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The Post's handling of the Cooke affair struck most editors as inexcusable. "The practice [of using blind sources] is valid if the source can help you expose criminal conduct," says Dallas Times Herald Managing Editor Will Jarrett. "It is not valid if your source is the person perpetrating the crime." Notes Los Angeles Times Editor William Thomas: "The part that boggles my mind is that a reporter who has been with a paper only eight or nine months can refuse to tell an editor her source."
The Cooke hoax unfortunately lent credence to the old adage that you cannot believe everything you read in the papers. Says Michael Gartner, editor of the Des Moines Register and Tribune: "When you damage the credibility of the Post you damage the credibility of the Des Moines Register and every other paper in the country." Shaken, many papers began re-examining their own policies on sources. "We are working at putting something in writing," says Boston Globe Editor Thomas Winship. Nowhere was the process so intense as it was at the Washington Post. Bradlee reminded the staff last week: "The credibility of a newspaper is its most precious asset. It depends on the integrity of its reporters. We must begin immediately the uphill struggle of restoring our credibility."
Before the Cooke controversy, the most talked-about Pulitzer Prize was the posthumous fiction award to John Kennedy Toole for A Confederacy of Dunces. Toole was unable to get his comic novel about New Orleans published and died in 1969, an apparent suicide at the age of 31. For ten years, his mother tried to find someone to bring out the book. Finally Novelist Walker Percy read it and persuaded the Louisiana State University Press to publish it last year.
The prize for meritorious public service went to the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer for its series on brown lung disease among textile workers. The New York Times won two awards, for John Crewdson's reporting on America's immigration problems and Dave Anderson's commentary on sports. The criticism prize went to Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Star for his book reviews. Shirley Christian of the Miami Herald won the international reporting award for her coverage of Central America.
—By Ellie McGrath. Reported by Jeanne Saddler/Washington with other U.S. bureaus