On the dust jacket of his new book, "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas," best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having "twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize."
In fact, as Goldberg acknowledged on Tuesday, he has never been a Pulitzer nominee, but merely one of thousands of entrants.
When this bit of résumé inflation was pointed out by a reporter for msnbc.com, Goldberg said he hadn't meant to mislead anyone and removed the Pulitzer claim from his bio at National Review Online. (Here's the page before and now.) And he added, "I never put it in the bio in the first place."...
What's surprising in Goldberg's case is that he has been called out for the same résumé padding before, when his previous book was published.
According to msnbc.com, this is how you get to be an Pulitzer "entrant" versus a nominee:
It's not uncommon for Pulitzer entrants to claim to be nominees. Here's how it works: Though there are only three nominees, known as nominated finalists, in each Pulitzer category each year, there are more than 2,000 entrants. One could say that all of them were "nominated" by someone. If all Pulitzer entrants could be called nominees, any publisher could give all its authors that honorific by submitting an entry form and a check for $50.
The Pulitzer rules make clear that the only people to be known as nominees are those finalists chosen by the Pulitzer juries. From those nominated finalists, the Pulitzer board chooses the winners. Everyone else is just an entrant. As the Pulitzer board's online list of frequently asked questions explains politely, "Work that has been submitted for Prize consideration but not chosen as either a nominated finalist or a winner is termed an entry or submission. ... We discourage someone saying he or she was 'nominated' for a Pulitzer simply because an entry was sent to us."
Besides violating the official rules, such claims mislead the public. Tell readers that you're an Academy Awards nominee, and they'll understand that you're one of the few finalists, not one of the many entrants submitted by movie studios. It's exactly the same with the Pulitzers.
I really don't take Goldberg seriously anyway, given how ignorant he is, and that the only reason he got the job at NR was because of who his mother is.
ReplyDeleteOver a decade ago he went at it with several Lewrockwell writers and did about as well as Krugman did vs Ron Paul in a series of written exchanges. It got so bad that William F Buckley ordered him to stop referencing lewrockwell.com because of how he was making NRO look in comparison.
ReplyDeleteMSNBC should next go after "nobel prize winner" Paul Krugman who won his award in something that has zero to do with what he writes and talks about on a daily basis while trying to use the award to appear as if he is an expert on monetary econ.