Commotion: Nobel Peace Prize Nominations
The Claim
A person underserving of a Nobel Peace Prize is being nominated to receive one of the world’s more prestigious awards.
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Emerging story
This year, people including Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Stacey Adams have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. These are all fairly controversial figures, and social media is rife with outrage over nominations.
Misbar’s Analysis
The Nobel Peace Prize is an award bestowed by the Nobel Foundation. The Peace Prize goes to those who achieved some sort of humanitarian goal. Last year, the World Food Programme won the award for their efforts in combatting world hunger.
The winners are sometimes controversial, such as former President Obama. The nominees are also often controversial.
However, while the prize itself is extremely prestigious, a nomination is not. The Nobel Foundation doesn’t do the nominating. Rather, members of the public submit applications. These people aren’t your run-of-the-mill internet users, however. The Foundation has a specific criteria of who is and is not allowed to submit applications. Submitters have to be members of specific organizations, public officials, professors, and so on.
The total number of suitable nominators is in the hundreds of thousands. Your “Intro to History” professor can nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize if they can muster up the wherewithal to fill out an online form. It’s certainly not news whether or not someone is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, meaning that we rate this as commotion.
