This just seems so wrong:
The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's highest honor, will be announced Monday.
Among the potential contenders are reporters who revealed the massive U.S. government surveillance effort. Revelations about the spy programs were first published in June in The Guardian and The Washington Post, which last week received a George Polk Award for national security reporting.
[. . .]
The disclosures by The Guardian and The Post showed that the National Security Agency has collected information about millions of Americans' phone calls and emails based on its classified interpretations of laws passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The documents revealed that telephone and Internet companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have been cooperating with the government on these national security programs.
The stories were based on thousands of documents handed over by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The reports were published by Barton Gellman of The Post and Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill of The Guardian, all of whom shared the Polk Award for national security reporting.
This was not exactly intrepid journalistic enterprise. All the reporters did was print the revelations contained in the documents Snowden dumped. An, yeah, the stories revealed some important information, but without question they did great harm to the security of this nation.
And let's face it. Edward Snowden is a traitor. Profiting from his treason by claiming "journalism's highest honor" would be nothing short of despicable.
