Pulitzer Prize fight: In November, the Pulitzer Prize committee invited our own Eliana Johnson to serve on the nominating jury for the National Reporting category. This week, she found herself on the receiving end of a rebuke from the Pulitzer board after trying to ask its members a few questions—like why a prize went to a Palestinian “poet” who mocked Israeli hostages.
The board awarded the Pulitzer prize for Commentary to Mosab Abu Toha for essays in the New Yorker that, it said, combined “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.” Just weeks before jury deliberations began, Abu Toha wrote on Facebook that a 28-year-old woman kidnapped from her home by Hamas was not a “hostage” and denounced the media for humanizing Israelis kidnapped by Hamas. “Imagine for a moment a Pulitzer going to an extremist Israeli settler poet who had minimized and mocked the suffering of civilians in Gaza,” Johnson writes. “You can’t, because it would never happen.”
When Johnson pressed the Pulitzer board on whether Abu Toha was vetted—or whether jurors like Viet Thanh Nguyen, who just days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel signed an open letter accusing Israel of “grave crimes against humanity,” recused themselves from deliberations over the award—prize administrator Marjorie Miller accused Johnson of violating a confidentiality agreement and said that, while jurors are chosen for their “character, expertise and integrity …. we occasionally misjudge.”
They sure do! “Here we have an institution, ostensibly committed to supporting ‘fearless’ journalism, trying to strangle reporting about what was known to the jury and when—and which board members cast votes on this award,” Johnson writes.
READ MORE: ‘We Occasionally Misjudge’: Pulitzer Board Told Me I Was out of Line When I Asked Why the Organization Gave an Award to Palestinian ‘Poet’ Who Made Hateful Comments About Israeli Hostages
Big donor, big problem: Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss billionaire who has funneled more than $650 million to Democratic causes, repeatedly sexually harassed a female employee nearly 60 years his junior, according to a lawsuit filed last month in California. The allegations are more than a personal scandal—they threaten to engulf a central pillar of the Democratic donor infrastructure.
“Madison Busby, a former employee at Wyss’s Halter Ranch winery, accuses the 89-year-old businessman of sexual battery, sexual harassment, and retaliation,” reports our Andrew Kerr and Chuck Ross. According to the lawsuit, Wyss groped Busby and made lewd remarks during their first meeting, then later propositioned her and her husband “to have sex with him, either as a group or with Ms. Busby alone.” After years of unwanted advances, Busby says Wyss retaliated by hiking the couple’s rent and slashing her pay—prompting her July 2024 resignation over the “anxiety and distress” caused by his ongoing behavior.
“Several prominent Democratic dark money groups could be caught in the crossfire of the sexual harassment allegations against Wyss, who has quietly emerged as the largest foreign donor to U.S. politics in recent years by funneling a staggering $652 million to liberal advocacy groups across the country through his two nonprofit organizations,” Kerr and Ross write. Wyss “is one of the top contributors to the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund, the two largest spokes of the left-wing dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors.”
READ MORE: Dem Megadonor Hansjörg Wyss Groped Employee and Propositioned Her for Group Sex, Lawsuit Says
Tapped out: CNN’s Jake Tapper has enlisted a PR flack to school him on basic human decency ahead of the launch of his forthcoming book on the “cover-up” of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. “Tapper has hired Risa Heller, a crisis communication expert described as the ‘warrior of choice’ for ‘cancellable elites’ trying to survive a scandal,” writes our Andrew Stiles. Heller’s client list has included Elizabeth Holmes, Anthony Weiner, Jeffrey Toobin, and even the voice of Elmo. Now she’s helping Tapper learn how to be “nicer” to fellow journalists.
It’s much-needed guidance. “Tapper is a notorious crank with a habit of sending indignant DMs to journalists and other commentators who criticize him on social media,” Stiles writes, noting some observers have described the CNN host’s “stubbornness, thirst for vengeance, and refusal to admit fault as ‘positively Bidenesque.’”
There’s evidence to suggest the training is already paying off. The day after Breaker reported Heller was coaching him, Tapper praised his co-author, Axios’s Alex Thompson, as “a great reporter and a kind person and a good friend”—which Stiles calls “awfully sweet of him.”
READ MORE: Jake Tapper Gets Remedial Training in Human Decency Ahead of Book Launch
Away from the Beacon:
- A group of House Democrats on Thursday reintroduced the “Reparations Now” resolution calling for the federal government to pay trillions in reparations to black Americans. Rep. Summer Lee (D., Pa.) declared, “Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We’re owed repair, we’re owed restitution and we’re owed justice.”
- The wildly popular children’s YouTuber Rachel Griffin Accurso—known to millions of toddlers as Ms. Rachel—is facing backlash for spotlighting the plight of Palestinian children on social media while largely ignoring young Israeli victims of Hamas, the New York Times reported this week. The Times profile comes on the heels of Accurso’s sit-down with Hamas apologist and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
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