Marty Baron on Journalism

[Lark11]

www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/washington-post-editor-marty-baron-message-to-journalists

Hitchens Prize
WASHINGTON POST EDITOR MARTY BARON HAS A MESSAGE TO JOURNALISTS IN THE TRUMP ERA
After the election of a president who waged, in his words, an “outright assault on the press,” the paper’s executive editor delivered words of advice for reporters when he received the Hitchens Prize in New York on Monday.
BY MARTIN BARON NOVEMBER 29, 2016 6:15 PM


Marty Baron in the Washington Post newsroom, February 2013.

On Monday, the second-annual Hitchens Prize—honoring the memory and legacy of the late Vanity Fair contributing editor and columnist Christopher Hitchens—was given to Marty Baron, Executive Editor of The Washington Post, at a dinner held at New York City’s Waverly Inn.

The prize, awarded by the Dennis & Victoria Ross Foundation, is bestowed upon a journalist or author whose work reflects a commitment to free expression, a depth of intellect, and an unwavering pursuit of the truth. This year’s citation acknowledged Baron’s long career in journalism and his work as editor of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

Among those on hand to see novelist Martin Amis hand the Hitchens medal to Baron, were Dennis and Victoria Ross; Graydon Carter, Editor of Vanity Fair; Amazon founder and Post owner Jeff Bezos, Hitchens’s wife Carol Blue and his daughter, Antonia; along with his friends Christopher Buckley, Sir Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, Victor Navasky, Brian Ross, and Jason Rezaian.

Accepting the award, Baron said that even as an editor with no books to his name and little reputation as a writer, he shared certain attributes with the prolific contrarian and polemicist Hitchens, who died in December 2011, most notably a shared respect for the truth and for the media’s duty to hold government to account. Baron went on to say that Donald Trump’s frequent denigration of the press was probably a taste of things to come and that the media in general now faces an enormous challenge. His remarks, in full, follow below. —Henry Porter

When Carol [Blue] called to tell me that I had been awarded the Hitchens Prize, I was stunned. The prize is so new that I had not heard of it. And I wondered how someone could look at my career in journalism, and Christopher’s brilliant run, and find the common themes.

I was—I am—enormously grateful to win a prize that honors Christopher’s legacy. Grateful that Dennis and Victoria Ross were inspired to create it. And blown away that I follow in the footsteps of the extraordinary documentarian Alex Gibney, [last year’s recipient].

Still, I’ve been researching Christopher’s life and work, looking for a match. A close friend and highly accomplished journalist sent me a note after he saw the news. “I highly respect you. And I highly respected Hitchens. Can’t say I ever thought of you as cut from the same cloth, however.”

It’s not surprising that my friend would say that. Christopher smoked incessantly. I don’t smoke. Never did. He drank with famous frequency—beginning with scotch, ending with cognac. I drink very little, almost never scotch or cognac. He was an impressively prolific writer. I’m an editor, have been since 1983. He wrote books, including a best-selling memoir. I haven’t . . . and I am my least favorite subject.

He was a regular presence on television and on debating platforms. I preferred to stay in the background—until a certain movie blew that idea to smithereens.

He once subjected himself to waterboarding. He also got a Brazilian bikini wax. I wouldn’t do either.

And as Graydon Carter wrote in his eloquent essay on the day Christopher died, he “will be remembered for the millions of words he left behind.” I may be remembered for how few I spoke—if the movie Spotlight is an indication.

Poor Liev Schreiber. He could not have been assigned a more challenging role. He had to portray someone both stingy with words and restrained in his emotions. No wonder that, when we first met, Liev kept probing to see if I’d done or said something more, well, dramatic.

So Christopher and I were different people. But in truth we shared a lot.

In Hitch-22, Christopher recounts how he was called by The Washington Post on Valentine’s Day 1989 for his opinion about the fatwah Ayatollah Khomeini had issued against [novelist] Salman Rushdie.

It was, he wrote, “a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship.”

When it comes to values, with the exception of religion—which I do not hate—Christopher and I are cut from the same cloth.

Values are what matter most. And this is a good time to talk about them. A good time to reaffirm what we as journalists stand for.

This is a time we are compelled to fight for free expression and a free press—rights granted us under the Constitution, yes, but also the very qualities that have long set us apart from other nations.

We will have a new president soon. He was elected after waging an outright assault on the press. Animosity toward the media was a centerpiece of his campaign. He described the press as “disgusting,” “scum,” “lowlifes.” He called journalists the “lowest form of humanity.” That apparently wasn’t enough. So he called us “the lowest form of life.” In the final weeks of the campaign he labeled us “the enemies.”

