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.”
Johnson says when she agreed to serve on the nominating jury for the national reporting category in November, she signed an agreement “to keep my membership on the jury and our selection of finalists confidential ‘pending the formal announcement of the winners.’”
“The Pulitzer board’s position that any reporter who participates on one of its many juries is prohibited from doing any reporting about the organization itself –even when one of its awards has become an international news story — is preposterous,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson says it took “half a second” for Abu Toha’s public remarks to emerge after his win.
“How on earth is this girl called a hostage? (And this is the case of most ‘hostages’),” Toha wrote on Facebook weeks before deliberations got underway. “This is Emily Damari, a 28-year-old UK-Israeli soldier … So this girl is called a ‘hostage?’ This soldier who was close to the border with a city that she and her country have been occupying is called a ‘hostage.’”
Damari was abducted from her home, spending nearly 16 months as a Hamas captive. She has since denounced the Pulitzer’s prize for Toha, saying it honors “a voice that denies truth, erases victims, and desecrates the memory of the murdered.”
Johnson said her questions included whether members of the Pulitzer board were aware of Toha’s statements, and whether members who have openly called Israel an “occupying power” recused themselves from the process. When Miller gave a “non-response response,” Johnson said, she began emailing Pulitzer board members directly.
“The vast majority did not reply,” Johnson wrote. “One cited a commitment to keeping the board’s deliberations confidential. I did not push back.”
That’s when Miller sent the email to Johnson, with the subject line “Confidentiality,” “alleging that my emails violated the confidentiality agreement I signed when I became a Pulitzer juror.”
Miller and her colleagues “have misjudged, starting with the minor issue of what the confidentiality agreement actually says,” Johnson said. “As part of providing my services to the Pulitzers, I agreed not to discuss deliberations over the National Reporting category, nor to reveal the finalists before the winner was announced. I did not agree to refrain from reporting on a separate category in which I had no role. … But hey, the Pulitzer board, they occasionally misjudge. Don’t you dare report on it.”
A message seeking comment from the Pulitzer committee was not immediately returned Saturday.