As announced Monday, reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post, working with photographer Michel du Cille, have won a Pulitzer Prize for their series reporting on the poor treatment of patients, many of them maimed Iraq War veterans, at Walter Reed Hospital. The series ran in February 2007.
A brief interview with the two reporters is online today at the Poynter Institute. It provides some of the back story of how they were tipped off to the situation at Walter Reed, how they gained access, and how they blended their two very different reporting and writing styles. (A bit more about this follows under the fold.)
Of course valuable reporting like this is the result of slow-going, painstaking work requiring months to investigate and gain the trust of sources before one word can be written. It's easy to forget that, but awards as prestigious as the Pulitizers remind us.
All the Pulitzer Prizes for '08 were announced Monday afternoon and they did receive attention from the Daily Kos community in a diary by Seneca Doane here. Writing that "we give the press a lot of deserved grief" around here, SD wrote that it's good ocassionaly to take note where we see the press succeeding.
Although the press often falls far short of its purported mission to be a watchdog over the powerful, we need it nonetheless. In all its imperfections there are those (too few!) moments when it opens our eyes to what we could not possibly otherwise know.
As in the Walter Reed stories:
Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
At Poynter, Ann Hull talked about her job as one in which "most of us.....seek to illuminate." Still, she admitted, "the chances to play a role in creating reform are rare." These stories provided that rare moment, getting a reaction from Congress, the Pentagon and the White House.
One of the most troubling aspects of the imperfect media landscape today, it seems to me, is the ceaseless cutting back of newsroom staff (in service to the shareholders expectations for unreasonably high profit margins). Original reporting -- by far the most important ingredient in Pulitzer-winning journalism -- inevitably suffers and the media failures multiply.
Dare we hope the Pulitzers might focus the minds of the media overlords on what a smart investment they make when they invest in reporters?