The Pulitzer Prize long ago became a farce — an award from and for leftist journalism activists to celebrate leftist activism posing as journalism. Few of the prizes illustrated this as well as the 2018 Pulitzers won by The Washington Post and The New York Times for leading the charge with the Russian collusion hoax that for years hamstrung Donald Trump’s presidency based on almost entirely false information fabricated by and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Trump is right to have a beef with those prizes, and last fall he asked the Pulitzer Prize Board to rescind the awards given that everyone now knows it was all fake news. Ask Robert Mueller. “The coverage was no more than a politically motivated farce which attempted to spin a false narrative that my campaign supposedly colluded with Russia despite a complete lack of evidence underpinning this allegation,” he wrote to the board last year. “It has since been confirmed that the allegations were false and I have been exonerated of these charges.”

Too bad for you, replied the board yesterday.

After two “independent” reviews, the board concluded everything is fine. “No passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes,” the Pulitzer board said in a statement. “The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”

We suppose that’s just as well, since the award itself is a farce. Best to not legitimize the prize by making sure decent and honest reporting is necessary to win it.

Of course, the entire premise of the reporting that earned these prizes was based on a corrupt political strategy involving collusion between Clinton’s campaign and officials at the highest levels of the FBI and CIA. After Watergate, actual journalists at The Washington Post doggedly broke the story. In a far worse tale of collusion and corruption, the activists at The Washington Post were primary players in spinning the narrative on behalf of Democrats and helping with the cover-up and attempted coup.

The contrast is astounding.

The Leftmedia can’t even be honest about disagreement over this reporting. Back in 2019, a New York Times spokeswoman insisted, “No report in our package of Pulitzer-prize winning work has been challenged.” In what alternate reality does she live?

Now, the Pulitzer board is being dishonest about the “independent” reviews. “Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” according to the board. That may be technically true, but we’ll bet the reviews were conducted by individuals with every connection to the Leftmedia as a disinformation industry. Those individuals almost certainly suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and they had no intention of helping him discredit their fellow activists at the Times or Post.

That’s precisely the trouble with “independent” “fact-checkers.” They are activists posing as journalists whose sole job is to circle the wagons on behalf of Democrats, Leftmedia outlets, or Big Tech censors. The entire schtick is leftists exonerating leftists while condemning conservatives.

It’s no wonder Americans generally don’t trust the media. Even if folks can’t quite put a finger on what’s wrong, they intuit that there’s an agenda behind news reporting and prizes for executing that agenda. We’re doing our part to make sure people are informed with the truth because, as Thomas Jefferson once observed, “Newspapers … serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke.”