Pulitzer Board Rebukes Juror Eliana Johnson for Calling Out Winner Who Mocked Israeli Hostages
The Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief took issue with recent comments by Mosab Abu Toha, who won the commentary category The post Pulitzer Board Rebukes Juror Eliana Johnson for Calling Out Winner Who Mocked Israeli Hostages appeared first on TheWrap.
Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson, who was invited to participate in a Pulitzer Prize nominating jury on national reporting, was rebuked by the board for calling out a winner in the commentary category who mocked Israeli hostages – and responded by calling their lecture on confidentiality “preposterous.”
The conservative journalist questioned whether Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha – whose essays in the New Yorker won the commentary Pulitzer for “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience” – had been properly vetted. Weeks before jury deliberations began, Toha wrote on Facebook that a woman kidnapped from her home on Oct. 7 was not a “hostage” and criticized the media for humanizing kidnapped Israelis.
“Imagine for a moment a Pulitzer going to an extremist Israeli settler poet who had minimized and mocked the suffering of civilians in Gaza,” Johnson wrote on Friday in the Beacon. “You can’t, because it would never happen.”
Johnson says she internally pressed the Pulitzer board on whether Toha was vetted – and whether fellow jurors who openly criticized Israel immediately after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack had recused themselves from deliberations over the commentary prize.
Johnson wrote that in response, Pulitzer administrator Marjorie Miller accused Johnson of violating a confidentiality agreement, while allowing that while jurors are chosen for “character, expertise and integrity … we occasionally misjudge.”
“They sure do!” Johnson wrote. “Here we have an institution, ostensibly committed to supporting ‘fearless’ journalism, trying to strangle reporting about what was known to the jury and when — and which board members cast votes on this award.”
I was pretty sure when I received an email in November asking me to serve on a Pulitzer Prizer jury that it was a joke. Turns out, that wasn’t the joke 
Read More
