Friday, September 16, 2005

Maybe He Left it With O'Reilly's Peabody

"Local" talk radio blowhard Jay Severin has been caught padding his resume by Globe Columnist Scot Lehigh. Here's a teaser:

Here's what Jay said: "But since journalism began, and up until the time at least that I took my master's degree at Boston University -- and may I add without being obnoxious, up till and including the time that I received a Pulitzer Prize for my columns for excellence in online journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism, the highest possible award for writing on the Web -- right up to and including that in 1998, you still had to practice journalism to be a journalist."

That struck several listeners as unlikely. Once I'd heard the claim, I asked the Pulitzer folks to check it out. "We looked at the records and there is no record of him winning a Pulitzer Prize," says Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzers. Nor is there a Pulitzer for excellence in online journalism.
As it turns out, this is not the first time Lehigh and Severin have crossed paths. Mark Jurkowitz has the rest of the story.