Deogun said the media should not fall into the “trap” of applying one standard to one person and a different standard to everyone else. He pointed to his former Wall Street Journal colleague Paul Steiger’s mantra that “in the end, stick to the facts.”

“I think sometimes there’s too much of a tendency to interpret a fact to a degree that it goes into opinion,” he said. “And I think part of our job is to, again, remind ourselves that our … readers, viewers, users, are not as ignorant, as stupid as we think they are, and I think part of that is to be more transparent. Part of that is to be more forthcoming about what we know and what we don’t know.”