They give Pulitzers for this?

Pity Leonard Pitts Jr.

Suffice it to say, a few years back, Pitts received a Pulitzer Prize, not for reporting facts but for opinionizing.

Now he is lecturing America for its inability or unwillingness to accept his opinions as fact.

In a sad commentary he offered University of Southern California alumni, this celebrated, award-winning spinmeister expresses his frustration about the fact that Americans don't all march in lockstep or see the world the same way he does.

In "Alternate Realities, One America," an essay that would be unworthy of a sophomore journalism student, he asserts the following as established fact: "And Barack Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961, according to his birth certificate, the governor of Hawaii and birth announcements that appeared in Honolulu newspapers at the time."

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This is the difference between a commentator and a real-live journalist: People like Pitts are OK saying something like that without ever having seen the birth certificate or explaining why we would need corroborating evidence like the governor's opinion or birth announcements in a newspaper if he had.

He also misreads a CNN poll from August as suggesting only 25 percent of Americans disbelieve Obama's birth story. In fact, 58 percent are skeptical. You would think the bigger number would help Pitts make his point. But I guess not. Facts are not his strong suit.

Here's Pitts' big point: "Once upon a time and not so long ago, he or she who had the most compelling facts won the debate. But that was before news media fractured, three major television networks and a morning paper splintering into a 24/7 megaplex of cable stations and websites willing and eager to spin the news according to the views of their viewers. It was before e-mail gave each of us access to the rest of us, before blogs made each of us a news organization in his or her own right, but without all those pesky ethical constraints by which news organizations have traditionally been bound. It was before something hard and nasty crept into the nation's political dialogue, before boundaries of propriety fell before demands of expediency, before scoring political points at all costs superseded the simple imperative to determine and do whatever was in the nation's best interest."

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In other words, Pitts misses the day when handpicked official opinionizers like him ruled the day.

"For 34 years, I've made my living in 'old' media, so I might reasonably be suspected of a little bias here," he wrote. "It is, after all, my industry that's circling the drain."

Well, he got that drain part right.

"But the most compelling danger is not the one faced by old media," he writes. "It is, rather, the one faced by the country. A nation where each political faction has its own 'facts' and truth is optional, a nation where there is no commonly accepted pool of information from which to draw conclusions or build arguments, is a nation where reasoning and intelligent debate become increasingly impossible. In other words, it's our nation."

Now, I have a similar background to Pitts. We graduated from college in the same year. We both toiled in the "old media" for many years. Of course, my experience was primarily in the reporting and news arena, rather than in the opinionizing industry.

What he says, however, is just not true. There was no golden age when there was consensus in America because of the media's diligent commitment to truth. On the contrary, I can tell you from personal experience as a former top newspaper editor that the major difference between then and now is that now Americans themselves have a megaphone.

And they're using it.

Meanwhile, Pitts must rely on the captive audience of the USC Alumni Newsletter to make his points.

Ahh, the good old days.