Who Is Government?
The inaugural Goldsmith Explanatory Prize for reporting on government is awarded to The Washington Post Opinions series “Who Is Government?” created by Michael Lewis.
Seven writers — Michael Lewis, Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell, and W. Kamau Bell — were “set loose on the federal bureaucracy” and given the same brief: find a story about public service. Each piece, taken together, helped shine a light on the value of government work and the dedicated civil servants that are rarely written about or celebrated:
Lewis found an engineer in the Bureau of Mines who singlehandedly revolutionized mining safety.
Cep discovered an official at Veterans Affairs who created a culture of care and excellence in our national cemeteries, the resting place of America’s fallen.
Eggers zeroed in on a group of scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories obsessed with finding planets hospitable to life.
Lanchester chose to profile a number — the Consumer Price Index — and in so doing explained how data-gathering is essential to the American Project.
Brooks unearthed an IRS agent who also investigates cybercrimes — and is a black-belt sommelier in his free time.
Vowell wrote about the democratization of our defining documents by chronicling the efforts of an innovator at the National Archives.
And Bell, using video, audio and text, profiled a member of the next generation of civil servants: his goddaughter, who was a paralegal at the Department of Justice.