You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World

Service with me, Stephen Sacker. Today I've come to Washington, D.C. and the downtown headquarters of the Washington Post,

the newspaper which exposed the truth about Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, a media

institution which proclaims its commitment to truth-telling and accountability. Democracy dies in darkness is the mantra on the paper's masthead.

And yet a short walk from here, inside the White House, the Washington Post is routinely condemned

as a linchpin of the fake news media and an enemy of the American people.

My guest today is executive editor of the

Washington Post, Marty Barron, recipient of a host of Pulitzer Prizes. Who gains and who loses

from the currently, deeply dysfunctional relationship between the president and the press.

Well, Marty Barron joins me now.

Welcome to Hard Talk.

From the outside, it looks as though there is a state of unrelenting trench warfare now

between the White House and the news media in Washington. Is that the way it feels to you? I don't see it that way. I mean, the White House has said, and particularly the President, has said that he's at war with the media. He's said that from day one. His very first day in office when he went to the CIA, and he told us CIA officers that he was at war with the media, but I've said ever since then

that we're not at war, we're at work. We're doing our jobs, as outlined in the First Amendment

of the Constitution, which calls for us to examine public characters and measures, as James

Madison, the founder said it, from the beginning. You're sort of suggesting that you can simply

ignore what is coming out of the Trump White House.

But when the president himself talks about your own newspaper as one of the pillars of the fake news media,

when he calls you an enemy of the American people, you can't ignore that.

Well, I don't ignore it, but I also make sure that it's not a distraction from what we're

supposed to do. I think we understand here well what our mission is, and our mission is to try

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