David Ignatius, a well-known Washington Post journalist, was invited by President Jahanian to speak at Carnegie Mellon. Ignatius reflected on his career and the trajectory of journalism.
Back in what he calls the “sexiest place on the planet,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius visited Pittsburgh as a speaker for Carnegie Mellon’s President’s Lecture Series last Thursday, giving the lecture “America and the World: What’s Ahead After the 2024 Election?”.
Ignatius’s connection to Pittsburgh spans several decades, beginning with when he applied to the Wall Street Journal in 1976, following his completion of the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship at Cambridge University.
“The Wall Street Journal hired me to cover the steelworkers,” Ignatius said. “If there was a person in the United States less obvious as a candidate to cover the first industrial union — prep school, Harvard, Cambridge kid, you know — I’d like to know who it was.”
Nevertheless, Ignatius said he “just fell in love with that job with the profession of journalism,” calling it the “absolutely formative years of my life [and] career.”
“I would go to the old Jones and Laughlin South Side plant when it was still across the river, and I would go to the bar closest to the mill gate and offer to buy steel workers a beer,” Ignatius recalled.
He also met his wife Eve Thornberg in Pittsburgh around the same period, who “was working here for Burroughs, a very early computer company.”
Reflecting on the modern age, Ignatius said, “I worry that we’re now in an environment where the skills that I’ve spent a lifetime building are seen as less valuable,” and that “we live increasingly in a poisoned information environment.”
“There’s this idea that everybody can be their own journalist.” Ignatius said. “‘We don’t need editors, we don’t need we’ll make our own newspaper. We have social media. We’ll curate for ourselves.’”
As a result, people “increasingly turn to newspapers, news organizations, as if they’re a club that’s going to reinforce, rather than challenge, what they think about the world,” Ignatius said. “So if you’re in the Washington Post club, you don’t want the Washington Post to say nice things about people you don’t like. And similarly if you’re in the Fox News club.”
According to Ignatius, with the advent of the current presidential administration, this problem may be exacerbated.
“By President Trump’s own description, the description of his associates, they’re trying to flood the zone,” Ignatius said. “This description has been used with this omnidirectional barrage of orders, edicts, reasons, and I think in part, that’s to disorient people.”
Ignatius cited the effects on the public health sector following the government “freezing NIH grant making and travel”: “I did some careful post-op reporting at a medical school nearby at Johns Hopkins, then branching out from there, you know, asking senior professors, junior professors, what’s different today?”
Ignatius continued, “a lot of junior faculty are wondering whether their research projects can go forward. They’re asking these questions, ‘at a conference I had scheduled in March on hepatitis, we won’t be able to get anybody from the FDA or the NIH because they can’t travel.’”
Ignatius offered some words of advice for Carnegie Mellon students looking to foster a healthier discourse in such an environment: “The great thing about journalism is that, although it’s professional, you don’t need a license, you don’t need a degree, you don’t need anybody’s permission. Just do it and you learn how to do it well by doing it.”
Ignatius continued by addressing aspiring journalists, emphasizing that for them, “There’s nothing like making mistakes because it makes better journalists.”
He elaborated on the importance of young journalists, encouraging them to be bold and ambitious. He said, “And my hope is that for the reason I said earlier, that we live in a polluted information environment, more and more young people will see that this is really a worthwhile career and that it’ll become more and more necessary.”
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