The Joseph Pulitzer Gold Medal for meritorious public service is an unparalleled American media honor, awarded to news organizations for collaborative reporting that moves readers, provokes change, and advances the journalistic profession. Updated to reflect new winners of the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and the many changes in the practice and business of journalism, Pulitzer's Gold goes behind the scenes to explain the mechanics and effects of these groundbreaking works.
The veteran journalist Roy J. Harris Jr. adds fascinating new detail to well-known accounts of the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate affair, the New York Times coverage of the Pentagon Papers, and the Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse cover-up. He examines recent Pulitzer-winning coverage of government surveillance of U.S. citizens and expands on underexplored stories, from the scandals that took down Boston financial fraud artist Charles Ponzi in 1920 to recent exposés that revealed neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and municipal thievery in Bell, California. This one-hundred-year history of bold journalism follows developments in all types of reporting—environmental, business, disaster coverage, war, and more.