Len Downie, Jr., the Executive Editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008 met with the Cleveland Club on January 12; he discussed journalism and his career.
Downie outlined his budding interest in journalism beginning with research and reports in elementary school on Cleveland’s West Side, then with the junior high school paper (for which Donna Shalala was editor in the class preceding) and high school paper. Having studied journalism and political science at Ohio State, Downie won a summer internship at The Washington Post. His work was so successful the Post offered him a job, where, among Easterners, he became known as “Land Grant Len.”
He soon became an effective investigative reporter, wrote a book broadening his exposure of the capital’s dysfunctional Court of General Sessions, and was awarded a year’s fellowship to study U.S. and European urban land issues. Returning to the Post, he was made Deputy Metropolitan Editor just as the Watergate scandal broke. Downie kept the reporting in the Post’s Metro section rather than having it transferred to the National staff and oversaw many of Woodward and Bernstein’s investigative stories. From then until 2008 when he retired from the Post as Executive Editor, he managed the major news stories of the nation. Since publishing All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post he has authored two lengthy reports currently available at the website of the Committee to Protect Journalists (cpj.org): The Obama Administration and the Press, and The Trump Administration and the Media.
“My biggest professional regret,” he told Club members who participated in the virtual meeting, “was not running more stories examining the allegations that the weapons-of-mass-destruction (WMD) intelligence running up to the 2003 Iraq War was faulty.”
Asked about current changes in journalism, he noted that whereas advertising used to support newspapers, the digital age eroded that model. One result was the sale of the Post to Jeff Bezos, who has invested heavily in technology means for the Post to survive. “Bezos has kept his word to Don Graham to keep his hands off the editorial product while moving the Post to a company supported by subscriptions and adept on multiple platforms – currently the Post is second only to the New York Times in daily digital views,” Downie said.
Downie’s answers to some Club member questions included:
Regional journalism needs help, including in Cleveland. Billionaires in various cities are making some papers stronger, but in far too many places investment companies buy newspapers and run them only for profit, thereby shrinking newsrooms and selling their buildings for cheaper quarters. Nonprofit efforts in some cities such as San Diego are making a good start and may be a solution.
Beginning with Ben Bradlee, the Post has had a strict division between the Editorial Page and the Newsroom, each having its own editor and reporting separately to the publisher. Downie said that in order to better keep an open mind about subjects when he was the Post’s head editor he stopped reading the Editorial and Op-Ed pages and even stopped voting.
Downie felt his job was always to report the truth, no matter the feelings of the subjects or the readers. One of his toughest decisions, and after counter-arguments by the CIA and President Bush, was to publish Dana Priest’s story about secret CIA prisons set up in Eastern Europe after 9/11.
He said he is heartened by the quality he sees in students taking his University of Arizona investigative journalism courses, but he advises them that owing to the demands of the job they should expect and accept a diminished social life. He also said journalists today have to be skilled not only in research and writing but also in the developing techniques of the internet, radio, video and podcasts.
Asked about movies, Downie said only three captured contemporary journalism: All the President’s Men; Spotlight; and The Post.
