Was Kent Dana the last honest newsman in America?

Shortly before he retired from the TV news business in 2011, Kent Dana, who died Tuesday, called me and asked if I would sit down with him for an interview.

Something to be taped for broadcast, he said, but done informally.

“Just a couple of old news hounds talking about politics and life in Arizona, how things were and how things are,” he said, “only using language suitable for a family audience.”

Then he paused and added, “As if that’s possible.”

Howling at his own joke.

I couldn’t say no.

We met at the state Capitol, where Dana had arranged for us to shoot the interview in the restored House chamber that is part of the museum there, where again there were jokes about the two of us someday being stuffed and put on display as exhibits.

“Yours,” I said, “would have a plaque underneath it reading, ‘The Last Honest Newsman in America.’ ”

“I doubt that,” he said, “although I bet the guides would have to tape over the bad words on yours whenever schoolchildren toured the museum.”

It went like that when the camera wasn’t rolling.

The interview, though friendly, was an interview.

Because that’s who he was.

Dana came into local TV news at a time when anchors were afforded the presumption of innocence. They were gifted trust by viewers, and only lost it if they strayed too far into what appeared to be a personal agenda.

Dana never did that.

He was grateful for having been given the audience’s trust, and was determined to earn it each day. Something he did for his 30-plus year run.

Pretty damn good.

TV news viewers got to know him without really knowing him. They knew Dana through his work and his work ethic, always coming across as the genuinely good and gracious man he was without revealing the many facets of his life and personality that defined him.

That defined who he really was. Before and after the interview that day at the Capitol we talked about families. We talked about kids. We talked about growing up — the way things change. The way they stay the same.

He would miss the news business, he said, but he was nothing but grateful for having been in it for so long, and more than happy to spend more time with his wife and extended family.

News writers over time bump into hundreds of people they would not have otherwise met. Good and bad. Honest and not. Happy and incapable of happiness.

When one of those individuals dies, we’re sometimes required to write about them. To dissect their lives. It’s part of the job, though we’re not often good at it.

With Dana, I would defer such judgment to the poet and short story writer Raymond Carver. His brief poem, “Late Fragment,” says all you need to know about Dana.

It goes:

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself Beloved on the earth.