It is no wonder that some members of our staff at The Washington Post and at other news organizations received vile insults and threats of personal harm so worrisome that extra security was required. It is no wonder that one Internet venue known for hate and misogyny and white nationalism posted the home addresses of media executives, clearly inviting vandalism or worse. Thankfully, nothing that I know of happened to anyone. Then there was the yearlong anti-Semitic targeting of journalists on Twitter.

Donald Trump said he wanted to “open up” libel laws. And he proposed to harass unfriendly media outlets by suing them, driving up their legal expenses with a goal of weakening them financially.

With respect to The Washington Post, he ordered our press credentials revoked during the campaign, barring us from routine press access to him and his events, because our coverage didn’t meet with his approval. Even before we were subjected to his months-long blacklist, Donald Trump falsely alleged that our owner, Jeff Bezos, was orchestrating that coverage. And he openly hinted that, if he became president, he would retaliate.

Jeff Bezos himself addressed this perfectly at one point—on several occasions actually.

“We want a society,” he said, “where any of us, any individual in this country, any institution in this country, if they choose to, can scrutinize, examine, and criticize an elected official, especially a candidate for the highest office in the most powerful country on earth. . . .

“We have fundamental laws and . . . we have Constitutional rights in this country to free speech. But that’s not the whole reason that it works here. We also have cultural norms that support that, where you don’t have to be afraid of retaliation. And those cultural norms are at least as important as the Constitution.”

Getting elected didn’t change anything. After his election—in the midst of protests against him—Donald Trump resorted to Twitter to accuse the media of inciting violence when, of course, there had been no incitement whatsoever by anyone.

The other night, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour eloquently explained the gravity of such deliberately false accusations emanating from a future head of state. She was speaking when she was honored by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Postcard from the world,” she said, “This is how it goes with authoritarians like Sisi, Erdoğan, Putin, the Ayatollahs, Duterte, et al . . . First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating—until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison—and then who knows?”

When the press is under attack, we cannot always count on our nation’s institutions to safeguard our freedoms—not even the courts.

At times throughout our history, they have shamefully failed to do so—whether it was the Sedition Act of 1798 under President John Adams, harshly repressive Sedition and Espionage Acts under Woodrow Wilson in the context of World War I, or the McCarthy Era that still serves to remind us of what comes of a dishonest and reckless search for enemies.

The ultimate defense of press freedom lies in our daily work.

Many journalists wonder with considerable weariness what it is going to be like for us during the next four—perhaps eight—years. Will we be incessantly harassed and vilified? Will the new administration seize on opportunities to try intimidating us? Will we face obstruction at every turn?

If so, what do we do?

The answer, I believe, is pretty simple. Just do our job. Do it as it’s supposed to be done.

Every day as I walk into our newsroom, I confront a wall that articulates a set of principles that were established in 1933 by a new owner for The Post, Eugene Meyer, whose family went on to publish The Post for 80 years.

The principles begin like this: “The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.”

The public expects that of us. If we fail to pursue the truth and to tell it unflinchingly—because we’re fearful that we’ll be unpopular, or because powerful interests (including the White House and the Congress) will assail us, or because we worry about financial repercussions to advertising or subscriptions—the public will not forgive us.

Nor, in my view, should they.

After the release of the movie Spotlight, I was often asked how we at The Boston Globe were willing to take on the most powerful institution in New England and among the most powerful in the world, the Catholic Church.

The question really mystifies me—especially when it comes from journalists or those who hope to enter the profession. Because holding the most powerful to account is what we are supposed to do.

If we do not do that, then what exactly is the purpose of journalism?

God forbid we take on the weaker institutions, the weaker individuals, while letting the strongest ones off the hook only because they can forcefully fight back.

A day before I started work at The Boston Globe in the summer of 2001, I read something startling. It was a column by The Globe’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, Eileen McNamara. She wrote about the case of John Geoghan. He was a priest. Geoghan had been accused of abusing as many as 80 children. It was shocking. So I read closely.

The column detailed how the attorney for the survivors—those victimized by the priest—had asserted that the cardinal himself, Cardinal Bernard Law, knew about this priest’s repeated abuse and yet continued to reassign him from one parish to the next—notifying no one, not the parish priest and certainly not the parishioners, that a priest known to have committed sexual assaults would serve in ministry at their church.

Those were the allegations of the plaintiffs’ attorney. But the attorneys for the Church called those allegations baseless and irresponsible.

And then Eileen ended her column by saying the truth might never be known because the internal Church documents that could reveal the truth were under court seal.

When there are allegations of grave wrongdoing, we can’t settle for the truth never being known.

