WASHINGTON, D.C. – They are some of the most basic – yet existential – questions in the journalism industry: How to tell the truth and how to get people to listen and trust you. Three accomplished journalists who cover the nation’s most powerful figures weighed in on those questions at a Poynter Institute event this week.
“When I started at The Boston Globe, 56 years ago, being fair, getting your facts right, playing it straight, being even-handed, wasn’t a subject of praise — it was what kept you from getting fired,” said award-winning broadcast journalist Chris Wallace, a legendary anchor who spent 18 years at Fox News and was most recently at CNN, which he left in November.
“Nobody gave you any praise for not taking sides. Nobody gave you any praise for trying to play it down the middle. And now it kind of stands out. And I think that is an enormously sad commentary on the state of the news business today,” he said.
Wallace appeared with other veteran political journalists for a discussion Wednesday night at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. moderated by Poynter Institute president Neil Brown. This event marked the end of a week’s worth of programming from the DC Public Library and Poynter’s MediaWise media literacy initiative around “Moments of Truth: An Exploration of Journalism’s Past, Present and Future” a traveling museum exhibit created by Poynter.
“Long before journalism as we know it today took shape, the need to tell our stories and share the truth of our world has been central to the human experience,” Brown said in his introduction.
In the pop-up exhibit, visitors learn about the importance of the press to defend democracy and uphold truth throughout history, from colonial America protesting the Stamp Act to the printing press, the rise of broadcast, the growth of digital media and the advent of AI.
Wallace’s fellow panelists included Lori Montenegro, Washington bureau chief for Noticias Telemundo, and Tia Mitchell, Washington bureau chief for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Early in the discussion, Brown raised a point he hears with “unfortunate regularity”: Facts don’t matter anymore.
Montenegro sat forward in her chair.
“We have people who are actually questioning the facts, questioning the data,” she said. “It’s a huge challenge.”
The fact-checking news site PolitiFact, which Poynter owns, rates statements on a scale of “True” to “Pants on Fire” on its Truth-O-Meter. Even though politicians have always used spin, choosing which truths make their policies the most appealing, Mitchell argued they used to stop repeating statements once PolitiFact unmasked them as lies.
“Whereas now, they double down, even if it’s like Pants on Fire and provable, they still say it anyways, repeatedly. And I just feel like that’s a shift,” she said.
But is it the journalist’s duty to fact-check their sources in real time?
Wallace, who received the Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism in 2020, believes it isn’t. When he moderated presidential debates in 2016 and 2020, Wallace chose not to fact-check the candidates. He stands by that decision. While he might call a source out for a falsehood in a private conversation, the debate stage is a different circumstance.
“In a debate, the moderator is there to facilitate the conversation between the two candidates, and it really seems to me it’s on the opposing candidate to fact-check,” he said in an interview before the event.
“Do I (correct) it only on the big whoppers? Do I do it on the little ones? I think it’s a very slippery slope,” he said.
Mitchell recognized the power of the follow-up question to call out a source mid-interview. She remembered interviewing the president of the Georgia Log Cabin Republicans about their exclusion from a pride festival. When he claimed that the Republican Party “has been working so hard on LGBTQ rights,” she had to interject.
“We’re in 2025 and we’re talking about the Republican Party, and not just nationally, but in Georgia, there have been recent laws to limit the rights of transgender people. So how can you say that?” she recalled saying.
“I think sometimes, if you catch it in your brain, and it catches you,” she said, “it’s ripe for a follow up.”
Traditionally, journalists are trained to be invisible, to stay out of the story they’re covering.
“And yet, increasingly, we’re drawn in as characters,” Brown said. He mentioned Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s verbal attacks on reporters.
Veteran TV anchor Chris Wallace talks about fairness and audience trust during an event with Poynter at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C. on July 2 (Phot by Chris Kozlowski)
Wallace praised his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin and the entire Pentagon press corps for their self-control in dealing with Hegseth. “I would have been really offended by it, and I probably would have barked back at him, which probably wouldn’t have been the wisest thing to do,” he said.
Given the important subject matter — the U.S. striking Iranian nuclear facilities — he said it was “probably better to stick to the facts than to get into a food fight.”
Mitchell agreed that the personal attacks on journalists are meant to distract from the news at hand, citing her own experience talking with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in the Georgia delegation.
“We have a great relationship. She’s actually one of my better sources…she’s one of the most accessible members of the delegation,” Mitchell said.
“I’ve had to learn, just like you do with any other source, there’s a way to ask Marjorie Taylor Greene a question that gets a good answer, and there’s a way to ask her a question that gets her riled up,” she said.
Partisan gamesmanship is not limited to politics, though.
Wallace reminded the audience that the news is a business, and that widening divisions exist between Americans. There was a time when networks ran the world and “news was a public service,” less concerned with making money. But that has changed.
“In a way that wasn’t necessarily true a long time ago, news organizations now realize that the market rewards them if they present a point of view and they offer themselves up to an audience as, ‘We’re going to tell you what you want to hear, we’re on your side,’ ” he said.
In an age where 57% of Republicans, but only 18% of Democrats, get their news from Fox News, while 48% of Democrats, and just 20% of Republicans, get their news from CNN (according to a Pew Research Center study), placating the audience is good for business.
When an attendee asked about Paramount’s recent decision to settle with President Trump for $16 million, Wallace called it simply a “business decision by a businesswoman who wants to sell her company.”
“I don’t like it, and five years ago, I would have been outraged by it. … It’s a very telling statement about how the world has changed, but I’m not outraged by it anymore,” he said.
Despite the growing trend of media settlements, Montenegro told Poynter in an interview that the press is still free in America.
“If we put everything in context, and we compare it to other nations in the world, including our neighbor, Mexico, I think we’re still in a good place, and we just need to be alert and on guard, and continue to push forward,” she said.
In response to a question about trust, Montenegro doubted whether the American people have truly lost faith in the press.
“I’m beginning to wonder if that is not just a narrative, that a section of our country wants people to believe that the press cannot be trusted,” she said on the panel. “The reason I say that is because my friends here, who work in local news, they have the trust of their community.”
The consistency of local coverage is what generates trust, she said.
Visitors in Washington, D.C. view Poynter’s traveling exhibit, Moments of Truth: An Exploration of Journalism’s Past, Present and Future before a panel discussion featuring veteran journalists Chris Wallace, Tia Mitchell and Lori Montenegro. (Photo by Chris Kozlowski)
One attendee, Joshua Murdock, experienced this dynamic as editor-in-chief of The Boulder Monitor in Boulder, Montana.
“In an age of rampant media distrust and polarization, I ran a little newspaper in a very red county with a pretty low education or literacy level, but people engaged with and trusted the newspaper,” he said.
Still, he recognized that it’s much harder to accurately reflect a community’s experiences across a region or entire country.
“And what I want to know is, how do we bridge that gap?” he said. “When a newspaper is telling you something that happened across the country, how do you know they got it right, you know?”
Afterward, Mitchell told Poynter that these issues are complicated and won’t be solved in a single discussion. “An event like this helps keep the conversation going. And I think we had a really thoughtful conversation, really great questions from the audience,” she said.
As part of Poynter’s 50th anniversary celebration, the “Moments of Truth” exhibit and community conversation series will continue on to Sarasota, Florida, in August. In the fall, the exhibit will travel to Kansas City, Boulder and Philadelphia.
