I Spent My Life in Newsrooms—But in My Novels, Reporters Aren’t the Heroes

I’m a journalist deep in my bones. Like a lot of people in newsrooms, I came to the profession young (at 15, in my case), and have spent more than 45 years at it now—as a reporter, as an editor, as the press critic at the Los Angeles Times, writing books about media, and even running two think tanks that studied the field. One of the books I co-authored with Bill Kovach, The Elements of Journalism, is a text on press responsibility that is used worldwide.

Journalists, to me, are heroes. But when I started writing novels a few years ago—and had to imagine how all the players in a story might think—I realized that, in political fiction at least, journalists don’t make great protagonists. Their grasp of the story, in the end, is too fragmentary. They are rarely let inside the rooms where the secret