The Pulitzer Prize Committee announced on Monday that it had given its commentary award for The New York Times Magazine staff writer, Nikole Hannah-Jones. The award-giving committee praised Hannah-Jones for her essay entitled “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”

Hannah-Jones’s essay was a part of the 1619 Project, a series of essays that chronicled the issues of slavery in the nation’s history. However, veteran historians claimed that the essay held erroneous information. To start with, Jones wrote that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4. On the contrary, the signing started on August 2.

However, Breitbart News reported that Hanna-Jones’ greatest mistake was her claim that the primary reason for the American Revolution was to “protect the institution of slavery.” The original text read: “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Interestingly, there had been changes from the original texts, in which the publication added the term “some of the colonists.”

Even veteran historians have questioned Hanna-Jones’ claims. For Pulitzer-Prize winning author James McPherson, professor emeritus of history at Princeton University, and one of the most authoritative voices in the history of the American Civil War, McPherson claimed that he was “disturbed” by the essay. He believed that the account was both “unbalanced” and “one-sided.” The winning author, who had written the “Battle Cry of Freedom,” claimed that the essay lacked “context” and “perspective.” He argued that the issue of slavery is more complex than what most people think, and that slavery is not only limited to America but had existed throughout different times in history.

Moreover, the professor dismissed the claims that racism had run “at the very DNA” of the American nation. McPherson believed that by saying so, it implies the idea that racism is a permanent condition.

Finally, the Pulitzer-winning writer claimed that Hannah-Jones had undermined the real values of the founding fathers, which stood in opposition to both slavery and racism, Mcpherson cited periods in American history such as the Civil War and Reconstruction, the creation of NAACP, and the Civil Rights movement, that had changed such narratives.

University Professor Leslie Harris was also outraged by Hannah-Jones’ inaccuracies. In his interview for Politico, the professor claimed that he had listened to the article with “stunned silence.” Harris disputed that slavery was not the reason that the 13 colonies had fought the British troops. By using such erroneous statements, Harris feared that people would immediately discredit Hannah-Jones’ essay, and the professor believed that “that’s exactly what has happened.”

The New York Times had constantly proved itself as effective left-winged machinery. For example, in 2018, the media outlet also shared the prestigious Pulitzer Prize over the so-called “Russian Collusion.” When the said narrative had been debunked, Times editor Dean Baquet allegedly instructed the newsroom to focus on the presidential race. As Breitbart News sums it, “The 1619 Project is the centerpiece of that new narrative—with Trump, implicitly, the inheritor of America’s racist past.”