We needed to know, and that is what propelled me—and my colleagues at The Boston Globe—to launch our investigation and to file a court motion to unseal those internal documents that would tell us what the Church was so determined to keep secret.

The first question we sought to answer, of course, was whether the Cardinal himself knew of this priest’s abuse and yet reassigned him to other parishes despite consistently strong evidence of serial abuse of children. The answer to that question proved to be an unequivocal yes.

We also wanted to know if there were other abusers like this priest? Beyond that, did the Church knowingly place abusers into parishes where their history of abuse was kept secret—and where they abused again? Was concealing abuse and reassigning priests the Church’s actual policy and practice? The answer to all those questions turned out to be an unequivocal yes.

The result of excavating the truth was a public good. Children were made more safe.

Well after our first story was published in January 2002, I received a letter from Father Thomas P. Doyle, who had waged a long and lonely battle within the Church on behalf of abuse victims. He wrote this: “This nightmare would have gone and on were it not for you and the Globe staff. As one who has been deeply involved in fighting for justice for the victims and survivors for many years, I thank you with every part of my being.

“I assure you,” he wrote, “that what you and the Globe have done for the victims, the Church and society cannot be adequately measured. It is momentous and its good effects will reverberate for decades.”

There is a lesson in Father Doyle’s letter: The truth is not meant to be hidden. It is not meant to be suppressed. It is not meant to be ignored. It is not meant to be disguised. It is not meant to be manipulated. It is not meant to be falsified. Otherwise, wrongdoing will persist.

I kept Father Doyle’s letter on my desk in Boston until the day, four years ago, that I left to join The Washington Post. It served as a reminder of what brought me to journalism and what kept me in it. And as a reminder of the work we as journalists must always do.

It is the work that occupied Christopher Hitchens over a lifetime and that still animates so many in the profession to which I’ve dedicated 40 years.

For all of my style differences with Christopher, what we shared transcends all that. We shared a common purpose.

Thank you for listening and for all you do to assure that Christopher’s ideals endure.

[Lark11]

www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2016/12/16/washington-post-executive-editor-martin-baron-delivers-commencement-address-at-the-cuny-graduate-school-of-journalism/?utm_term=.8ca8eefc43fe

Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron delivers commencement address at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism

By WashPostPR December 16

Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron delivered a commencement address today to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism at The Times Center in New York City. In his speech, Baron highlighted eight lessons the journalism profession can learn based on the coverage of the 2016 presidential election. A transcript of the address is below.

Thank you for inviting me to be here on this special day. Congratulations to all of you.

The skills you’ve acquired will be essential to your success. But the lives you’ve led allow you to contribute something unique to our profession.

You will bring your distinct experience, your singular observations, your background. Each of you also, I hope, will bring your particular voice. Because our profession needs to hear from you. And this is very much a profession where one person can make a profound difference.

We can be better and smarter and wiser – and the public can be more informed — by what you’ve witnessed over a lifetime and what you now see and hear.

You will have the opportunity and the power to transport people into a world they otherwise would never have known. Journalism can do that.

Your dean has given me roughly 10 minutes to have my say. So I’d better get started.

Given that we’ve just gone through a presidential election unlike any we’ve ever seen before, I’d like to talk about what we can learn from it.

I emerge from this election enormously proud of the journalism of The Washington Post. It was penetrating and perceptive. Our journalists were resourceful and often brave.

Still, there is always good reason to find lessons we as a profession can learn. Because we should strive to constantly improve. And this is a moment to reflect. We should not hesitate to do so.

So here are my thoughts in the immediate aftermath:

No. 1.: We in the press are bad forecasters. As knowledgeable as we are, we can’t predict the future. Too often we tried. But no one could have predicted how this election played out.

Our journalistic experience gives us the tools to analyze what is happening. It does not enable us to accurately forecast what will happen. The variables are too many, and often elusive.

So we need to be careful about slipping from analysis to prediction. No matter how smart we think we are, we’re not that smart.

No. 2: Elections are a reminder that swagger makes us look good but it has to be earned. And earned with a quality that is quite different. That quality is modesty.

You know, journalists love swagger. The public can find it appealing, too. Our owner at The Post, Jeff Bezos, has spoken admiringly of swagger as part of the culture of The Post. And we like that. You can be sure. And it happens to be true.

So why would I mention “modesty”? And what do I mean by that word?

Because modesty recognizes that we always have a lot to learn and that we are not without flaws. The best journalists are more impressed with what they don’t know than with what they do know.

A mind filled with questions is essential to doing our jobs. We can never have too many. We can only have too few.

