain.

She was suffering from an infection caused by the remains of twin fetuses she had aborted by pill five days earlier.The first thing you’ll notice when reading ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters is that they fail to offer a single on-the-record source who maintains that abortion laws slowed or stopped doctors from providing medical help for Thurman.Not one.Indeed, a reader must plow through to the 57th paragraph of the article to find this throwaway line: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide [emergency help].”Not clear? That’s a re...