Press: Westward Ho

Sharing the Pulitzers

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer began his career west of the Mississippi, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but for years there have been grumblings about an Eastern bias in the coveted awards he endowed. In 1980 the Los Angeles Times made that claim at length in a report by its press writer David Shaw. Indeed, from 1972 through 1981, papers west of the Mississippi won only 17 of 112 Pulitzer Prizes.

This year was different. Western papers won five of the twelve journalism awards announced last week, including those for local, national and investigative reporting, editorial cartooning and criticism, the last given to Music Critic Martin Bernheimer of the Los Angeles Times. Only two citations went to papers in the Northeast—both to the New York Times, for John Darnton's dispatches from Poland and for Jack Rosenthal's editorials, bringing the paper's alltime total to 50. Among winners: Seattle Times Reporter Paul Henderson, for proving that a man convicted of rape was innocent; the Kansas City Star and Times, for jointly pinpointing construction flaws that led to the collapse of a walkway killing 113 people at the city's Hyatt Regency Hotel; the Detroit News, for investigations indicating that the Navy had misreported the causes of death of several servicemen; Humorist Art Buchwald, for commentary.