The Styrous® Viewfinder: Jonathan Swan ~ Champion of the Free Press

August 7, 2020

Jonathan Swan - July 19, 2020

photo: HBO

Today is the birthday of a journalist I had never heard of a few days ago, Jonathan Swan. He reports for Axios which airs on cable channel HBO; as I don't have cable, I didn't know about him. After watching snippets of his Axios interview of Donald Trump for Axios on commercial broadcast television network, ABC, I searched on YouTube, found the interview (link below) and became an instant fan of his.

This is what I found about him on Wikipedia:

Swan was born on August 7, 1985, and raised in Australia. He is the son of physician, journalist, and radio and television broadcaster Norman Swan; his aunt and uncle are also Australian journalists. In Australia, he entered the field of journalism in 2010. He then moved to the United States in 2013 for an academic fellowship and worked as a Congressional aide.

Swan became a national political reporter for Axios in December 2016. While at Axios, Swan broke several stories about the Trump administration. Former Washington Post journalist Ronald Kessler claimed in his 2018 book, The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game, that Swan is among a handful of reporters to whom President Trump feeds information, with instructions to attribute quotes to an unnamed White House official.

Swan was the first to report that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate deal; that Steve Bannon was about to be fired; that Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital; and that Trump would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals executive action policy. Swan broke the news that the Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was retiring from Congress.

Swan was praised for the manner in which he had conducted an interview with President Trump (link below). But, to be fair, not all opinions of him are postive as witness the NY Times article (link below).