If mistakes were made in this election, it was that the profession overall made too many assumptions – about who would prevail, about what voters would most value in candidates, about the issues that would determine the outcome, about statements that presumably would be fatal. Many of those assumptions turned out to be incorrect.

Reporting is the proper antidote to our assumptions. Getting out of the office, talking to people in our communities and around the country, seeking to understand them, doing our homework. That can cure us of mistaken preconceptions.

When we’ve done our reporting, we can arrive at sound conclusions. And then we’ll have earned our swagger. The swagger of achievement, not entitlement.

Jeff Bezos has called Post journalists “professional swashbucklers.” Doing hard, revelatory reporting is the “professional” part.

No. 3: We need to be better listeners.

There has been a lot of argument about whether the press is somehow “responsible” for the election outcome.

First, let me point out that we have a democracy, and the decision belongs to the voters. It is the same democracy, by the way, that allows the press to report with treasured freedom.

Our job is to give the public the information it needs and deserves to know. The voters make their choice, weighing everything according to their judgment. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

Still, the press stands accused of not taking Donald Trump seriously enough, early enough, during the primaries; and, at the same time, of giving him too much coverage; or failing to vet him thoroughly early on. Still others say we were too harsh.

On the whole, I don’t think much of that stands up to scrutiny. And we have to be careful not to generalize about “the media,” which covers a lot of territory. There were some lapses, no question. For one, cable networks should not give any candidate hours upon hours of live coverage for virtually every rally held. That is not journalism.

The most worrisome concern, however, is something else. It is that we as journalists – before Donald Trump became a candidate — largely failed to focus on the depth of anxiety and grievance in America: The severe hurt felt by those who had seen opportunities vanish for themselves and their families. The boiling resentment harbored against those perceived as gaining at their expense.

It is our job to hear all people. And to listen closely. And to give the people of America insights into each other. We will have to work harder at that.

No. 4: We need newsrooms filled with people from different backgrounds.

The face of America is changing, and that means that the faces in our newsrooms should change, too. If we hope to reflect the lives of all Americans, our newsrooms need to draw from every corner of this country.

It was evident during this election, as it had been for years before, that many in our society do not see themselves represented adequately, or even honestly, in American media.

As Gwen Ifill, the gracious and accomplished journalist who died just over a month ago, once said: “We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”

Race and ethnicity are a big part of that. As a profession, we have made progress on that front, achieving more diversity through hiring. We need to do more.

I believe we also need to think more broadly about the composition of our newsrooms. It’s fair to ask some questions:

How many of our newsroom colleagues come from working-class families? How in touch are we with families where, when one thing goes wrong – a lost job, a car that gives out – then an entire household falls into crisis for lack of a financial cushion?

How many in our newsrooms have served in the military?
When there was a draft, there were more. But the military draft ended in 1973. When our country has been in so many wars, when so many of our fellow citizens are returning from the brutality of battle, we must ask ourselves whether we are missing something essential to understanding America.

No. 5: We need to think hard about what it means to be “fair.”

This is especially important during an election season when we in the press are subjected to incessant partisan attack.

Yes, we must be fair to the people we cover. That means being honest, honorable, and accurate in our reporting. We need to listen openly to what candidates have to say. We need to put hypotheses to the test. We should acknowledge when our premise is incorrect, or when too much remains unverified.

But when we’ve done all the research — when we’ve done our job thoroughly — we have a duty to tell people what we’ve learned. And to tell it to them forthrightly. Without masking our findings or muddling them.

That’s just being straight– and being fair — with the public.

If we don’t do that, we’re certainly not being respectful of the truth.

No. 6: Let’s remember that there is such a thing as truth. And we as journalists must be resolved to find it — and to tell it.

That is an urgent mission in an era when many ideologically-driven media outlets publish purported facts that are, in actuality, malicious falsehoods and baseless conspiracy theories.

Certain sites have propagated the notion that someone other than Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks of 9/11 – perhaps the U.S. government or Jews.

They still maintain that the president was not born in the United States. These media outlets spread the false notion that last year’s military training exercise, Operation Jade Helm, was an administration plan to crack down on civil liberties and prelude to a military takeover.

One radio host, also the operator of a popular Internet site, has asserted that some mass shootings – Sandy Hook, San Bernardino — were hoaxes to advance the cause of gun control.

Some politicians cynically repeat those lies. Others, taking the cowardly path, just choose not to challenge them.

The result? People believe a lot that is plainly, demonstrably untrue. Many people. And many people, faced with conflicting information, have no idea what to believe. The easiest course, then, is to believe whatever you’d like.

All of this is having a corrosive effect.

How can we have a strong civil society when we can’t agree on basic facts, when people accept lies as truth?

