Advice from longtime journalist: Challenge everything
If your mother says she loves you, check it out — inquire, investigate and assess that claim.
That’s a silly exaggeration, of course. Yet when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, says on national TV that the White House is compelled to “put alternative facts out there,” it’s time to challenge what we hear or read from every source.
That advice comes from Joann Byrd, the most admirable journalist I’ve ever known. The Herald’s executive editor from 1981 to 1992, Byrd later worked as The Washington Post’s ombudsman. A decade ago, she co-chaired the Pulitzer Prize Board. Her nonfiction book, “Calamity: The Heppner Flood of 1903,” was published by the University of Washington Press in 2009.
I called my former boss, who lives in Seattle, to talk about journalism in the Trump era. Just one day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump told an audience at CIA headquarters: “I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth.”
About that, the 74-year-old Byrd said, “He’s just flat wrong.”
“Journalists I know get out of bed in the morning to serve the public, and will do anything we can to provide reliable information. I never met a journalist who did not operate on that theory,” Byrd said. When reporters have fabricated information or otherwise lied, “they’ve been fired immediately.”
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