2002 – Gretchen Morgensen of The New York Times wins Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Wall Street scandals.
excellent reporting about Wall Street occurs on a daily basis. These stories break dramatic ground in explaining to the readers and viewers what is going on and how their investments are being affected. In 2002, Gretchen Morgensen of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize in the beat reporting category for her coverage of Wall Street.
On November 18, 2001, she wrote a damning article about Salomon Smith Barney analyst Jack Grubman that detailed how the stocks of telecommunications companies that he had been recommending to investors had lost billions of dollars. “ It is impossible to tell how many investors profited from Mr. Grubman’s advice on the way up,” she wrote. “But those who stuck with him until the end, heeding his advice and holding on to the stocks, have fared dismally. In one telecom arena that Mr. Grubman dominated, among the so-called competitive local exchange carriers, some $140 billion in stock market value has vanished — 95 percent of the cash raised.”
In a May 27, 2001 piece titled “Buy, they say, but what do they do?” Morgensen excoriated Wall Street analysts who were selling stocks in companies which they were telling clients to purchase. “Now the effect of research analysts’ rosy reports on the stocks of untried companies is also coming under the microscope,” wrote Morgensen. “At the height of the I.P.O. craze, some analysts became the Wall Street equivalent of rock stars. They could push stock prices to unheard-of levels with positive research reports and appearances on financial news shows and in the press — investors lapped it up.”
And in a March 18, 2001 article titled “How do they value stocks? Count the absurd ways,” Morgensen wrote with a forceful conviction of attempting to right an obvious wrong – how Wall Street had overvalued stocks. “P erhaps the biggest mistake investors made during the bull market was to believe corporate propaganda about which numbers supposedly provided the best window on the state of their operations,” she wrote.
The assertion came just one week after the Internet bubble that had caused stock prices to run up had been burst, and the market was headed downward for most of the rest of the year. Morgenson’s writing showed that she was looking out for her readers and ready to let them know what went wrong without holding back. Her writing likely upset many on Wall Street, but it was accurate and on the mark.