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Comment by illiilliiililil | Hacker News Reader

The 1619 Project was such an awful bit of journalism. Totally not surprised it won a Pulitzer.

The entire project did not win, just one story from it by one person: https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/nikole-hannah-jones-new-yor...

I don't understand the usage of awful here. Are you using it to suggest the journalism is good and deserving of recognition (confusing) or that the Pulitzer is an award for bad journalism?

I believe that illiilliiililil is expressing a somewhat complex set of opinions:

1) They genuinely don’t like the 1619 project.

2) They understand that the Pulitzer is supposed to be an award for good journalism.

3) They believe that journalism about some subjects is more likely to win a Pulitzer without being the best by illiilliiililil‘s standards. You could compare it to the concept of an “Oscar bait” movie: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_bait

I’m not sure I agree with this criticism - I think exploring tough subjects can lead to great work that is especially deserving of praise.

On the American Revolution, pivotal to any account of our history, the project asserts that the founders declared the colonies’ independence of Britain “in order to ensure slavery would continue.” This is not true

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/magazine/we-respond-to-th...

The 1619 should have been in time magazine or national geographic, not the new york times. Because its not news, its pseudo-anthropology designed to create a legitimate citation source for teachers and academia in general.

Now high school students can write nonsense in an essay and cite the New York Times as a source, and get A+ from their teachers. This is the real purpose of it

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