By William H. Freivogel >> “Facts can’t fix this.” That was the headline that emerged from a post-election discussion recently at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School about how the press fell short covering the presidential election. The point: The press constantly repeating facts and pointing out lies won’t stop a man like
By Ruth Johnson >> The press failed to understand the voters who are returning Donald Trump to the White House, former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said. As in 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, “we didn’t understand the country well enough,” Baron said during a recent conversation with former New York
By Jeffrey Layne Blevins >> It looks like America is going back after all. Since the Democratic convention in August, Vice President Kamala Harris often declared, “we are not going back,” as a reference to the many ills of Donald Trump’s first term in office, which saw a woefully mismanaged response to a global pandemic,
By Jackie Spinner >> The day before the Nov. 5 election, I carried a bundle of poles into the newsroom of the Columbia Chronicle in an attempt to recreate one of my core memories from The Washington Post, where I was a staff writer for 14 years. I made signs for the seven swing states
By William H. Freivogel >> If President-elect Donald Trump follows through on the threats and actions he directed at the press during the election campaign and his first administration, an already weakened press could suffer further harm over the next four years. A weaker press, in turn, weakens an important constitutional check on government, one