It is why we as journalists must stay faithful to our central purpose. Someone must still tell things as they really are.

No. 7: When individuals seek to hold the top position in the most powerful country on earth, we have an obligation to find out everything we can — about their records and about their character.

That means digging. It means investigative reporting. It means we must cover more than what politicians and policymakers say. It is more important to cover what they do.

Inevitably, it means we are going to be targets of persistent, often venomous attack.

We will be accused of bias. Access to a candidate may be cut off. Subscribers may cancel. And at times, as happened in this latest campaign, our journalists will be subjected to vile insult and threatened with personal harm.

But as Anthony Lewis, the late New York Times columnist, wrote: “The American press has been given extraordinary freedom by the Supreme Court’s interpretations of the First Amendment. In return, it owes society courage.”

And, so, no matter how nasty things get, we must keep doing our jobs. Whoever aspires to be president deserves intense scrutiny. We must provide it.

Finally, No. 8. This is a particularly worrisome lesson for me.

Freedom of the press in this country is more fragile than any of us might have imagined. It is now under assault. You, I, all of us in this profession – and the public — will have to defend it.

Every presidential election brings the press into conflict with candidates. That’s only natural. And this year neither major candidate had warm feelings toward the press. That’s OK.

Hillary Clinton was notoriously inaccessible throughout much of her campaign. She ducked hard questions that deserved to be asked. Her longstanding suspicion of the press and hostility toward it were fully evident.

But our President-elect went further. Animosity toward the media was a centerpiece of his campaign.

He described the press as “disgusting,” “scum,” the “lowest form of humanity,” even “the lowest form of life.” As election day approached, he called us “the enemies.”

He said he wanted to “open up” libel laws. And he promised to harass unfriendly media outlets by suing them, for the sole vindictive purpose of driving up their legal costs.

With respect to The Washington Post, for months Donald Trump ordered our press credentials revoked because our coverage didn’t meet with his approval. Even before we were blacklisted, he openly hinted that, if he became president, he would seek retribution against our owner.

Let’s think about what makes our country truly exceptional and a beacon for people around the world who seek freedom: The First Amendment. Free expression. And, beyond that, a set of democratic norms that allow anyone to scrutinize and criticize our elected officials. As well as a sane and humane political culture that allows people to speak their minds without fear of government reprisal.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in 1927, wrote this: “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth . . .

Sadly, we cannot always count on our nation’s institutions to safeguard our freedoms.

At times in our history, they have shamefully failed to do so – whether it was the Sedition Act of 1798 under President John Adams, harshly repressive Sedition and Espionage Acts under Woodrow Wilson during World War I, or the McCarthy Era that reminds us of the grave damage that comes from a reckless search for enemies.

In 1940, another great jurist, Judge Learned Hand, called upon America’s citizens to see themselves as the ultimate guarantors of our freedoms. “Liberty,” he said, “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.”

The right to free expression belongs to all of us. The fight to protect it falls to all of us as well.

My hope is that no one will fight harder than all of you.

You have inherited this incredible gift. You leave here with an obligation to make sure it is never stolen from us.

Thank you for listening. Good luck to all of you.

[Lark11]

www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/02/19/washington-post-executive-editor-martin-baron-delivers-reuters-memorial-lecture-at-the-university-of-oxford/?utm_term=.d4ffd50cc306

WashPost PR Blog
Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron delivers Reuters Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford
By WashPostPR February 19
Executive Editor Martin Baron delivered the Reuters Memorial Lecture at the University of Oxford on February 16, 2018. The full text of his prepared remarks is below.

Over the past few years — during the U.S. presidential campaign and then after, during the first year of a new administration – many of us in the press came to wonder why the old rules of journalism no longer seemed to apply.

How was it that when we reported that what a candidate said – and then what the president said – was false, much of the public shrugged it off?

How was it that so many people believed things that were untrue, even though we could document that they were false?

How was it that websites created overnight could successfully disseminate falsehoods and crackpot conspiracy theories, suffering no consequences for deliberate deceit but instead gaining audience?

I got what I believed to be some answers when I was directed to the late Neil Postman’s 1985 book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”
Postman’s idea was that the shift in media consumption from the printed word to the television signal had changed the very fundamentals of how we communicate — and thus had altered our culture and our politics.

While the public, he felt, worried most about an authoritarian world as envisioned by George Orwell in the book “1984,” he believed a future as imagined by Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” was more likely.

“Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us,” he wrote. “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.”

Postman argued that a so-called Age of Exposition – when people were informed by the printed word and its implicit requirement that arguments be rooted in logic and evidence — had been replaced by an Age of Show Business.

