Angeles times, the New York Times and the miami harold. Allow me to start our discussion tonight with a simple proposition that in a democracy such as ours if freedom of the press is jeopardized then democracy itself is jeopardized since one is intimately linked to the other. During the president ial campaign of 2016 donald trump routinely criticized the press humiliating a number of reporters, bullying others, challenging the very concept of freedom of the press as written into the First Amendment of the u. S. Constitution. If he won it would inevitably change. That is the way it has always been. He won and it has not changed. It has gotten much worse even on occasion frightening. I use that word deliberately. The word of a president is much more consequential than the word of a candidate. I know other president s have had their quarrels with the media but donald trump crossed a bright line when he accused reporters of being the enemies of the American People forgetting it was a favorite of many dictators and trump has gone further warning he might change laws that reporters might have to reveal their sources on Sensitive National security stories or risk imprisonment even warning networks that their licenses to broadcast may be revoked if their new stories displeased the white house, stories called fake news. What is President Trump seeking to accomplish in this running war with the media and what should the presss response really be . So dean, marty, welcome. Good to have you both with us. How does one cover a President Trump in a wild era of expanding Digital Horizons . How do you do that at the same time perhaps under cutting your own traditional standards of mainstream journalism . First off you hold onto your standards of journalism. I think there are bedrock standards, truth, fairness that good journalists are aggressive, skeptical. I think you hold onto those things. Obviously you have to come him at a remarkable speed and with him you have to dodge the fact that, yes, all of the things you opened with are true. I think he sought to undermine the press. I think its an attempt to appeal to his base by making the press look like its not fair and by turning the press into a punching bag. I think over the long haul if you tell the truth and youre aggressive and fair and hold onto your principals i think in the end its the only way you can cover it. Im sure you agree with all of that. Yes. The question im getting at is this president has a way, a very skillful way of dominating the environment. He is all over the place. He does it with his tweets, his personality, his style. How do you keep up with that kind of domination of the environment . Do you have enough reporters . Do you have to stick to your basic rules as dean was saying before and still be able to cover it . I think so. I agree with dean. We have new ways of publish it. We publish not just 24 hours a day, seven days a week but people expect to get their news immediately typically on their cell phone the instant that it happens. It all poses challenges to us. We still have our values. We still have our mission. That remains the same. You know, every day when i walk into our news room we have the principal of the Washington Post on the wall. The very first principal which has been around there for more than eight decades and that is to tell the truth. Thats sense of striving there because it can be elusive. It says that there is such thing as the truth. Its not just a matter of personal flchblt personal opinion. There is a truth. Our job is to try to determine the truth. That is what we do. It is nothing fancy. It is our work, the same work we have been doing for decades. You use the word truth. This is a president that has been violating the truth almost on a daily basis. We use the word lie now to describe many things the president of the United States is saying. Now, you have your standards. In my judgment they are the right standards. How do you maintain them when the manual covering isnt dealing with them on many occasions . We actually i chose to use the word lie on the front page of the New York Times. I think a lot of thoughtful editors could disagree with it. We dont do it all of the time. I think the way you cover him is if he says x and if it is wrong you report out y. I think one thing marty said is true. I think you report aggressively and sort of lay out the facts. I think thats what we have been doing since i reported as a reporter in 1977. I dont think its different. I think its faster. I think its more aggressive. We have set up operations. We no longer wait for two or three days to evaluate whether a politician is telling the truth. We try to do it immediately. We set up systems to do it immediately. On the other hand i have to say, its some times easier to check things today. The internet may have payrorols. It is hard to check a lie. If the president says that he cut a program by half a billion dollars i dont think they thats easy. Thats 90 of the things youre talking about. Thats sort of easy. You challenge them and report them out and lay it out. Marty, when the president dismisses some of your best reporting as fake news and when according to many polls from 30 to 40 of the American People are buying into that description, how do you deal with that . How do you i realize youre looking for something more. I dont think theres a lot more to it. Every day the president , on his first day in office, he went to headquarters. He said i have a war with the press. The reality is we dont have a war with him. You know, we are at work. We are doing our jobs the same way we have always done it. Look. You talk about fact check. We have had it at the Washington Post far long time well before the trump administration. In fact we doubled the size. We added an extra person. They have been doing fact checks far long time. They happen toed to be a little bu bu busier, but they are doing the same sort of work every single