Pulitzer Winner Charlie Savage Interviewed

Glenn Greenwald talks with the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage about his reporting that won him a Pulitzer for National Reporting a couple weeks back. Savage got into and continued writing on President Bush’s use of “signing statements”, an arcane and complicated issue with no sex appeal and very little in the way of guaranteed instant response from the average reader. Never mind, as he says in this interview, that the abuse of signing statements reveals a unifying theme in many of this administration’s most serious blunders.

Talking about why the Globe kept on running the signing-statement stories when so many other papers ignored it — it did light up the lefty blogosphere, which Savage notes — he says this:
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The Associated Press article reporting on the Pulitzer awards quoted you as follows: “The Globe for a while was throwing it out on the front page when a lot of people were ignoring it, and that took a lot of courage.”.

Can you elaborate on that? Who was ignoring it? And why do you believe it took “courage” for The Globe to continue to publish your articles on signing statements?

“The Globe, unlike some regional papers, has made a decision to continue doing its own enterprise reporting in Washington. This means that the Globe can highlight its own stories rather than taking the safer route of joining in a single national agenda set in consensus with others. I think it took courage on the part of editors to keep putting the paper’s reputation behind a very complex story that was not being echoed on the front pages of other publications. I believe this experience shows why it is very important to maintain a diversity of journalistic thought in Washington.”
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The issue of “consensus” coverage, (the truly snide have been known to call it “pack journalism”), has always been troublesome, leaving huge voids in coverage of stories with less of that “readers want to know” appeal. That trouble has been aggravated as regional papers have either done away with Washington bureaus entirely, or reduced them in size to, say, a single, industrious intern, who, unless they’re a fledgling Charlie Savage are in no position to dispute their silverback editors’ notion of “the story of the day”.

Since writing his Pulitzer-winning series on the signing statements Savage has popped a couple excellent pieces on the background of Alberto Gonzales’ acolytes in the present, uh, Justice department. Click the link for one of them.