If you go around from city to city, you will see quite a different newspaper. And while the Post , as the premier paper in the U.S. capital, is read by public officials and executives throughout the world, he emphasizes that it is still essentially a local paper. While localism is important, Downie cites the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and the independence of the press, as the cornerstone of American journalism. That means that government can never control or influence the press. We want to be fair, accurate, and complete.
American newspapers go to great lengths to separate facts from opinion.
What a reporter contributes to a story is expertise and analysis. Many of our reporters become experts in fields that readers need help in, whether it's government and politics, or economics, or nuclear energy. And so in our picking and choosing about what we are going to find room for in a newspaper, we are creating priorities to some extent. And we ran some stories about it, but no one in the media crusaded about this, and there weren't editorials or a lot of front-page stories. Sometimes, in following the public, the press appears to be more powerful than it actually is, Downie says.