时报与普利策奖的那些爱恨情仇
Here’s Your Pulitzer. Bad News to Come.
David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 40 years.
大卫·W·登莱普(David W. Dunlap)是一位本地新闻记者，同时也是“筑城”(Building Blocks)专栏的作者，已在《纽约时报》工作了40年。
Pulitzer day is usually a very happy one in the newsroom. This year was no exception, as Dean Baquet, the executive editor, let a jubilant staff know that The Times had won three prizes.
每逢普利策奖(Pulitzer)的颁奖日，新闻编辑部里通常都弥漫着欢欣鼓舞的氛围。今年也不例外：当主编迪恩·巴奎(Dean Baquet)宣布时报夺得了三个奖项的时候，全体员工一片欢腾。
But happy-ever-after is not much of a journalistic motif, and the history of The Times’s 97-year relationship with the Pulitzers includes sour, tragic, unexpected and disappointing endings.
但皆大欢喜并不是新闻的常见主题，时报和普利策奖有着97年的瓜葛，其中包含着许多酸楚、悲伤、意外和失望。
Begin with Walter Duranty’s 1932 award for dispatches from the Soviet Union; our “Guilty With an Explanation” prize, the only framed tribute in the 15th-floor Pulitzer gallery that contains a description of what went wrong with the correspondent’s reporting.“Duranty’s cabled dispatches had to pass Soviet censorship, and Stalin’s propaganda machine was powerful and omnipresent,” the explanation goes. “Duranty’s analyses relied on official sources as his primary source of information, accounting for the most significant flaw in his coverage — his consistent underestimation of Stalin’s brutality.”
就从沃尔特·杜兰蒂(Walter Duranty)凭借从苏联发回的报道，而在1932年获奖说起吧。那是“我们为之感到惭愧但可以做出解释”(Guilty With an Explanation)的一个奖项，在15楼的陈列室，框起来的荣誉证书里，只有这一个附有记者在报道中犯了何种错误的说明。“杜兰蒂通过电报发回的稿件必须经过苏联审查，斯大林(Stalin)的宣传机器既强大又无所不在，”说明文字这样写道。“杜兰蒂的信息主要来自官方来源，致使其报道存在重大瑕疵——他对斯大林的暴虐一直估计不足。”
The Times’s own assessment of Duranty’s performance noted his failure to account for the disastrous impact of Stalin’s forced collectivization of farming, which had especially ruinous consequences in Ukraine, where famine killed millions in the years after he won the prize.
时报在评价杜兰蒂的表现时指出，他没能揭示斯大林强制实施农业集体化政策的灾难性后果。该政策给乌克兰带来了毁灭性尤其巨大的影响，杜兰蒂获奖后的数年间，数百万乌克兰人死于饥荒。
“Ukrainian-American and other organizations have repeatedly called on the Pulitzer Prize board to cancel Duranty’s prize and The Times to return it, mainly on the ground of his later failure to report the famine,” the account continues. “The Pulitzer board has twice declined to withdraw the award, most recently in November 2003, finding ‘no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception’ in the 1931 reporting that won the prize, and” — P.S. — “The Times does not have the award in its possession.”
“乌克兰裔美国人以及其他一些机构，曾多次要求普利策奖委员会撤销颁给杜兰蒂的奖项，并要求时报归还普利策奖，主要理由是他后来未能报道饥荒，”那份说明继续写道。“普利策奖委员会两度拒绝撤销奖项，最近一次是在2003年11月，因为‘没有明确而又令人信服的证据’，表明1931年赢得奖项的报道‘存在蓄意欺骗之举’，”此外，“该奖项并不为时报所有。”
Five years later, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished dispatches for Europe was Anne O’Hare McCormick. No disgrace attaches to this prize. Instead, it is a fitting tribute to a remarkable pioneer: a woman in the field of foreign correspondence in an era, and at a newspaper, where such a thing was just about unimaginable. Hers was also one of the few voices at the paper to acknowledge publicly, while it was happening, the nature and dimension of the Holocaust.