What did this mean? It meant that surface appearances mattered more than reasoning. It elevated performance in the sense of acting over performance in the sense of achievement.

Take the issue of “credibility.” In the Age of Show Business, as Postman put it, credibility “does not refer to the past record of the teller for making statements that have survived the rigors of reality-testing. It refers only to the impression of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness . . .”

He added that if on television this brand of credibility “replaces reality as the decisive test of truth-telling, political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude . . . One may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying.”

Postman wrote the following in 1985: “The reporters who cover the White House are ready and able to expose lies, and thus create the grounds for informed and indignant opinion. But apparently the public declines to take an interest.”

I don’t mean to dwell so much on Neil Postman. And I am not predicting that Aldous Huxley’s prophesy will come true – or Orwell’s, for that matter.

But I do think we must recognize that something profound has changed in our profession.
Journalism may not work as it did in the past. Our work’s anticipated impact may not materialize. The public may not process information as it did previously.

The president of the United States may well be on to something when he emphasizes, as he routinely does, his television ratings. Or when he explained, as he did in October, his behavior on Twitter by declaring, “You have to keep people interested.” Or when he remarked of the generals in his cabinet, immediately after his swearing-in on January 20, “I see my generals. These are central casting.”

Or when, in January this year, he conducted a 55-minute bipartisan immigration meeting with cameras rolling, later boasting that networks gave it “great reviews” and garnered “fantastic” ratings. Or the next day, when he welcomed reporters again to the Cabinet Room, saying, “Welcome back to the studio.”

There is clearly a heavy dose of the show, the performance, in this administration. Donald Trump learned from his 14 years hosting “The Apprentice.” He may have learned more about today’s media environment and today’s political communication than we in the press yet fully understand.

“Before taking office,” the New York Times wrote two months ago, “Mr. Trump told aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

Just before he took office, one of our reporters asked him how people would know if he had fulfilled his promise to “make America great again.” Aside from talking about jobs and infrastructure, he talked of being a great “cheerleader” for the country, and then previewed a spectacle he had in mind: “ . . . we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military. That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we’re going to be showing our military.” (It now looks as if we may actually get that military parade.)

In fact, Trump’s showmanship goes incredibly deep. In the 1980s when his first marriage had collapsed, as one of The Post’s writers recently recalled, “Trump not only didn’t push back when tabloid newspapers turned the collapse of his first marriage into a daily soap opera; Trump actively participated in the scripting of the drama, calling gossip writers, dishing out salacious morsels almost by the hour.”

“The show is Trump,” he said then, “and it is sold-out performances everywhere.”

Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist for The New York Times and previously the Wall Street Journal, authored a November piece headlined “We are all part of Trump’s show.” But months earlier, in a brilliant lecture, Stephens cautioned: “At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself.”

Let me pause here to say I am not expressing a view on the results of the presidential election or the president’s policies. I have deep respect for our democratic system and the public’s right to select whomever they prefer to lead the country.

People have their own reasons for voting as they do. And it’s to be expected that whoever is elected will endeavor to execute policies consistent with positions articulated during a campaign.

Let people debate what’s right and proper. That’s our system.
This is the same democracy, by the way, that gives us in the American press the constitutional right to publish freely without government interference, a right I cherish.

Yet the founders of the United States created a democracy where the president is not a king. He occupies a central role.
But so does Congress. The courts do, too. And so does the press, which is why the founders crafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That amendment places checks on the government’s power. Freedom of religion, one of the rights there, puts limits on the government. And so do the other First Amendment rights regarding free expression: that is, freedom of speech, freedom to peaceably assemble, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and freedom of the press.

Those last four rights were designed with a clear purpose: holding government to account. Or, as founder James Madison put it, “the right of freely examining public characters and measures.” So, the job of the press is to provide citizens of our democracy the information they need and deserve to know.

The question I’m seeking to address here is this: How is that all working out right now? Does the public see the press as effectively filling this role? When the press does its reporting, delivers the facts it has gathered, and seeks to hold government accountable, how is that received by the public?

What does it take to establish something as fact? Do the old ways still work? And if not, how does democracy function when we can’t agree on a baseline set of facts? What if the public rejects the very idea of an independent arbiter of what’s true and false?

The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan liked to say, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” What if people believe they are not only entitled to their own opinion but to their own facts? Where does that lead?

A few sobering statistics tell us where things stand today.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll published in October showed that nearly half of all American voters – 46% — believe the news media fabricate news stories about Trump and his administration. Three quarters of Republican voters believe that.

A Gallup-Knight Foundation survey released in January found that four in 10 Republicans consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be “fake news.” The number is 17% for Democrats.

