Fighting Back

With all these challenges to truth right now, how do you how do you fight back against that threat to truth?

Well, I mean, we do the work, our journalists do the work that they've trained to do. Our stories are thoroughly reviewed. They're edited. High consequence stories are vetted in many levels of editorial review. We have lawyers actively involved. Double, triple check sources. It's just using the tools of journalism and making sure that you're being thoughtful, not rushing something to be the first one out. If you put the accuracy at risk and when mistakes occur, as they do, correcting it immediately. But I think right now there is a vulnerability for journalists that the slightest misstep in a story, something that is not consequential to the story, if someone can see the slightest error there becomes a way to exploit it and say this is false, fake news. Don't believe it. And it puts the pressure on journalists. It's a tough job to be a journalist today. They work very hard. They're under pressure. And it's important that they're accurate in what they report.

So how difficult this is for you and the staff of The Washington Post where you do feel like you're constantly under attack, the media is under attack every day now?

Well, our approach is that we are not the opposition. Our job is to do the work of journalism, to do the work that's been intended by the First Amendment. You know, when the founding fathers created the First Amendment, it wasn't because they had a particular affection for journalists or that the journalists had good lobbyists. It was because they felt that a free and independent press was important if this model of democracy was going to succeed. So we, our journalists follow that same rule, the same practice that was intended when our country was formed, to be aggressive, be thorough, to report on the powerful, to hold them to account, to challenge them when facts are not accurate and to report when the facts are.