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I just came onto this thread from last April.
I was a very early subscriber to the Huffington Post, and I honestly don't think it deserved the Pulitzer prize this year. Early on, if was an excellent source of fresh perspectives, thorough examinations of the hot topics of the moment, and was filled with knowledge, verve and great original blogging.
But over the past few years it has degenerated, in my opinion, to being nothing but a tabloid with big pretensions. The home page is split vertically into 3 sections; the one on the left lists the current blogs, the center contains all the headline news it aggregates, and the right hand column is full of nothing but weird news, gossip and celebrity fluff. Finding the original content that once made it so good grows harder with each addition to the maze of sub-groups within it's main headline topics sections.
In it's beginnings, there was a lot of political stuff written, pro and con, from both liberals and conservatives. But these days, the political blogging is much more stale and predictable than in the past, and there is much less of it. Huffpo seems to content itself to just aggregate the news with click-throughs to the original writing, and allow all the original thought and work to be done in those other websites.
I recently criticized a particularly shallow daily issue, where several female bloggers wrote pieces about the objectification of women in the left column, while at the same time, much ado was made about the latest Miley Cyrus side boob photos. For some reason, Huffpost was obsessed for a time with how much of a celebrity's breast could be seen from the side. These side-boob shots were all presented as being especially shocking in their headlines. "Shocking!" and "Side-boob!" went on side by side for months.
My comments never made it into the large discussion over Miley's latest display of flesh. I'm nobody- just another reader, but I felt a certain satisfaction that my pointing to the hypocrisies of all that must have pricked one of their net nannies enough to scratch it from publication.
While it's fun to read the trash sometimes- who doesn't?- I don't think the Pulitzer prize is deserved by the Huffington Post.
I find this award to be especially curious, as the Pulitzer committee did not award a 2012 prize for fiction this year, and their preliminary judges offered 3 excellent choices that were certainly as deserving as On The Road, Catch-22, Catcher In the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lonesome Dove, and a lot of past Pulitzer winners were.
The Pulitzers have been awarded since 1915, and have always reflected the best of American reportage, poetry, factual articles and fiction. I find their award to Huffpo a sad degeneration of one of our proudest and most prestigious literary awards.
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