A model publisher

Among all the tributes to Katharine Graham, who led The Washington Post to greatness and died last week at the age of 84, one fact stands out:

She put the news first.

She rejected the cautious advice of her lawyers and business advisers and gave the order to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the government’s conduct of the Vietnam War. She pressed her staff to go ahead with an investigation of a break-in at the Watergate office building when most other papers accepted the Nixon administration’s line that it was a minor burglary and no story.

She made those courageous decisions when The Post was just going public, and when a misstep could have led Wall Street to downgrade the company’s stock and federal authorities to suspend its television and radio licenses.

In this era of big corporate newspaper chains, some publishers put the bottom line first and cut back their news coverage in hard times. Mrs. Graham’s strength and determination showed that fearlessly printing the news can lead to financial success.

Her son, Donald Graham, succeeded her as publisher. When he moved up a few years ago to become president of the Post company, he said that a publisher’s most important job was to select a good editor. His mother had done just that. She chose Ben Bradlee as executive editor soon after her husband had died and she had taken over leadership of the paper. The Graham-Bradlee team made The Post the leading newspaper it is today by putting news first.