Walter Mears
Walter Robert Mears (January 11, 1935 – March 3, 2022) was an American journalist, author, and educator. Mears worked for the Associated Press from 1956 until his retirement in 2001. In 1977, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the 1976 United States presidential election. In 2016, Mears joined the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, at Duke University, as a volunteer instructor, teaching classes on election campaigns; he had previously taught undergraduate classes in journalism. Early life and education. Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on January 11, 1935, and raised in Lexington, Massachusetts. He  graduated from Middlebury College in 1956 and received an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1977. He served on the Board of Trustees from 1980 to 1984 and was the recipient of the Alumni Award in 2011. Mears served as the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the "Campus", and referred to his four years of work with the paper as his "journalism school." Career. Mears began working as a newsman with the Associated Press (AP) immediately after graduation in 1956. He reported on national politics from 1960 to 2001. Throughout his career in journalism, he covered 11 presidential elections , and his stories have appeared in almost every American newspaper. He was one of the subjects of the 1973 non-fiction book "The Boys on the Bus", which focused on reporters covering the 1972 presidential election between Richard Nixon and George McGovern. Mears was such a well known and established news reporter that he was featured in "Doonesbury" comics; one Trudeau comic strip, published on February 5, 1973, depicted Mears questioning Richard Nixon's so-called "Energy Czar," John A. Love, during the embargo and oil crisis. He won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of  the 1976 Presidential campaign and election. He retired from journalism in 2001, though after retirement, he occasionally published articles on his AP blog, and taught journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mears authored the book "Deadlines Past: Forty Years of Presidential Campaigning: A Reporter's Story", which was published in 2003. He co-authored two more books with a colleague, John William Chancellor: "The News Business" (1993) and "The New News Business: A Guide to Writing and Reporting" (1995). He also worked for two years with reporters of the Associated Press in writing "Breaking News: How  the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else" (2004). He has won several awards over the course of his career. In 1973 he won the Associated Press Managing Editors Association's Top Performance Award, and in 1986 he won the Associated Press Robert R. Eunson Distinguished Journalist Award. In 1977, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the AP awarded him a membership to the Burning Tree Club. Political and philosophical views. Mears believed the newspaper business had a duty to report facts and maintain a neutral point of view; he believed that personal opinions had no  place in good journalism. Even after retiring, he continued to encourage transparent campaign coverage and spoke about the need for good background and fact checking, especially in the digital age of reporting. He believed that "print news is the best place to look for information." In 2004, two questions were directed to Mears during the first session of a bloggers conference sponsored by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. The questioner, David Weinberger, wanted to know whom Mears supported for president; Mears refused to say, asking "How could you trust what I write?" In response, Mears was asked how  could he be trusted in what he writes about on his blog. Mears responded to the second question in his AP blog by speaking to the importance of transparency and ethics in campaign reporting. He decried the lack of content and accuracy in much of today's reporting. He wrote about the need to "get the facts straight," and, while he acknowledged the difference and difficulties in reporting between his days and now, he implicitly responded to the question asked by Weinberger by explaining how to earn trust. Mears' point in the blog was emphasized by Bill Mitchell and Bob  Steel in a report for the Poynter Institute after the conference. During his years of reporting and after, Mears was critical of all candidates, no matter their political affiliation. Earlier in 2004, speaking at Montgomery College's Lycem series, he called the political conventions "all show and no decision." During a question-and-answer session, he said the word "media" "had become convoluted in the context of 24-hour cable news and the 'echo chamber' it [had] created." In a 2016 interview for "Duke Today", when questioned about "getting the journalism that our democracy needs," Mears responded: In the same  interview, he was questioned about the presidential election campaign. Mears remained analytical in his responses. When asked about Trump speeches and if they reminded of him of an earlier era, Mears compared him to populist senator Huey Long, saying "If you want to go back to another time when someone matched Trump in simple answers – 'I'll fix this for you' – you have to go all the way back to Huey Long. The Roosevelt people were concerned about Long running for president back in 1936. He was assassinated before he got there, but he had much of the same approach  that Trump does. You know, don't ask a lot of questions. I'll make every man a king. And that's Donald Trump." In 2019, Mears described his views on the impeachment hearings of Donald Trump in the context of previous hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Personal life. Mears' first wife, Sally Danton, and their two children died in a house fire on December 24, 1962. With his second wife, Joyce Lund Mears, a reporter turned stay-at-home mother, they had two daughters, Stephanie and Susan; the couple later divorced. He then married Carroll Ann Rambo  Mears, a producer for NBC News, in 1986, before later divorcing. Walter met his fourth wife, fellow journalist Frances Richardson, in 1994, and they married in 1997. Following Mears' retirement in 2001, the couple moved to Arlington County, Virginia. After his book "Deadlines Past" was published, they left the Washington area in 2005 and moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, retiring to Governors Club, a private community, seeking a more relaxed lifestyle. Mears and Richardson were married until her death from cancer in 2019. Mears died from cancer at his home in Chapel Hill on March 3, 2022, at the  age of 87.