day. The very fact that the president is attacking us doesnt change things. We have to we cant just be reactive to that. We have to go out, gather the facts, provide the context, do it in an honorable way. Thats what we endeavor to do every single day. What is different about covering trump . Well, its a you know, look, its a more hostile environment. Theres no question about that. He was attacking us through the campaign and then far time during the general election as well. He condemned us. So this is a more tlenting and hostile go ahead. If i can add, it is also a significant [ inaudible ] i actually dont want to have a co cozy relationship with any president. He turned up the volume and dramatically changed the culture of washington. I know this is not the sexiest answer but i think that calls for us to stick to our principals even more. It calls for us to hold on so the values, the fairness, the toughness but especially to sort of like there are these dra t traditional journalism even before the arrival of donald trump. If anything i think the last year has been a call to hold onto those and to hold onto them tightly. Okay. Back in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the baseball barrier on color he still faced a great deal of prejudice and he got into a lot of fights. His boss pulled him aside and said jackie, dont punch back, just beat them on the field. Turn that into journalism now. How do you adjust to the almost daily taunts and jabs and insults without punching back . Youre all making it seem as if its sort of the same, your principals are the same. It cant be. How do you not punch back . Its what im trying to do here. I dont think thats true. I think we come to expect it. I happens every other day, maybe every day. It has become background music to some degree. It is not pleasant background music but it is background music. If we were to get all worked up about it and spend our time making an issue out of it we wouldnt be able to do our jobs. If thats what he wants to do thats what he wants to do. We want to do our jobs. Thats what we are going to continue do. You know, i know, everybody in this room knows the two of you, New York Times and the Washington Post are in a kind of unsanely competition to pull another watergate. What i would like to know how do you respond to that kind of criticism which is not widespread but its there . It is one of the under valued journalism is competition. I hate it when i get beat. He hates it when he gets beat. The thought we could collude to do anything is utterly ridiculous except obviously we could collude to talk about the First Amendment. The thought that we would be anything other than friendly and admiring but vicious well, he is vicious. [ laughter ] when the president keeps attacking the press, what is he seeking to accomplish . You said before playing to his base. Fine. Is that all he is trying to accomplish . I think if you look at Donald Trumps pattern through the campaign and then as president , first off he clearly goes after his critics. I think he goes after in particular critics and people who have independent standing. Early in his presidency and probably the most independent and protected entities in societies and the press. I think all president s are frustrated by the power of the press, by the fact they cant tell us what to do. At our best we push back at them hard. I think for a guy that grew up in a world of business i think it makes him nuts. He is also a new yorker who grew up manipulating the press. I think page six was his playground. I think suddenly he arrives in washington at the pen of it all. You dont see a larger purpose here . I mean theres the obviously which is that he plays to a base that generally may not believe the press anyway, but i think some of it is personal frustration. It was to manipulate the press. He got his way with the press, mainly the tabloids. Is it possible . I hear you but part of it is just a guy who suddenly finds himself confronting a very different kind of press than he confronted when he lived in the world in new york. Is it possible that by attacking the press, by creating a sense of fake news, by delegitimizing among an x per spe sent what it is you do far living that he may succeed, that at the end of the day his vision of it all may triumph . Do you think its possible and what would then happen . What is the price of letting this happen . I mean it has a corrosive effect. He is obviously saying something that appeals to a large segment of the population. Approval ratings were quite low. We have the not great distinction. The polls have shown a sharp decline particularly in the last year in approval of the presidency as well to the point where our standing and the presidency standing are beginning the intercept. The Approval Rating were very low. A huge segment of the american proplati population saw that as a partisan enterprise. I think the longview of the standing is among the. If it is to whatever degree, how does one reconstitute trust . How do you gain back the confidence of the American People that what you spent an awful lot of time and money doing is valuable and important . How do you sell that again . I mean i may be naive but i think when the press does its job and does its job which is to be an aggressive questioning watchdog of government even if it drops it comes back. Press does its job vietnam, watergate, press didnt build up to the iraq war, i think when the press does its job and is aggressive, if it holds onto its values i think history is filled with examples of where it comes back. I think as long as you get it right, as long as you stand up to power, as long as you aggressively question, as long as you hold onto all of that, i dont think you lose. I think history is behind us. You dont feel neither one of you that the combination of taunt perhaps action against you it makes him more nervous. I think im with marty. The taunts and tweets have become