Another: The Washington Post’s Fact Checker staff counted more than 2,000 false or misleading claims by President Trump during his first full year in office.

Another: A Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll showed that 36% of Republicans believed freedom of the press does more harm than good.

Finally: A YouGov/Economist poll found that 55% of Republicans believe the courts should be allowed to “fine news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate.” And 45% of Republicans say the courts should be able to “shut down” biased media organizations.

Donald Trump has made a distinct contribution to the muddling of fact and fiction. And his objective is evident.

Our columnist Michael Gerson – a conservative – put it this way: “It is the dismissal of reason and objectivity as inherently elitist and partisan . . . It is the attempt to destroy or subvert any source of informed judgment other than Trump himself.”

And that is why it is now worth recalling what Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court wrote in 1945 on behalf of the First Amendment: “every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”

During the campaign, Donald Trump went beyond seeking to discredit the press. He sought to marginalize us, then to delegitimize us, then to dehumanize us — calling us “disgusting,” “scum,” the “lowest form of humanity,” even “the lowest form of life.”

Only four weeks into his administration, he labeled us “the enemy of the American People.” By late summer, he questioned our patriotism: “I really don’t think they like our country,” he said. By the end of the year, he was calling the news media a “stain on America.”

His first full day in office, the president went to the CIA to declare himself at war with the media. And, indeed, he has been.

Statistics about Trump’s tweets capture the unrelenting nature of the assault: Since he declared his candidacy in 2015, he has posted more than 1,000 tweets critical of the press.
From December of 2016 to December 2017, Trump tweeted about “fake news” more than 150 times.

All this in the United States, which historically championed press freedom as a foundational principle that truly made America great, inspiring people around the world seeking free expression of their own.

Chris Wallace of Fox News — of all places — has declared: “President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on a free press in our history,” adding: “I think his purpose is clear: a concerted campaign to raise doubts when we report critically about his administration that we can be trusted.”

The observations of Yale professor Timothy Snyder apply here. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” he has written. “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.”

As he seeks to undermine confidence in the work of mainstream news organizations, the president himself traffics in baseless conspiracy theories.
One of our political writers, James Hohmann, labeled him “the most conspiracy-minded president in U.S. history,” rattling off the baseless theories he has promoted over the years:

Falsely claiming that Barack Obama is from Kenya. Wrongly claiming that Obama did not attend Columbia University. Insisting that Obama personally bribed New York’s attorney general to investigate Trump University.

Suggesting there may have been foul play when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in his sleep. Asserting that the IRS audits him because he’s a Christian.

Standing by a false claim that he watched TV footage of thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11 after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Suggesting that campaign opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban-born father was involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination.

The day after Trump took the oath of office, the White House press secretary, acting on the president’s instructions, excoriated the press for unfavorably comparing the size of his inauguration crowd to that for Obama.

The press secretary angrily insisted “this was the largest audience to ever witness the inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” That was false. National Park Service photographs proved it.

Trump claimed that 3-5 million people voted illegally, alleged fraud without which he would have won the popular vote. False. No one has produced evidence of any pattern of fraud.

The president declared that his predecessor had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election but never produced evidence. Judging from sworn congressional testimony of the former FBI director and the National Security Agency chief, he never will.

This can be head-spinning stuff.

In February last year, when the president spoke to a conservative group, he attacked a story of ours. The Post had disclosed that General Michael Flynn, his national security adviser at the time, had not told the truth when he insisted that he had not held pre-inauguration discussions with Russian officials about sanctions against that country.

In fact, he had held such discussions, we reported. He lied to the American people. And now, based on his December plea of guilty to criminal charges, we know Flynn also lied to the FBI.

For our story, we had nine sources. And we said so. And yet the president declared: “There’re no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people . . . They make up sources.”

That was an odd statement. Because the president had just fired General Flynn, explaining that Flynn had not told the vice president the truth about his conversations with the Russians.

But the president went a step further. He pointed to our story in his call for a criminal leak investigation. Which raised a question: If the president really believed we had no sources for our story, then what leak did he think needed investigating?

By March, even the conservative editorial writers at The Wall Street Journal were at wit’s end. They published a piece entitled “A President’s Credibility,” pointing to what they described as the president’s “seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.”
Still, it goes on. Toward the end of the year, the president privately advanced the idea that the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape was a fake. That tape was a recording published by The Washington Post near the end of the presidential campaign. It documented Trump boasting about grabbing women’s private parts.

After it was published, Trump offered up a rare declaration of remorse: “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” But once a year had passed — and amid widespread allegations of sexual harassment allegations against other prominent figures — the president reversed himself, asserting privately that the recording had been fabricated.

