Complaint Over Prize Is Rejected by Pulitzer Panel

The executive committee of the Pulitzer Prize board announced Monday that it had found no cause to question the national reporting award won by Tim Weiner of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The National Journal, a Washington-based magazine, had asserted that Weiner’s series on a secret Pentagon budget was built on a story that appeared in the Journal in 1986 and broke no new ground.

But a Pulitzer board statement read by spokesman Henry Fuhrmann said that “after careful consideration of objections raised by the National Journal,” the executive committee had “found no cause to question the award of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize ‘for a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs.’ ”

‘Am Not Surprised’

“I am very happy,” Weiner said in a telephone interview. “I am not surprised in the slightest. There was never any question in my mind or in the minds of my editors, my colleagues and fellow reporters at other papers that the board would act unanimously to throw out this complaint.

“I think it’s been an instructive experience being on the other end of the microscope, and I think every reporter should go through it,” he said.

The Pulitzer statement said the board decision was reached by unanimous vote of the five executive committee members participating, he said. Two members, Inquirer Executive Editor Eugene Roberts and David Laventhol, president of Times Mirror Co., which owns the National Journal, did not take part in the deliberations, Fuhrmann said.

The Inquirer said Weiner broke new ground with his analysis of the entire Defense Department budget, which concluded that the department was hiding $35 billion in secret programs.