Thursday, 4:30 PM
Globe wins Pulitzer Prize for series on Bush efforts to expand presidential power
By Globe Staff
The Boston Globe won its 19th Pulitzer Prize today for a series of stories by Washington bureau reporter Charlie Savage about President Bush's efforts to expand presidential power.
Savage, 31, won the award for national reporting for a series published last spring. The stories outlined how Bush had reserved a right to ignore a new law banning torture and claimed a right to bypass safeguards in the Patriot Act. In his reporting, Savage revealed that Bush has used signing statements to ignore more than 750 laws.
"I'm honored and overwhelmed," Savage said today. "I think it's great for the Globe. It shows that regional papers can still have a national impact. Even though it was in my name, it was a team effort."
The Pulitzers, which also honor achievements in letters and music, are journalism's highest honor.
"What Charlie does and the reason he won this richly deserved Pulitzer is because he covered what the White House does, not just what it says," Globe Editor Martin Baron told his staff as they hoisted champagne and cheered Savage this afternoon in the newsroom. "It was his persistent and pioneering reporting that not only brought great honor to you, Charlie, but also to this newspaper."
After Savage's stories were published, more than 150 editorials, columns, and political cartoons called on Bush to follow the law.
The Globe last won a Pulitzer in 2005, when Gareth Cook won the explanatory journalism prize for his coverage of the scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research. In 2003, the newspaper's Spotlight Team won the Pulitzer for public service for coverage of the priest sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.
This year, the Spotlight Team was one of three finalists in the local reporting category for it series "Debtors' Hell." According the Pulitzer judges, it was a "well documented exposure, in print and on-line, of unscrupulous debt collectors, causing two firms to close and prompting action by state officials." The winner in the local reporting category was Debbie Cenziper of the Miami Herald for her series on waste, favoritism, and lack of oversight at the Miami housing agency.
Savage was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and got his start in journalism at age 9 as a newspaper boy delivering the afternoon edition of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. His first experience inside a newsroom came in high school, when he worked as a clerk in the sports department of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
After earning an undergraduate degree in English from Harvard College in 1998, he got a job as a reporter for the Miami Herald. In 2003, Savage earned a master's degree as a Knight Foundation journalism fellow at Yale Law School. That October, he joined the Washington bureau of the Globe.
Savage recently returned from a book leave writing about presidential power. The book, "Takeover," is scheduled to be published by Little Brown this fall.
