THE LATEST PULLET SURPRISE IS NO LAUGHING MATTER

DATELINE: Leakieville, Apr 21 –  The term, Pullet Surprise, as a mangling of Pulitzer Prize, was coined in 1969 to refer to humorous blunders. In 1997, Warner Brothers used the term as the title of a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon. The plot of the Looney Tunes six-minute short had nothing to do with the Prize. It was all about chickens.

As used in this article, Pullet Surprise is a combination of both prior uses. It refers to the major blunder made last week by the Pulitzer Prize jury in the public service journalism category. But, unlike the meaning originally given in 1969, the blunder is without humor. It is all about rewarding acts of cowardice, or chicken behavior in the vernacular.

The Pulitzer was created by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, an American newspaper publisher, in 1917. This year, the public service jury consisted of seven individuals, most of whom are employed by news media organizations. Two are academics. The jury awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in public service journalism to The Guardian US and The Washington Post newspapers for publishing Edward Snowden’s leaked NSA documents.

The Post award was for “revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.” The verbiage describing The Guardian US award was similar.

Apparently, Pulitzers are a lot easier to come by these days. The lauded revelations consisted merely of publishing content from the stolen papers provided by Snowden. Cut and paste is what now passes for hard-hitting journalism.

In fact, Snowden chose the newspaper recipients of the stolen information. He spoke with a Post reporter first and the Post published some of the information a couple of weeks later. Thereafter, he spoke with a reporter from the Guardian, which also published document content.

The revelations described a so-called “massive NSA surveillance” program. The program gathered phone metadata consisting of numbers called, the date, time and length of the calls, but not the content. According to NSA Director, General Keith Alexander, the metadata prevented 54 terrorist attacks, including 13 in this Country. It enabled analysts to “connect the dots” in identifying terrorist networks before they acted.

A companion program called PRISM tracked digital activity such as email, instant messaging and web searches for the same connect-the-dot purpose. PRISM operated internationally but not in the U.S.

According to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, Snowden’s act was the “most massive and damaging theft of intelligence in our history.” But, it was the publication of the leaked documents that compromised U.S. intelligence collection techniques. The series of newspaper articles alerted enemy combatants to our surveillance sources, methods and tradecraft. They have now taken measures to defeat those efforts, making U.S. intelligence collection much more difficult.

The publication of the Snowden information has made the nation less safe and its people less secure. Clapper believes that the types of terrorist attacks that the surveillance once thwarted will likely cost American lives in future battles.

For this destruction, The Washington Post and The Guardian US received the highest award in public service journalism. It calls into question which public was served. After one year of front-page news, Americans remain almost evenly divided on whether Snowden’s leak of NSA spying served U.S. public interest or harmed it.

Epilogue: Snowden seems to have an unquenchable thirst for publicity. In a bizarre twist last Thursday, he pitched a softball question to Vladimir Putin in the latter’s annual televised call-in show. The query was whether Russia “intercepts, stores or analyzes in anyway the communications of millions of individuals.” Putin said no and that was the end of that.

If only it were the end of Snowden sightings as well. Instead, we probably haven’t seen the last Pullet Surprise attributed to his theft.