The Pulitzer Prize board rejected the former president’s request to rescind The New York Times and The Washington Post’s awards on Monday, which he claimed was “running cover” for “the biggest reporting failure in modern history.”
The board stated earlier on Monday that it found no justification for complying with Trump’s repeated requests to rescind awards given to the two newspapers’ staffs in 2018 for their coverage of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“The Pulitzer Board has taken away any shred of credibility it had left with its ‘response’ regarding the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, which was awarded to The New York Times and The Washington Post for blatant fake news,” Trump said in a statement.
“Instead of acting with integrity and providing transparency, the Pulitzer Board is running cover for the biggest reporting failure in modern history: the fake Russia Russia Russia collusion hoax,” he added.
Then, according to Trump, the only time the two newspapers should receive a Pulitzer award is if a new category called “disinformation” was created.
“The truth is that the 2018 Pulitzer Prize was handed out for reporting that merely parroted political disinformation—disinformation that we know was fabricated by foreign operatives and my political opponents,” Trump said.
“If the Pulitzer Prize has become a blatant acknowledgment of false, liberal political propaganda, then the Pulitzer Board should just say so,” he added.
The board claimed to have reviewed the situation and discovered no justification for revoking the news outlets’ rewards.
“The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that 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 board said in its statement, adding, “The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”
As per Nytimes, Trump said that he would “continue doing everything possible to right the wrong caused by the 2018 Pulitzer Prize,” adding that he would do the same when it came to the Jan. 6 committee’s investigations into his involvement in the Capitol riot.