At about the same time, the New York Times reported, Trump was once again questioning the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate. It didn’t seem to matter that Trump – finally, during the campaign, and under pressure to admit the truth — uttered these words: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States.”

This all may get worse before it gets better. Tribalism in media consumption is becoming more pronounced.

The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report last year identified the U.S. online media environment as the most polarized in the world, reflecting a society that itself is equally polarized.

Polling for Reuters showed that 51% of those who leaned left trusted the media, compared with only 20% on the right.

A recent Poynter Institute study showed the gap growing, with 74% of Democrats, including respondents who lean Democratic, expressing “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in media reporting compared to just 19% of Republicans. The widening gap is due largely to a surge in Democratic confidence in the press since Trump’s election.

A Pew Research poll found that early in the Trump administration, roughly nine in ten Democrats said news media criticism keeps leaders in line, an endorsement of the watchdog role of the press. But only four in ten Republicans endorsed that view. The gap between the two was the highest ever in Pew’s polling on this issue since 1985.

Now there are threats to use government power against us.

During the campaign, Trump mused about suing the press so as to burden us with high legal costs and penalties. More recently, when the television network ABC made a serious error in its Trump coverage that briefly sent a soaring stock market down, the president – who never accepts accountability for his own falsehoods – called upon investors to sue the company for any stock market losses they suffered.

Minor errors by news outlets are seized upon and weaponized with the aim of crippling or destroying those institutions. He often calls for reporters to be fired, even for honest mistakes.

Overall, this president, who has made aggressive use of his constitutional right to free expression, has said that the First Amendment provides “too much protection” for the press.

Last month he called U.S. libel laws “a sham and a disgrace” and pledged to review them, although it’s unclear what he can do since they’re rooted in the Constitution, Supreme Court rulings, and state – as opposed to federal – law.

When speaking with then-FBI director James Comey, Trump called for more leak investigations and proposed putting journalists in prison for publishing classified information.
Last summer, the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced that the Justice Department was conducting 27 leak investigations, three times as many as the Obama administration – which itself had launched a record number.

Sessions declared: “We respect the important role that the press plays and will give them respect, but it is not unlimited. They cannot place lives at risk with impunity.”

All of us in the press understand about putting lives at risk. But the thing is, we haven’t done anything of the sort. The statement by the attorney general was evidently intended to please the president and incite the public against us.

What officials really seem to fear is the damage that truth can inflict on their reputations.

The leak investigations have been, above all, an effort to intimidate. Thankfully, I see little evidence that the press has been cowed. In many ways, it has been reinvigorated.

At The Post, we take inspiration from the principles that were articulated for our organization in 1935. They begin as follows: “The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.”

Judging from digital traffic, a surge in subscriptions and reader comments, much of the public believes we are doing just that.

On the glass wall of my office, I have posted dozens of notes from readers. Let me give you a flavor of what they say.

Here’s one: “Thank you for your work on behalf of truth in these times of tension and mistrust. Please know that American citizens rely on you to do your job with thoroughness and integrity, and we so appreciate your role in our democracy.”

Another: “I am counting on you and your able reporters to ‘keep at it.’ I have come to believe that the free press has saved our asses time and time again. Never has it been more important than it is today.”

And finally, “I subscribed to the Washington Post today because facts matter.”

Amid an unrelenting assault from the most powerful person on earth, the answer for us is clear: Just do our job. Do it honestly, honorably, seriously, fairly, accurately, and also unflinchingly. “To show, by our work,” as David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette put it, “that the truth still matters.”

We also must be more transparent — reveal how we go about our reporting, tell people who we are.

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold said earlier this year, “Beyond the age-old requirements that we be right and that we be fair and we be clear, there is a requirement that we be transparent.” That means, he said, we owe the public “proof of why what we do is better. If they don’t know it from our name, they must see it from our work.”

Tensions between the press and a president are not new. A recently released movie tells a piece of that history.

It happens to be called “The Post.” The Steven Spielberg movie is about the confrontation between the press – the New York Times and the Washington Post – and President Nixon over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967.

The Pentagon Papers were leaked, and the press sought to publish them. The Nixon administration moved to block publication, threatening criminal prosecution. The case landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which on June 30, 1971, ruled 6-3 in favor of the press and its right to publish.

“In the First Amendment,” Justice Hugo Black wrote, “the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors . . . The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

That opinion of Justice Hugo Black best captures the spirit that today animates The Post’s newsroom and, I believe, other leading American news organizations. It is our soul.

But we have been reminded over many months now that, as journalists, we need more than a soul. We also need a spine. I am pleased to report that we have that, too.

Thank you for listening.