Standing Up For What Is Right

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

 Award-winning writer and publisher of The Washington Post for over two decades, Graham, who was born on June 16, 1917, wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning memoir and led an editorial team that not only revived a so-so newspaper but also made it into a national power.  The Post, subject of a recent Tom Hanks-Meryl Streep movie by the same name, set the benchmarks for “how it’s done” in investigative journalism.

Graham said that she always stood behind her reporters and longtime editor Ben Bradlee and never wavered in her belief that what they were doing was not only right, but necessary.

A Republican who led investigative reporting into Presidential misconduct on both sides, she said politics should never get in the way of good reporting.  “It matters not if a person is from one party or another.  If someone has done something that needs to be exposed in print, then that’s what a good reporter should do.” 

                                            She was awarded the Freedom Medal and The Presidential Medal of Freedom, and shortly before her death in 2001, the International Press Institute named her one of the world’s 50 most influential and powerful media people of the 20^th century.   “Once, power was considered a masculine attribute,” Graham said when told of the honor.  “In fact, power has no sex.”

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