Onell Soto and Julie Thornton did one heck of a job with their article on January 12th that highlighted the essential points that appeared to be well researched at that point to have any reader who read it become aware that this was a BIG untold story up to that point, that had three LTTE's show up in the paper the very next day as a result of it.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070112-9999-1n12lam.htmlThe deadline for Pulitzer nominations for 2007 for journalism was 2/1/2007. Their article was initially published on 1/12/2007. The full impact of it though, isn't being shown until now, when we might see Gonzales step down, and who knows how much farther up the ladder of this administration it will inflict heavy damage on, and might be ultimately what triggers impeachment hearings on Bush and Cheney too.
Onell Soto already was part of the team that received pulitzer prize for 2006 with the Union Tribune's and Copley News Service coverage of the Duke Cunningham fiasco.
I would hope that if they weren't nominated for the 2007 awards that they would be precluded from getting nominated for 2008 awards later since the pulishing deadline of their article was on 1/12/2007.
Media Matters also notes the importance of this article starting things off with their summary of this crisis published a week ago or so here:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200703030005I think we should try finding out from Pulitzer what the story is and whether we should go ahead and nominate them for next year's pulitzer, or try and reason with them to add them to this list of nominees if they haven't been nominated already, given the importance in how they broke this big issue wide open in January!
We need to keep not just criticize the media for screwing up, which they do a lot of these days, but make sure we identify and reward those that do the right thing on occasion too, like Soto and Thornton did in this case!
The folks at TPMMuckraker should also receive credit for following up and giving thorough investigative treatment to this issue too.