| They pass their report shortlisting finalists to the Pulitzer Board, which approves or rejects by voting. The Board then sends its winners’ list to the Columbia University to announce. It would have been enlightening if the report looked into reasons which made the Pulitzer Board retain this mode all through these years although it had a school which it could fall back on to do what idealistic thinkers called a year-round monitoring process. Today there are 271 awards for journalism in the United States obtained through the same process.
For us at DAME, there are two points, One: the awards were established to promote a humanistic value-excellence. For that value to be appreciated, members of the society must take active part in building, nurturing and preserving the value of excellence. The decision of people to send their entries and of others to send entries of their favoured candidates concretely manifests this commitment and ensures that this value is nourished by people who hold it dear.
Two: Even with the best of resources, it is impracticable to conduct a monitoring process as advocated. Take radio and television. The monitoring team will have a hard task recording all the radio and television broadcasts throughout this country every day. Even without the coming of private electronic bodies, that process is simply gargantuan. And in the print, it would require collecting all editions of each day. Resources for the logistics, any critic will admit, are too colossal to begin to cost.
And we believe that grandiose ideas, which are visibly unrealistic, do not have to be celebrated in the press all in the mischievous bid to show that awards are not being done very well. We would like DAME to be criticised on its activities and not be made to pay for the sins of any other awards scheme.”
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