杜兰蒂得奖5年后，安妮·欧黑尔·麦克米克(Anne O’Hare McCormick)因为对欧洲的出色报道斩获了普利策奖。这个奖项没有任何不体面之处。相反，它是对一位出色先驱性人物的恰当褒扬：在那样一个时代，一位女性居然当起了驻外记者，而且是时报的驻外记者，真的令人难以想象。犹太人大屠杀发生的当时，她是少数几个在报纸上对大屠杀的性质和规模做出公开报道的人之一。
”There is not the slightest question,” she wrote on March 3, 1943, ”that the persecution of the Jews has reached its awful climax in a campaign to wipe them out of Europe. If the Christian community does not support to the utmost the belated proposal worked out to rescue the Jews remaining in Europe from the fate prepared for them, we have accepted the Hitlerian thesis and forever compromised the principles for which we are pouring out blood and wealth.”
她于1943年3月3日写道，“在试图把犹太人赶出欧洲的运动中，对犹太人的迫害已经达到了可怕的高潮，这里却没有任何问题。挽救欧洲尚存的犹太人，帮助他们逃脱既定的命运——如果基督教社群不极力支持这个迟来的提议，我们就等于接受了希特勒的论调，永久地破坏了我们为之倾注鲜血和财富的那些原则。”
The downbeat ending to the story of Mrs. McCormick’s prize is that another 33 years would pass before a woman on the staff of The Times would win a Pulitzer again. That was Ada Louise Huxtable, in 1970, for her distinguished architectural criticism. And then another 13 years elapsed before a Pulitzer was conferred on a Timeswoman: the reporter Nan Robertson, who chronicled her own experience with toxic shock syndrome.Tragedy has accompanied the Pulitzer. Within months of winning the 1994 prize in feature photography — for a wrenching picture of an emaciated Sudanese girl who had collapsed under the gaze of a nearby vulture as she tried to reach a feeding center — Kevin Carter was himself dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, an apparent suicide at 33.
麦克米克的获奖有个令人悲观的结局，那就是直到33年之后，时报才又出了一名荣获普利策奖的女性。1970年，艾达·露易丝·赫克斯泰勃尔(Ada Louise Huxtable)凭借出色的建筑评论获奖。然后，又过了13年，才又有一名时报女性获得普利策奖：记者南·罗伯逊(Nan Robertson)，她记录了自己出现中毒性休克症状的亲身经历。悲剧一直伴随着普利策奖。凯文·卡特(Kevin Carter)在获得1994年普利策专题摄影奖几个月后死于一氧化碳中毒，时年33岁，他明显是自杀的。他的获奖作品是一个在前往营养中心的途中瘫倒在地的苏丹女孩，她骨瘦如柴，近旁还有一只秃鹰凝视着。
The photograph had been published first in The New York Times and in The Mail & Guardian, a Johannesburg weekly. “Later it was displayed in many other publications as a metaphor for Africa’s despair,” Bill Keller wrote in his obituary of Mr. Carter.
这幅照片最早发表在《纽约时报》和约翰内斯堡的周报《邮报卫报》(Mail & Guardian)上。比尔·凯勒(Bill Keller)在为卡特撰写的讣告中写道，“它后来被发表在了许多其他刊物上，暗示着非洲的绝望。”
(An editor’s note in March 1993 said many readers had wondered about the fate of the girl. “The photographer reports that she recovered enough to resume her trek after the vulture was chased away,” The Times said. “It is not known whether she reached the center.”)
（1993年3月的一篇编者按提到，许多读者都想知道这个女孩的命运。“摄影师报告称，在秃鹰被赶走后，她后来恢复了体力，有能力继续自己的行程，”时报写道。“不清楚她后来是否到达了中心。”）
In a breathtaking coda to the afternoon in April 2002, when he led the celebration of The Times’s record-breaking seven Pulitzer Prizes, Howell Raines resigned as executive editor 14 months later, undone by events including the exposure of Jayson Blair’s fraudulent reporting.And even at this year’s celebration, there were those in the newsroom — their memories of Pulitzer day in 2013 still vivid — who were not quite ready to draw an easy breath until every last marathoner crossed the finish line in Boston.