background music. We dont even respond anymore. When i was covering Lyndon Johnson there were a couple of occasions he would call me on the phone, yell and curse and accuse me of all kinds of horrors. When they ended i was a shaken leaf. It was tough. Does anything resemble you . Shouting, yes. Not just shouting or anything like that that im aware of. You dont need an enemys list. Not aware of anything. So even ton the National Securiy story. I dont have any evidence that it is happening. Let me take a minute to remind you that we are raid you television and internet watchers, listeners, readers that this is the report on marvin and im talking to two of the nations top editors what is the single biggest challenge today . I think we have gotten past it. If you had gotten past it i might have said the financial future. I dont feel threatened by that anymore. I really dont. And now . The single biggest challenge, there are a lot of them. I mean the single biggest challenge to my mind is not just the New York Times, its whether local news, which i think is in the middle of a crisis, whether the country can survive what i think is going to happen in the next four to five years, which is many local newspapers are going to go out of business. I believe i have an obligation to make up for at least some of that. I think i have an obligation to do what i can to help some of those survive. If you ask me whats the biggest challenge facing journalism, i can answer that. Its the inevitable decline and death of some of great local News Organizations. It is so called news thats coming from Media Outlets that deliberately spread false information. People are open to those because some how it conformed to their view of the world. We could agree on what happened yesterday and disagree on what do about it. I think its not just a challenge for a press but a challenge for democracy. How you have a healthy democracy and a well functioning Civil Society if we cannot even agree on a baseline set of facts. I have to go back to the first question i asked you, which is if you are dealing with a president who attempts to build up the concept of fake news, it only worsens your problem. No question. And how does a newspaper today you run the two biggest newspapers in the country, that is a huge problem totally agree with you. How do you deal with it . Do you deal with when you say i want aggressive reporting, those are words. They are words of great importance. Is that it . We dont have total power obviously. So we do have to do our jobs. Also i think we can be more transparent. Talk more about who we are and how we go about our work. It is all of that. I think people are entitled to know how to reach us. We can show more of the documents and we can disclose full transcripts or full audio of interviews we conducted. We did a focus group and people didnt know what date lines were. They thought it meant she made a lot of phone calls. I think we need to tell people that she has been covering wars in afghanistan, here is who she is. Here is her background. To the best of my knowledge you established the foundation in the news room to attract money to help you cover the news. We literally just started that. Thats not why i feel more comfortable. Thats brand new. I feel comfortable because over the last year and this is one thing i would point to. So trump has been wonderful . Thats a complicated answer. Just to finish, i think for my institution and i suspect the same is true for martys the evolution and economics for great News Organizations is that we are much more dependent on readers. I also think it ensures institutions that are high quality do you still make more money no. We make more money on subscribers on print and online. When i started in this business 80 of newspapers revenue came from advertising. You have been known to have deep pockets. Does that mean you have no financial problems at the post . No. [ laughter ] we are having a very good year. We have seen tremendous growth. It has had a dramatic impact. It is quite a good year for us. The objective is to create a Sustainable Business model. We are not a charity. He doesnt treat us like a charity. If people were to get tired of this charity we would be in deep trouble. We want to create a Business Model that would last for many decades. Have you done that . Last year was our first profitable year. We are doing far better. We still have a lot of things to work on as does the New York Times. The two of us are in better shape than newspapers around the country and that does remain a huge crisis in this country right now. I was joking before when i asked you whether trump is good for business. It occurs to me that maybe im sure you thought about this, maybe the reason the subscription rates are going up is people want to know about a president who dominates the news. Sure. It gives you an opportunity into this new president both were ready to take advantage of it. Not every has seen the dramatic increases that the post and New York Times have seen. The thing i think trump has done for me as a journalist, i think there is a period when newspapers sort of lost a little bit of their confidence. Our economics are more in turmoil. There has ban shift among the american pub lichllic. Its changed. People dont take the press for granted anymore. They have a better understanding if they dont support quality journalism, if they dont support quality journalism they will not get quality journalism. We are talking about it from two very distinctive News Organizations. You mentioned the News Organization in the central part of america. Perhaps you were saying to yourself some of these may have to go out of business. I think local news is in deep trouble. I think the Financial Model that the post and New York Times have managed their way through, which is the dramatic decline, i think a lot of these newspapers have cut these to the point that its hard for them to charge the ki