• Awarded for excellence in journalism and writing
• Has been dominated by leftists in recent decades

The Pulitzer Prize is an annual award given only to Americans (with one exception) in each of 21 categories, most involving journalism. Winners are chosen by an independent Board whose members are selected by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917 in accord with journalist Joseph Pulitzer's 1911 will, which bequeathed to Columbia University $2 million, one-fourth of which was to be "applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education."

In recent decades, the Pulitzer Prize has come under fire for what some critics have called "ideological correctness." As writer George Shadroui puts it, "[T]he Pulitzer is a political prize bestowed almost exclusively on writers, journalists and thinkers who cater to suitably liberal or left-wing points of view."

Some recent decisions by the Pulitzer Committee have tarnished the Prize. In 1981, the purportedly true story of an eight-year-old heroin addict named "Jimmy" won a Pulitzer Prize for Janet Cooke, a young African American reporter for the Washington Post. But the Post returned the Prize after Cooke admitted that the child—and the story—were wholly fictional. The deeper scandal, however, was that the Prize itself had been rigged. As 1981 Pulitzer jury member Edward Shanahan writes, his panel actually had named someone else to win this Prize, but behind the scenes someone very powerful, presumably from the Washington Post, was able to pull strings, reclassify Cooke's series from a category in which she would have lost, and persuade the Pulitzer Board to give her the Prize. (The secretive Pulitzer Board, more than half of whose members are academics and other non-journalists, retains the power to override what its own hand-picked, predominantly liberal selection juries decide.)

In 2003, in an issue with resonance for the charges that today's Prizes are dominated by ideology, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. refused to return a Pulitzer awarded in 1932 to his newspaper's Soviet correspondent Walter Duranty, whose reportage, the intervening years have shown, deliberately echoed Soviet propaganda about the supposedly good conditions in the Ukraine where Marxist dictator Joseph Stalin in fact was systematically murdering 17 million Kulak farmers by starvation.

The Pulitzer Prize is presently given in 14 separate journalism categories, including Breaking News Reporting, Investigative Reporting, Explanatory Reporting, Beat Reporting, National Reporting, International Reporting, Feature Writing, Commentary, Criticism, Editorial Writing, Editorial Cartooning, Breaking News Photography, Feature Photography, and Public Service. The Prize is also awarded in five "letters" categories: Biography or Autobiography, Fiction, General Non-Fiction, Poetry, and History (the latter being only category in which the winner need not be an American citizen). Finally, the Pulitzer is awarded in two "humanities" categories: Drama and Music.

In 20 of the 21 annual Pulitzer Prize categories, the winner receives a trophy and $10,000 in cash. The only exception is the Public Service category of the Journalism competition, where the prize is a gold medal that is presented not to an individual but to a newspaper.