Setting The Benchmark For Great Reporting

“To love what you do and feel that it matters how could anything be more fun?” – Katharine Graham

The award-winning writer and publisher of The Washington Post for over two decades, Graham, who was born this day in 1917, is especially remembered for her newspaper's role in exposing the Watergate Scandal.    Her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, simply titled Personal History, exudes both her joy of working in media and the fun she had doing it.  She and her editorial team not only revived a so-so newspaper but made it into a national power.

A Republican who led the investigative reporting of a Republican president, she said that politics should never get in the way of good reporting.  “It matters not if a person is from one party or another,” she said.  “If someone has done something that needs to be exposed in print, then that’s what a good reporter should do.”  That investigative effort still stands as the benchmark for “how it should be done.” 

      By the time she retired, she was considered one of the most powerful and influential women in America, not only overseeing The Post and all its affiliates but also Newsweek Magazine.    She was awarded both the Freedom Medal and The Presidential Medal of Freedom, and shortly before her death in 2001 she was named one of the world’s 50 most influential and powerful media people of the 20^th Century by the International Press Institute.  In 2002 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

“Once, power was considered a masculine attribute,” Graham said.  “But, in fact, power has no sex.”

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