15 Facts About Walter Mears

Walter Robert Mears was an American journalist, author, and educator.

Walter Mears was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on January 11,1935, and raised in Lexington.

Walter Mears graduated in 1956 from Middlebury College, where he was editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, the Campus, later referring to his four years of work with the paper as his "journalism school".

Walter Mears began working as a newsman with the AP immediately after graduation in 1956, initially covering Vermont state politics from the Montpelier office and moving to national politics in 1960.

Walter Mears became chief of the Washington bureau, in the 1980s was executive editor in the New York bureau, and retired in 2001 as vice president of the Washington bureau, where he wrote a widely syndicated Washington Today column.

Walter Mears won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the 1976 Presidential campaign and election.

Walter Mears worked for two years with reporters of the Associated Press in writing Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has Covered War, Peace and Everything Else, published in 2004.

Walter Mears believed the newspaper business had a duty to report facts and maintain a neutral point of view; he believed that personal opinions had no place in good journalism.

Walter Mears responded to the second question in his AP blog by speaking to the importance of transparency and ethics in campaign reporting.

Walter Mears decried the lack of content and accuracy in much of today's reporting.

Walter Mears wrote about the need to "get the facts straight," and, while he acknowledged the difference and difficulties in reporting between his days and now, he implicitly responded to the question asked by Weinberger by explaining how to earn trust.

Walter Mears was assassinated before he got there, but he had much of the same approach that Trump does.

In 2019, Walter Mears described his views on the impeachment hearings of Donald Trump in the context of previous hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Walter Mears met AP journalist Frances Richardson in 1994, and they married in 1997.

Walter Mears died from cancer at his home in Chapel Hill on March 3,2022, at the age of 87.