Washington Post correspondent Dan Balz reflects on his career—and what his reporting reveals about politics today.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

After nearly five decades, Dan Balz is retiring from The Washington Post, where he covered 12 elections and eight presidencies as a political correspondent. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg asks Balz about the state of American democracy today, and how he’s seen the landscape of politics change.

“Over the course of 50 years that I’ve been doing this, I think that the most important shift,” Balz said last night, is that “politics has gotten tougher, coarser, and meaner.” There’s always “ebb and flow” in politics, he continued. But trust in government “fell off the cliff during Vietnam and Watergate, and it’s basically been down ever since.”

Watch the full episode—and learn more about the figures who changed American politics—here.

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