[Note: an incompletely edited and proofed version of this post was mistakenly published. I apologize. Thanks to Tim LeVier for flagging the problem.]

All awards and prize organizations are subject to fair suspicion about their integrity, and collectively, they undermine each other. The Academy Awards get criticized by prominent blacks, and suddenly the number of black nominees explodes. The Nobel Prize committee, once the epitome of a well-respected and trusted awards program, exposes its political bias by giving a Peace Prize to Barack Obama for no good reason whatsoever.

Then, beginning in late 2017, in an expose published late last year by a Swedish newspaper, the Swedish institution was rocked by accusations  from18 women who said they were sexually harassed or assaulted by French arts promoter  Jean-Claude Arnault, who is married to poet Katarina Frostenson and is friends with Horace Engdahl, both  members of the  Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in literature.  Arnault was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of raping a woman in 2011. This ugly publicity cast unwelcome light on more unethical conduct: a club called Forum that Arnault and Frostenson owned received a subsidy from the Academy. Yes, the members were voting finnacial benefits to themselves.  There were also credible reports of Frostenson giving names of winners to Arnault before they were announced,, allowing him place wagers and win money with insider information. As the scandal expanded, Frostenson and Engdahl refused to resign. Three other members of the Academy left in protest.

Nice. The Committee decided not to award a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

I’m surprised they didn’t just give it to Barack Obama.

This brings us to the Pulitzers, which have always been suspect. Lately it has been giving out honors to journalists and news organizations for hyping the Mueller investigation. The nice thing about the  latest  scandal is that it diminishes the status of these ridiculous, political and biased awards.

What is the scandal of which I speak? Get this: despite the Nobel corruption and conflicts scandal, Author Eliza Griswold won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Her husband is Steve Coll, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, which hosts the prizes, and a Pulitzer board member since 2012.

Uh, conflicts of interest, anyone? Appearance of impropriety? In any organization that cares about public perception and ethical standards, the relatives of officers and board members are made ineligible for organization grants, subsidies, honors and contracts. Yes, the Kennedy family’s “Profiles in Courage Award” once went to the courageous Ted Kennedy, who didn’t have the courage to try to save a young women from drowning after his drunken driving sent her to the bottom of a river, but that’s the Kennedys. Ethics rules don’t apply to them.

The Pulitzers obviously just don’t care about conflicts or appaearances. Of course giving a prize to the wife of a board member is unethical. There’s no serious argument that it isn’t unethical. Read the dead-alarms defense from Pulitzer Prizes administrator Dana Canedy, when asked about the conflict of interests complaint:

“That is utter nonsense,. For every Pulitzer winner with a connection to the board there are literally thousands without a board affiliation and yet somehow we never get inquiries about those.”

Isn’t that great! It’s like a judge who is caught taking a bribe complaining, “For every case I take a bribe to decide certain way, there are literally thousands of cases where I rule justly and fairly,  but somehow I never get inquiries about those.”  Canedy’s statement is not only an endorsement of The Ruddigore Fallacy (doing an ethical act cancels out an unethical one), it is stuffed with the unethical assumptions behind a staggering number of rationalizations on the ethics Alarms list, including

1. The Golden Rationalization variations including “It’s always been done this way,” “It’s tradition,” and “Everybody accepts it.”

21. Ethics Accounting, or “I’ve earned this”/ “I made up for that”

21A. The Criminal’s Redemption, or “It’s just a small part of what I am!”

22. The Comparative Virtue Excuse: “There are worse things.”

24. Juror 3’s Stand (“It’s My Right!”)

31. The Troublesome Luxury: “Ethics is a luxury we can’t afford right now”

33. The Management Shrug: “Don’t sweat the small stuff!”.

38. The Miscreant’s Mulligan or “Give him/her/them/me a break!”

41. The Evasive Tautology, or “It is what it is.”

43. Vin’s Punchline, or “We’ve never had a problem with it!”

44. The Unethical Precedent, or “It’s Not The First Time”

46. Zola’s Rejection, or “Don’t point fingers!”

48. Ethics Jiu Jitsu, or “Haters Gonna Hate!”

49. Convenient Futility, or “It wouldn’t have mattered if I had done the right thing.”

50A. Narcissist Ethics , or “I don’t care”

53. Tessio’s Excuse, or “It’s just business”

55. The Scooby Doo Deflection, or “I should have gotten away with it!”

58. The Golden Rule Mutation, or “I’m all right with it!”

59. The Ironic Rationalization, or “It’s The Right Thing To Do”

61. The Paranoid’s Blindness, or “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Yes, the Pulitzer Prize committee’s position is that it’s “nonsense” to expect a prestigious awards institution to avoid blatant conflicts of interest.

Come to think of it, they may be right.