Fox News host Howard Kurtz suggested there were “no actual inaccuracies” in reporting by The New York Times and The Washington Post after President-elect Donald Trump sued the Pulitzer Prize Board for awarding the news organizations for work done to expose Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
“Trump has openly said, he doesn’t make any secret of it, that if he loses these lawsuits, he’s still satisfied because it puts the journalists or media organization through an ordeal and forces them to hire expensive lawyers,” Kurtz explained to Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz on Sunday.
Chaffetz, a former Republican lawmaker, argued Trump’s lawsuits against news organizations and the Pulitzer Prize Board had “some very valid points.”
“The Pulitzer Prize to hand out awards for people that were perpetuating what was proven to be an outright lie,” Chaffetz argued.
“Wait, what’s the outright lie?” Kurtz challenged. “Let me stop you there.”
“Well, if you’re going, for instance, on the Russia hoax, and they knew over the course of time that those were wrong, then I think the big question is, did they know it?” Chaffetz claimed. “When did they know it? Did they continue to do those types of things?”
“And so that’s the type of thing that I think he’s going to say, I can demonstrate, I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these things are fundamentally wrong, and you knew it, and you continue to perpetuate the lie,” he added.
Kurtz, however, corrected the Republican contributor.
“Well, the Pulitzer board has said that there were no actual inaccuracies pointed out in the article submitted by the two papers, the Washington Post and the New York Times,” the Fox News host said.
In a statement, the Pulitzer board said an independent review found “that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.”