Texas Paper Honored for Public Service : Times’ Rosenberg Wins Pulitzer for TV Criticism

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for meritorious public service Wednesday, and Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg won a Pulitzer in the criticism category.

The Philadelphia Inquirer and Newsday on New York’s Long Island won two Pulitzers each. Jeff MacNelly of the Chicago Tribune won the cartooning prize for the third time, thus becoming only the fifth person (all of them cartoonists) to win three Pulitzers since the awards began in 1917.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s award was given for a series of stories by Mark J. Thompson, 32, disclosing that almost 250 U.S. servicemen had lost their lives since 1967 because rotor blades of helicopters built by the Bell Corp. could break and slice through the cockpits.

The series led the Army to ground almost 600 Huey and Cobra helicopters, pending their modification, the Pulitzer Prize Board said in announcing the awards in New York.

A band played in the newsroom at the Star-Telegram after the Pulitzer announcement, and Phil Meek, the paper’s president and publisher, announced $250 bonuses for everyone on the editorial and circulation staffs.

The Pulitzers are the most prestigious awards in American journalism. The public service award, traditionally the most coveted of the Pulitzers, is awarded to a newspaper rather than to an individual, and it carries with it a gold medal. Prizes of $1,000 are given in each of the other Pulitzer categories.

The 1985 awards, for work done in 1984, will be presented at a luncheon May 20 at Columbia University, which administers the Pulitzers.

Rosenberg’s Pulitzer was The Times’ third in two years and its 14th overall. The New York Times, which has won the most Pulitzers of any paper (54), won no Pulitzers this year. Neither did the Washington Post, making this only the second time since 1969 that both papers were shut out.

The arts and letters winners this year were:

--Biography: Kenneth Silverman for “The Life and Times of Cotton Mather.”

Play on Painter Honored

--Drama: “Sunday in the Park with George” (music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine), a Broadway play based on the works of French post-Impressionist painter Georges Seurat.

--Fiction: Alison Lurie for “Foreign Affairs.”

--General nonfiction: Studs Terkel for “The Good War: An Oral History of World War II.”

--History: Thomas K. McCraw for “Prophets of Regulation.”

--Poetry: Carolyn Kizer for “Yin.”

--Music: Stephen Albert for “Symphony, RiverRun.” The Pulitzer Prize Board also awarded a special citation in music to William Schuman for “more than half a century of contribution to American music as composer and educational leader.” Schuman, 74, won the first Pulitzer awarded in the music category, in 1943.

Rosenberg won his Pulitzer for columns on subjects ranging from presidential campaign coverage to Olympics coverage to television’s treatment of death.

‘I’m Overwhelmed’

“I’m honored, gratified, overwhelmed,” he said.

Rosenberg, 42, came to The Times in 1978 from the Louisville Times, where he had been a television critic for eight years and, before that, a general assignment reporter and political writer.

He almost won a Pulitzer four years ago, when the nominating jury in the commentary category made him its first choice. But the Pulitzer Prize Board--which has the final authority to award the prizes--switched him to another category and gave the award to someone else that year.

Through the years, the board has frequently moved entries between categories and given Pulitzers to journalists who were not the first choices of the nominating juries. In an effort to minimize controversy over that, the board modified procedures in the journalism categories this year.

It permitted news organizations to make duplicate entries in two categories instead of having to select just one category for each entry. The board also said it would move a nominee from one category to another only if three-fourths of the members of the board approved. And it directed the nominating juries to submit their nominations of three finalists per category in alphabetical order, with no order of preference specified.

One Finalist Shifted

In past years, juries generally indicated their order of preference, and when the board gave a Pulitzer to someone other than a jury’s first choice, some jurors felt slighted.

There were no jury first choices to “overturn” this year, and the board shifted only one finalist to another category.

The board moved Larry C. Price of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the finalists in spot news photography, to feature photography and gave him that Pulitzer Prize over the three finalists nominated by the jury.

There were two new categories in this year’s Pulitzer competition--explanatory journalism and specialized reporting. Jon Franklin, science writer for the Baltimore Evening Sun, won in explanatory journalism for his seven-part series, “The Mind Fixers,” about the new science of molecular psychiatry, the study of the relationship between brain biochemistry and behavior. Randall Savage and Jackie Crosby of the Macon, Ga., Telegraph & News, won in specialized reporting for their examination of academics and athletics at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.

Other Pulitzer winners announced Wednesday include:

General news reporting: Thomas Turcol, Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star, for stories exposing the corruption of a Chesapeake city official.

Investigative Work Noted

Local investigative reporting (two awards): William K. Marimow, Philadelphia Inquirer, for stories disclosing that city police dogs had attacked more than 350 persons--an expose that led to the removal of a dozen officers from the city police department’s K-9 unit and changes in the training of that unit--and Lucy Morgan and Jack Reed, St. Petersburg, Fla., Times, for “their thorough reporting on Pasco County Sheriff John Short, which revealed his department’s corruption and led to his removal from office by voters.”

National reporting: Thomas Knudson, Des Moines Register, for a series of articles on the health hazards of farming.

International reporting: Josh Friedman, Dennis Bell and (photographer) Ozier Muhammad of Newsday for their series on the plight of the hungry in Africa.

Feature writing: Alice Steinbach, Baltimore Sun, for “A Boy of Unusual Vision,” a story about a blind fourth-grader.

Commentary: Murray Kempton, Newsday, for “witty and insightful reflection on public issues in 1984 and throughout a distinguished career.”

Philadelphia Writer Wins

Editorial writing: Richard Aregood, Philadelphia Daily News, for editorials on a variety of subjects.

Spot news photography: The photo staff of The Register of Orange County, for “their exceptional photographic coverage of the Olympic games.”

Feature photography (two awards): Price, for photos from Angola and El Salvador, and Stan Grossfeld, Boston Globe, for a series on photos of the famine in Ethiopia and for his photos of illegal aliens on the Mexican border.

Grossfeld also won a Pulitzer last year, in spot news photography, for his work in Lebanon. Tony Robinson in The Times’ bureau in New York also contributed to this story.