If the Pulitzer Prize is the Oscars, the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Journalism may be sort of like the Golden Globes - a bigger deal to the writers themselves, although it garners less attention than the main prize.  In a sense, the Goldsmith is a bigger deal.  While there are a variety of categories in which one can win a Pulitzer for investigative work, only one person walks out of the Goldsmith dinner with the big check and the bragging rights.  So, to even be nominated is a pretty big deal.

The winners of the Goldsmith Prize for 2008 were announced earlier in the week - the Washington Post's Barton Gellman and Jo Becker for their really great series Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.  It's not who I would have picked.  That's another pair of finalists: Dana Priest and Anne Hull for their series "The Other Walter Reed."

In picking the Angler series, I feel like the panelists decided on a story that while really interesting, focuses too much on political celebrity, and not enough on heavy duty problems facing Americans far below this country's elite classes.

It's like this: the scandal at Walter Reed, that is the warehousing and almost "disappearing" of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who have suffered mightily from their war wounds, says an enormous amount about our society and how much mismanagement has resulted from our governance in the past 7 years.  Tens to hundreds of thousands will come back from those wars injured and incomplete, and they won't be properly cared for.  The result will be people who live for decades but are unable to function in our society.   The result will be people who gave everything, and got less back than they deserved.

It's heartbreaking, and it's something that everyone should care more about.

Cheney's Vice Presidency, on the other hand, is also important. But Cheney, and his fiercest lieutenants like Chief of Staff David Addington, are just people.  While the Gellman and Becker series delivers a lot of really shocking details about how far Cheney has gone in order to create an edifice of secretive and literally unimpeachable executive power, the problem that the story brings into crystallization is far more abstract.  The unitary executive is scary - it needs to be debated, understood, and in my opinion, rolled back.  But the telling of the story amounts to a lot of inside baseball that is a long ways from directly affecting real living people.

The soldiers whose sacrifice was thrown back in their faces at the Walter Reed Medical Center are facing far more serious problems, and right now to boot.  Dana Priest and Anne Hull did an amazing thing in telling their stories in such excruciating detail.  Awarding the reporters for finding and telling their stories would have said much more than reminding us of how much Cheney's concept of political power needs to be excoriated.

So, if there were a Veracifier Prize for Investigative Reporting, Ms. Priest and Ms. Hull, you'd get it.  Here's hoping that there will be a Pulitzer with your names on it.