“Salt Lake Tribune wins Pulitzer for campus rape coverage, praises victims for sharing their stories”

I expect that some critics will eagerly seize this award — what don’t they seize? — as yet another weapon with which to bludgeon Brigham Young University and, more importantly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which sponsors the University.

But the fact is that there was a problem — an unintended and inadvertent problem, I’m absolutely certain, at the intersection of two values or priorities — and that this reporting called attention to the problem so that it could be fixed.  So I don’t begrudge the Tribune its prize:

http://www.sltrib.com/news/5161643-155/salt-lake-tribune-wins-pulitzer-for

Did the current climate of distrust of large organizations and specifically of religious institutions play a role in the judges’ decision?  Possibly.  Is the Deseret News increasingly the more intellectually interesting of the two newspapers?  I think so.  Should I have received the Pulitzer instead?  Absolutely.

Still, congratulations to the Salt Lake Tribune.

(Incidentally, my comment above about winning the Pulitzer myself draws on an actual experience:  When Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 — the first Arab to have garnered that prize — some magazine or other tracked down his fellow-countryman, the eminent Egyptian short-story writer Yusuf Idris [d. 1991], for a response.  The Nobel Prize was a wonderful tribute to the quality of Arabic literature, Idris was reported to have said.  “‘But,’ he quipped, ‘it should have gone to me.'”  Reading that, I couldn’t help but laughing.  I knew Yusuf Idris just a bit, and that was no mere quip.  He was, I’m sure, entirely serious.  I’ve never met anybody who manifested a healthier, more unembarrassed appreciation for his own greatness.)