Editor and Publisher has a story

As always, not everyone in the press and on the Web agrees with the selection of Pulitzer Prize winners, announced earlier this week. But what’s relatively rare is that criticism surrounding one choice this year has a partisan edge.

The Pulitzer Board anointed 11 Associated Press photographers as winners in the category of breaking-news photography. The award-winning photos were from war-torn Iraq — and some in conservative circles claim the images were, on the whole, overly helpful to the insurgent cause. At least one of the photos raised an uproar from the same quarters when it was first published late last year.

It cites the Jawa Report (Rusty wonders if their site is HTML enabled). And then goes on to bash Malkin and Powerline.

Columnist Michelle Malkin and the popular Powerline blog, meanwhile, returned to the controversy over the widely published AP photo of terrorists executing Iraqi election workers in Baghdad. Malkin asked on Tuesday if the Pulitzer judges were “ignorant of the controversy.” Powerline called the award a “Pulitzer Prize for felony murder.” Last December it had charged that “the terrorists wanted to be photographed carrying out the murder, to sow more terror in Iraq and to demoralize American voters. That’s why they tipped off the photographer, and that’s why they dragged the two election workers from their car, so they could be shot in front of the AP’s obliging camera.”

The “tipped off” refers to the AP revealing that the photographer had been notified that a car bombing had occurred in the area where the attack on the election workers eventually took place. Contrary to the Powerline assertion, however, there is no evidence that the photographer knew anything about the attack in advance or, indeed, that the killers knew a photographer was poised and ready to snap that image. Indeed, according to AP, the lensman was 300 meters away. Salon.com quoted an unnamed AP source calling this charge of pre-arrangement “ridiculous.”

And all this has offended the AP.

Today, Kathleen Carroll, the AP’s executive editor, told E&P: “The allegations on these Web sites are complete baloney and deeply offensive.”

And Rusty Shackleford has more.

Our other objection is to the photos selected as worthy of the Pulitzer. Is the Associated Press an American organization or not? Cause, I was kind of under the impression that America was sort of in this little thing called a SHOOTING WAR!

Ernie Pyle is rolling over in his grave, right about now. I wonder if he ever got that up close and personal interview with the Waffen SS he always wanted to do? You know, to show their side of the story. Cause, you know, they had families too. And kids. And flower gardens. And kitties……