Pulitzer for the Enquirer? He would have been proud

The news that the National Enquirer scandal sheet has been deemed eligible to be entered for a Pulitzer Prize - the highest accolade in the fields of journalism and literature in the US - has been greeted with considerable tut-tutting in north America.

Pulitzers go to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer - not reporters in raincoats engaged in midnight stakeouts, waiting to catch a politician kissing his mistress goodnight on a motel porch.

At least that was the thinking until the Enquirer blew the lid on Democratic hopeful John Edwards, who was not only having an affair with his campaign 'videographer' Rielle Hunter, but doing it behind the back of his wife Liz, who had recently been told that her cancer was inoperable.

Suddenly - and not for the first time - the supermarket tabloid  had a really good story. A man who wanted to be president of the United States was, it turned out, not just a cheating bastard, but a lying one too. And it took the Enquirer to prove it.

But does the rag deserve a Pulitzer? The award given to William Faulkner, to Bernard Malamud, more recently to Toni Morrison? Surely not!

I would have asked the same question until I read Kenneth Whyte's book about the history of William Randolph Hearst, The Uncrowned King.

In order to place Hearst in context, Whyte examined the lives and personalities of all the other great American publishers and editors from the Civil War onwards - including Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the prize is named.

Pulitzer, writes Whyte, left his native Hungary for the States "looking for a fight". By the age of 31 he was publishing his first paper - the St Louis Post-Dispatch - and only five years later he was running the World, which under his guidance would become New York's raciest and most successful morning paper.

The fact is, Pulitzer was closer to the gutter than he was to the stars. He was criticised for making the World crude and sensationalist - but New Yorkers loved it. "Whatever it lacked in subtlety and intellectual heft," writes Whyte, "the World was flat-out exciting." In five years he took its circulation from under 30,000 to 100,000.

The question isn't whether the National Enquirer should, God forbid, be handed a Pulitzer - it's what on earth were Bellow, Mailer and Morrison doing when they agreed to accept one?

Here are two of my favourite Joseph Pulitzer stories, courtesy of Ken Whyte's excellent book:

• HOW TO DEAL WITH AN ANGRY READER - SHOOT HIM

One of Pulitzer's most famous editors was John A. Cockerill, a former drummer boy in the Civil War, whom he poached from the Cincinnati Enquirer to work on his first paper, the St Louis Post-Dispatch .

It was the late 1870s. One day, Cockerill was visited in his office by Colonel Alonzo W Slayback, a lawyer who was defending a partner accused of receiving paybacks from both sides in a municipal swindle.

The Post-Dispatch had picked up on Slayback's involvement in the case and was giving him a hard time.

"Slayback barged into Cockerill's office intending to slap him silly,"
writes Whyte. "Cockerill, apparently anticipating the confrontation, had his loaded gun lying near at hand. On seeing the weapon, Slayback pulled his own, but before he could get a round off, the editor shot him dead."

Cockerill pleaded self-defence and, with his boss Pulitzer standing by him, was never prosecuted.

• HOW TO GET BACK AT A DASTARDLY RIVAL

By 1883, Pulitzer had graduated from Missouri to New York and was the proud owner of the World, which through sheer chutzpah he swiftly turned into the most talked-about daily of the time - much to the fury of his rival, Charles Anderson Dana, editor of the Sun.

In 1886, Pulitzer had cause to call Dana "a mendacious blackguard". Dana fired back that Pulitzer exuded "the venom of a snake" and wielded "the bludgeon of a bully".

Dana then let rip: "The insuperable obstacle in the way of his social progress is not the fact that he is a Jew, but in certain offensive personal qualities... His face is repulsive, not because the physiognomy is Hebraic, but because it is Pulitzeresque... Cunning, malice, falsehood, treachery, dishonesty, greed and venal self-abasement have stamped their unmistakable traits... No art can eradicate them."

To which Pulitzer responded: "To what race of human beings does Charles Anderson Dana belong?... The Danas, although a New England family of considerable Puritan and literary pretensions, have unquestionably a Greek derivation. The modern Greek is a treacherous, drunken creature... Mr Charles Ananias Dana may be descended from a Greek corsair. If so, his career of treachery, hypocrisy, deceit and lying could easily be accounted for."

Who would begrudge the National Enquirer its chance of a Pulitzer for exposing the ghastly John Edwards? Winners will be announced on April 12. ·