Pulitzer Prize Board Chair Eugene Robinson spoke on BBC Newsnight Wednesday evening, calling President Donald Trump's rhetoric in Arizona "very troubling."
Of Trump, Robinson said, "He has escalated the rhetoric in a way that, frankly, worries me and that ... it could be dangerous. It's very troubling and it's something we need to speak out about."
"The Pulitzer Prizes have been around for 101 years, and all the journalists and playwrights and authors and poets and composers who have won Pulitzer Prizes shared one thing in common, which is that they were all engaged in a search for the truth. And we must believe that there is truth. That truth does exist, and that it can be ascertained as near as possible, and that perhaps we can agree on at least what the facts are. And then let's argue about them. Let's agree on what the facts are," Robinson told the BBC's Nick Ferrari.
"Now, sadly, that consensus about literally a chronicle of events, an encyclopedia of facts — that consensus, frankly, seems to have broken down here," Robinson said.
The conversation moved on to a Harvard study on negative coverage of the president, Trump's "disregard for fact," and more.
Later in the interview, Ferrari asked, "How much are you, and your colleagues in the press and the media generally, how much are you sort of victims of some kind of cultural conflict that's being played out?"
While dismissing the idea that members of the media were victims, Robinson did speak to the cultural divide in America — as well as the work journalists currently are doing to bridge it.
On the future relationship between the president and the media, Robinson added: "We will have to work through this, because neither of us is going anywhere."
For additional remarks by Robinson on the First Amendment and freedom of the press, click here.