By PAUL SANN

[Executive Editor of the New York Post and a member of the five-man jury of editors which passed on the entries for the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting.]

    I am raising what seems to me to be an extremely serious question about the 1967 Pulitzer Prizes.
    The Pulitzer Advisory Board announced last Monday that the prize for National Reporting had been awarded to Monroe W. Karmin and Stanley W. Penn of the Wall Street Journal for their investigation "of the connection between American crime and gambling in the Bahamas."
    Newsweek magazine has now revealed that the editors who screened the national entries recommended that the prize go to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson for their disclosure of the financial double dealing which ultimately led to the Senate Ethics Committee's censure motion against Sen. Dodd (D-Conn.).
    What is not known--and I feel I must bring it to light now--is that the national jurors never even saw the ultimate winner, the Karmin-Penn story, because it was never submitted to them. So the jury had no opportunity to make any judgment on that story as opposed to the 50 entries competing for this high honor in American journalism.
    While I know that the Advisory Board has the right to "select, accept or reject the recommendations" of the juries assembled each year at Columbia University, I believe that this procedure represents a gross injustice first to the candidates for the award and second to the jurors themselves.
    As far as the candidates go, it was a grogs injustice this year because the vote of the National Jury on the very real achievements of the nominees during 1966 proved to have no bearing whatever on the ultimate choice of the prize.
    As far as the judges go--and I am speaking only for myself--it was a gross injustice for the obvious reason: we spent two days at Columbia screening the great mass of entries and arriving at six nominations only to find our recommendations discarded and the winner in national reporting emerging either from some other jury or from the Advisory Board itself.
    This to me is an unconscionable act.
    While the proceedings of the Pulitzer juries are deemed to be of a confidential nature, I have decided that I cannot in good conscience respect that injunction now that Newsweek--and today's New York Times--have disclosed how the Pearson-Anderson selectior was shelved by the Advisory Board. As far as I am concerned, the lid is now off and the full story might as well be told.
    I believe it would be wrong for me, as a newspaperman, to let the impression stand that the prize awarded for national reporting represents an award in which the assigned judges particjpated.
    Some of us may have seen the Karmin-Penn expose when it was published in the Wall Street Journal last October--I saw it--but it was never put before us at the university.
    I know that the task of jurors is to "screen" the entries, nothing more. I did not know until last Monday that a Pulitzer Prize could emerge from some source other than the very editors serving in the category involved.
    I did not know, in a word that a given jury might actually find itself engaged in a pure charade having no bearing what. ever on the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize.