Why the WSJ and Bloomberg didn’t win Pulitzers for covering the crisis

Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review examines the reasons why The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News didn’t win Pulitzer Prizes for their work in covering the Wall Street crisis of the past three years.

Starkman writes, “But if I had to read the tea leaves on this one, I look to the National Prize, won by ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein, for their work exploring and unraveling the colossal scandal that was the financial crisis. One story in that series told how Wall Street banks, faced with difficulty in selling toxic debt, created fake demand, selling their unwanted CDOs to other CDOs. This is not a wonky detail. The actions grossly enlarged future losses borne by investors and the public. Another story reported how one hedge fund, Magnetar, on its own helped to perpetuate the housing bubble by having toxic CDOs created and betting against them.

“The full series is here: The more you learn, the worse it gets.

“I wonder if the Pulitzer jurors and board feel as I do, that we’re still in about the third inning of this profound and historic event and its aftermath. The virtuosity of Eisinger and Bernstein’s work aside — and it was virtuous indeed, as we said as the series unfolded — perhaps the best thing about it was that they decided to keep after the story after others had foolishly moved on. I always thought that was nuts, especially if you have the words ‘Wall Street’ in your name.

“I’m sure Bloomberg News, which has long sought a Pulitzer, is disappointed it, too, didn’t win. But the Bloomberg entries that made it among the finalists, as good as they were, also didn’t deal with the crisis, the business story, the story, really, of our time.”

Read more here.