The News You Need on May 6, 2026
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. The Washington Post wins the Pulitzer it deserves, Marco tells gas pumpers to be happy, and Barron might not be a time traveler after all.
The Washington Post Wins the Pulitzer Prize For Pubic Service
AP
Charles: This is the 7th time that headline has appeared, and the public service prize has a very special provenance for Post junkies: the first time the paper won it was in 1973 for a bunch of amazing stories by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward about something called Watergate
It is a great thing that the Pulitzer Poobahs honored The Washington Post this year, because, in spite of Jeff Bezos’s most recent mauling, the Post continues to do extraordinary work about the destruction of democracy by Donald Trump.
This is how the Post described its triumph yesterday; it’s accurate:
The Post stood out for the depth of its reporting on federal officials, and for the unique insights the sourcing gave reporters into the effects of the actions on critical government functions. Those strengths became a hallmark of the reporting. Post journalists exclusively reported that DOGE agents were trying to gain access to the Treasury payments system that disburses $6 trillion a year in public money and that the administration had forced out the senior civil servant who tried to block them. Reporting revealed that the IRS was considering giving DOGE access to private financial information on every taxpayer, business and nonprofit in the country — provoking such outrage that the plan was abandoned. And the coverage showed how Musk’s team’s attempts to “fix” Social Security had instead thrown the agency into dysfunctions.
Even now, barely three months after Jeff Bezos sent his own bulldozers into the Post newsroom, the remaining reporters do an amazing job of covering an administration run by fools and mobsters.
Because its current owner has done so much to destroy it, this Pulitzer is supremely bittersweet.
It was less than two years ago that Kelley Benham French, was hired by the Post with great fanfare to be its first narrative accountability editor. “In her new role, Kelley will oversee a team with the mission of harnessing immersive reporting, rigorous investigative work and exceptional writing to produce stories that hold powerful forces to account on matters of urgent national interest.”
Kelley was one of the editors of the series that won the Pulitzer yesterday.
Her husband Tom French explains how that prize hit her
For the last few months, my wife Kelley has been curled up on our living room couch, crushed after she and several hundred other journalists were laid off in a single terrible day at the Washington Post. The official story was that the Post needed to save money, but the lie of that rationale was underscored by the news that the paper’s owner, a billionaire whose pocket change could bankroll the place for another century, had just ponied up $40 million for a vanity documentary on Melania Trump in an obvious bid to curry favor with her husband in his gilded White House.
Kelley loved being an editor at the Post. It was the challenge she’d been working toward for decades, honing her craft at other papers, soaking up everything she could from some of the country’s most accomplished editors and writing coaches. By the time the Post hired her, she was more than ready. She knew how to edit breaking news, how to lift enterprise stories to the next level and then the level above that. She had learned how to navigate the dynamics of a vibrant news organization brimming with deeply committed human beings, all trying to carve a path for journalism into an increasingly chaotic future. Kelley thrived on the intense camaraderie at the Post, admired her bosses, relished every minute of working with the world-class reporters on her team. The joy in her voice, as she helped them sharpen their blockbuster stories, was unmistakable.
Then came the Wednesday morning in early February when the paper, one of journalism’s most hallowed institutions, was gutted. Kelley and everyone else on the list of the discarded was informed by email that they were no longer allowed to set foot in the newsroom unless they arranged a time for someone to help them clear out their desks…
Kelley Benham French
The truth was, the Post that many of us had grown up with – the paper I had been faithfully reading for the past fifty years, ever since I was a high school kid devouring every word from Woodward and Bernstein – had been demolished. The bulldozers had already razed the East Wing of the White House. Now they’d arrived, in the form of a mass email, to reduce the Post to a shell of itself. The loss, to the entire country, was beyond words.
Fast forward to this past Sunday afternoon, May 3, when Kelley got a phone call informing her that one of the stories she and her team had published before the layoffs was being honored, along with the work of dozens of others, with the 2026 Pulitzer for Public Service.
It was painful, watching this news wash across my wife’s face. She was proud, of course, and thrilled that these reporters she admires so profoundly were receiving the recognition they deserve for their back-breaking, meticulous, essential investigations. But in that moment, she was destroyed all over again. The Pulitzer Board was confirming that she and her team had been working at the highest level of excellence, serving the most sacred mission of journalism. And yet she and so many others had been cast aside.
Kelley caught an early flight the next morning so she could be back at the Post when the Pulitzers were formally announced. Soon she was posting photos of her and Hannah Natanson and William Wan and other allies celebrating their victory, their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders, faces beaming. But when I looked closer at the images, I could see that Kelley’s eyes were puffy and that she was fighting to hold herself together.
As an American citizen, I am grateful to Hannah and William and all the other brave reporters who pursued the truth so tirelessly in the face of federal subpoenas and search warrants and FBI agents banging on the front door before dawn. But I reserve a special awe for my brilliant wife who returned to the newsroom that broke her heart -- the place that had told her she was no longer welcome -- just so she could cheer on her beloved former colleagues.
For sixty years The Post did as much as it could to keep the capital honest, and gave The New York Times the competition it desperately needed after the fall of the New York Herald Tribune. Writing for its book section was one of the pleasures of my life until Bezos ended the book section earlier this year. The Post gave me one of the two greatest reviews my books have ever received. And it provided one of my brothers an excellent living for his entire working life.
I hate Bezos for what he has done to the Post.
But I revere the reporters who remain there.
Don’t punish those reporters for the sins of their owner.
We still need them.
So keep your subscription for their sake.
