Leonard Downie Jr.

Leonard Downie Jr. was an executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008 and spent 44 years in the Post’s newsroom where he helped supervise the newspaper’s Watergate coverage, oversaw the coverage of every national election from 1984 through 2008, and worked as an investigative reporter, editor on the local and national news staffs, London correspondent, and a managing editor under then-executive editor Ben Bradlee. He is also the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University. Downie is the author of seven books, including “The New Muckrakers,” “The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril” (with Robert G. Kaiser), “The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know” (with C. W. Anderson and Michael Schudson), “All About the Story: News, Power, Politics and The Washington Post,” and “The Rules of the Game”. He is also the author of two Committee to Protect Journalism special reports, “The Obama Administration and the Press” and “The Trump Administration and the Media,” and a report, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” (with Michael Schudson). Downie is a founder and former board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the chairman of the Board of Advisers of Kaiser Health News.