This 2002 story on Bethany McLean’s ‘92 Enron reporting contains the sort of insider-backbiting that EphBlog readers love.

If journalism were in the Olympics, the Enron story might well be pairs figure skating. Bethany McLean, the young Fortune writer who first wrote about Enron’s shady finances a year ago, has, of course, already been awarded the gold. And with that have come the requisite endorsements: In the past two months, she was hired as a consultant by NBC News and shared in a $1.4 million deal to co-author a book on the scandal.

But another team is also vying for top honors — amid complaints about shoddy judging. Reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal believe their work has been unjustly ignored, with some wondering whether Pulitzer rivals like the Washington Post and the New York Times have gone out of their way to praise McLean.

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That’s the competition. Now for the judging. In January, Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post’s media writer, highlighted McLean as the first journalist to ask questions about Enron. Ten days later, the Times’ Felicity Barringer wrote her profile of “the financial reporter everyone loves to lionize.”

While McLean was being anointed as a journalistic sex symbol in a story hitherto dominated by a balding Kenneth Lay, folks at the Journal felt they were being robbed: “People are trying to queer the Pulitzer pitch for the Journal,” says one editor there. That’s sour grapes, counters Kurtz: “In this case, a 31-year-old reporter beat them and the rest of the world by a considerable margin.”

Read the whole thing.