Judith Miller Skewers Associated Press Pulitzer: NYPD Muslim Series Was 'Manufactured News'

Judith Miller hit out the Associated Press' Pulitzer Award for its series about the NYPD's Muslim surveillance program on Wednesday.

Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley won the Pulitzer for investigative reporting in honor of their work on the NYPD's secret spying on Muslims. The New York Post has bashed the award-winning series as a "non-stop hit job" on the city's counter-terrorism efforts. Miller ripped it in an editorial in the City Journal on Wednesday.

She alleged that the articles did not give a shred of evidence that the surveillance program violated anyone's civil rights. The series, according to Miller, was "manufactured news that played to left-wing stereotypes about police and law enforcement excesses."

She continued, "The subtext was that the NYPD’s monitoring was illegal, unconstitutional, and unnecessary... But the series itself failed to document such illegality or over-the-top conduct. Moreover, the department’s assertions that its surveillance efforts were legal and its explanations about how the program worked were invariably given short shrift, buried in the AP’s flurries of unsupported allegations."

Jim Romenesko reached out to the AP's Paul Colford for comment. Colford responded in an email, "This is a great week for AP and our four journalists who won a Pulitzer for Investigative Reporting. We’re all proud of them and their editors for bringing such important findings to the surface. And I encourage all who read comments about our NYPD series, whether critical or complimentary, to review the stories at www.ap.org/nypd."

(h/t Romenesko)