Working in your interests whether you think they’re biased snobs or not

Pulitzers were just announced for the New York Times and The New Yorker for their investigative work breaking sexual harassment and assault stories about Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, and their ilk. The Washington Post earned another for exposing Roy Moore as a likely pedophile. They also shared an award with the Times for their coverage of Michael Flynn and his lies about secret interactions with Russia and Ukraine.

These stories have been out for months and months, more than a year in some cases. People paid a woman to pose as a rape victim to try to trick the Post reporters on the Moore story. Bill O’Reilly at his peak could tell more than 3 million people whatever he wanted for 45 minutes five times a week. Harvey Weinstein spent years ruining women’s careers. Trump and Putin are, literally, the most powerful people in the world, and one of them spent the bulk of his career as a KGB agent.

These stories have been attacked, smeared, and manipulated. Every attempt has been made to discredit them — by people who have the means.

The reporting has held up. The work is good. Not because it won Pulitzers but because it was well researched and reported and because it was correct.

I get that these publications can come off as pretentious and out-of-touch. (The New Yorker, for crying out loud.) They earn that criticism often enough.

But don’t confuse this work with commentary. And don’t confuse the people who do it with pundits, news readers, or loud, rich dummies with TV shows. Jodi Kantor and Greg Miller aren’t Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham (or Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews, for that matter).

The reporters who broke these stories are working for you and in your interests whether you think they’re biased snobs or not. They’ll make mistakes. But, unlike most of the rest of us, they’ll correct themselves publicly.