Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and editor Martin Baron reflected on his over 40-year career in journalism as he delivered the spring 2024 Presidential Lecture at Utah Valley University on March 26.

“Journalism is not stenography,” Mr. Baron began. “We have to go underneath the surface; we have to look behind the curtain. The word ‘examining’ suggests accountability; our job is really to hold powerful individuals, powerful institutions to account. I think that is the original assignment given to the press by the founders of this country. It's why they insisted on it, why they wrote the first amendment, and I view that as sort of a sacred duty on the part of the press is to deliver accountability.”

Over the course of his remarks, Baron examined the relationship between objectivity, neutrality, and moral clarity in the field of reporting, advocating that objectivity’s standard yields the best results in journalism.

“[Objectivity] is a recognition that each of us…have our opinions, that we all have our preconceptions. And if we're going to do our job properly, we have to get beyond that. We'll just be willing to open ourselves to other views and approach our jobs as a scientist would — engage  in an experiment — which means that you have hypotheses that something might be the case, but you must test it, and you test it again.”“Our job is to talk to everybody we need to, look at all of the evidence we need to examine, be open-minded, be rigorous, be thorough, be comprehensive, be fair. The goal of objectivity is to get at the truth,” Baron continued.

The 18-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist noted that his field is going through a “period of radical reinvention” as the world adapts to 24-hour news cycles, social media, and generative AI creating news content.

“We have to recognize that we're living in a much more visual society than we did before,” Baron said.” We have to recognize that people's attention spans are a lot shorter than they ever have been. We're going to figure out how do we essentially get people interested in reading the bigger story or watching the bigger story.”

As the media landscape of the 21^st century continues to evolve, Baron remarked that journalism’s core values should always remain intact.

“I think what we need to hold on to our core values that we have, that journalism is the process of verification, that's absolutely essential,”  he said.” If you believe in the mission of traditional journalism, you should pursue it because as long as we have democracy, we will have journalism. But you have to expect that our field is going to be constantly disrupted. And we as journalists should be comfortable with this and expect that every six years or less.”

Despite the growing rancor in public discourse and declining trust in news media, Mr. Baron said that we as a society should remain optimistic, remarking, “I’ve never seen anybody succeed by expecting to fail.”

“I try to be optimistic about our country,” he said.” Not unworried about our country, but I try to be optimistic about our country. And I try to be optimistic about my profession as well. Because I don't think we can afford not to be optimistic, and because I think journalism is incredibly important to democracy [and] to society.”