Pulitzer Prize-Winning Articles Assailed : Board Is Asked to Reconsider Award to Philadelphia Inquirer

A Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who last week won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on secret Pentagon spending was guilty of “a blatant and egregious case of building a news story according to someone else’s blueprint,” and the Pulitzer Prize Board should “reconsider” his award, the editor of the National Journal charged Wednesday.

Tim Weiner, the Inquirer reporter, denied the charge and said it was “unfair to me and my newspaper.” His editors agreed.

In a letter to Robert Christopher, secretary of the Pulitzer board, Richard Frank, editor of the National Journal, said: “We make no accusation of plagiarism, but by no account does the Philadelphia Inquirer series deserve a Pulitzer because (the series) . . . plows no new journalistic ground.”

Had Not Read Letter

Christopher said Wednesday that Frank’s letter did not arrive in his office until late in the day, after he had left, and he would look at it today.

The National Journal, owned by Times Mirror Co., which also owns The Times, is a 5,000-circulation magazine that covers the federal bureaucracy and circulates largely among Washington officials and journalists. John Fox Sullivan, publisher of the Journal, said in an interview Wednesday that Weiner’s prize-winning, three-part series “seemed to us . . . to sort of follow in the footsteps . . . of a story we did on the very same subject.”

The National Journal cover story on the Pentagon’s “black budget” was published March 1, 1986, almost a year before Weiner’s three-part series. David Morrison, author of the Journal story, charged Wednesday that the Inquirer series was “copycat journalism . . . that didn’t report anything new or demonstrably expand upon” what he had written.

Weiner had called him and complimented him on his story before writing his own stories, Morrison said, and if Weiner had also credited him and the Journal in print, “we would have had less grounds for complaint.”

‘Broke . . . New Ground’

But Eugene Roberts, executive editor of the Inquirer, said his paper didn’t credit the Journal in print because: “There was nothing at all (we) picked up from (their) story. . . . Our series broke all kinds of new ground,” Roberts said.

The Journal complained primarily about the first part of Weiner’s three-part series, on how secret Pentagon spending had tripled in the last seven years and now totals at least $35 billion a year. These funds are used to finance clandestine military units and weapons development and are largely free of congressional oversight.

Morrison also charged, however, that the second part of Weiner’s series--on secret government plans to prepare for World War IV--covered essentially the same ground as a story in the Washington Post more than six months earlier.

There were several similarities between the Inquirer and Post stories, as there were between the Inquirer and Journal stories, but Weiner and his editors insist the Journal is wrong in its criticisms.

Acknowledged Praise

Weiner acknowledged calling Morrison to praise him for his stories and said he thinks he knows how Morrison feels, seeing Weiner win a Pulitzer for writing about the same subject he had written about. But “we were knee-deep in the story before I saw (his) story,” Weiner said.

Jonathan Neumann, assistant metropolitan editor at the Inquirer, supervised Weiner’s work, and he said Inquirer editors had first discussed doing a story on secret Pentagon spending five years ago.

“Nobody owns a story,” Neumann said. “It doesn’t matter how many people write about it. I thought they (the Journal) did an excellent job figuring out really arcane numbers in Pentagonese . . . but our story went beyond that in scope. . . . Tim spent seven months traveling around the country . . . interviewing people.”

The Inquirer entered Weiner’s series in two Pulitzer categories--explanatory reporting and national reporting. Two separate juries judged those categories, and one, the national reporting jury--didn’t consider it among the three best, according to Robert Clark, the jury chairman.

Decision on Finalists

The jury in explanatory reporting did vote it among the three best in its category, though, and nominated it and the two other top entries. The Pulitzer Board, which makes the final decision, gave the award in explanatory journalism to one of the other finalists and switched the Inquirer entry to national reporting, where it won the award over the three top choices of the national jury.

Clark said he polled his fellow jurors after the board made that decision and found that while they continued to prefer their three choices, they thought the Inquirer entry was also very good and they decided to lodge no protest.

The Inquirer has won 14 Pulitzers in the last 13 years--more than any other paper in that period except the New York Times--but this is the second consecutive year that the Inquirer has been involved in a Pulitzer Prize controversy. The editor of a small Georgia newspaper launched a campaign against the Inquirer last year, charging that the Inquirer’s winning entry for feature writing contained about 200 words that should have been attributed to a book.

The Pulitzer board took no action, and Inquirer reporter Steve Twomey retained his award.