Drawing a Line

Great journalism often means taking on powerful people and digging for the truth, wherever that truth may lead. For you personally, can you describe an instance where you actively challenged a person or an entity perhaps, and faced aggressive pushback?

That's not infrequent. As I'm sure you found in your journalism career, when you interview someone or you report on them and it's a very positive story, they think, well, that, of course, that's true, it's positive. And when it's negative, it's like, that's not true. That's wrong. You have to correct this. And we make a point. I tell, at the highest levels of government, I have told the people we deal with, if there is a factual error in anything The Washington Post has reported or is in the process of reporting, we want to know immediately. Call me. Call our editor, Marty Baron, who is as attentive to this as anyone because we do not want to have a factual error. The problem comes more often is people say, well, I just didn't like the tone. Well, you know, we can't always select the tone when multiple sources are contributing to a story. Our reporters do the best job they can to make sure it's balanced, accurate, and it includes all views.