It isn't easy being green — or brown, or any kind of minority, which was what Kermit the Frog really meant.

The subject of minorities preoccupied this year's presidential election. Some were to be walled out, some deported. Minority citizens were courted in blocs for their votes.

Gwen Ifill, the "PBS NewsHour" managing editor and co-anchor, who died Monday at age 61 after a private struggle with cancer, was two kinds of minority, a woman and an African American. She was a PK — preacher's kid — whose parents came from Caribbean nations. She delivered the nightly news and hosted "Washington Week in Review" with the intelligent steadiness that marks the great news anchors as people we come to trust.

Americans are still arguing about what the news media did or had done to them in the campaign. Was the media biased, duped, unable to get the big picture? Media figures became part of the story, thus surrendering a claim to objectivity.

Gwen Ifill was too ill in the days before the election to cover it as she had previous campaigns, but she would have been as unlikely to earn that scorn as Walter Cronkite would have been. 

On the "NewsHour," Ifill and co-host Judy Woodruff didn't glam up the news. Colleagues didn't shout over one another. Guest experts on the show usually look like regular people, not celebrities, yet they turn out to be the very people on the planet who know all about the subject at hand. And there are always at least two: the one for and the one against.

Because her news operation researched its facts and presented them evenhandedly, viewers learned over time that they would not be hearing a retraction the next day. What she presented held up.

When the subject was one that a viewer could measure against his own experience, it passed the personal knowledge tests. Like Cronkite, in his day the most trusted person in America, she was an honorable journalist. Her report was her word.

Kermit the Frog, of course, was no reporter or even a human. But puppeteer and Good Human Being Jim Henson gave his froggy surrogate a goofy voice to channel the kinds of truth that children need to hear. From Kermit they learned that what they suspected was true: It isn't easy being green, but it has potential.

In their own lives they could see he had given it to them straight, and they remembered it. When Henson died unexpectedly in 1990, young adults called home in sorrow: "Mom! Mom, Kermit is dead!"

Being free gives Americans the right and the need to expect the truth. When we're uncertain or fearful, we are a minority of one. We need someone who understands the situation and won't mislead us.

By presenting all sides with candor and courtesy, such a person also becomes a model of how to agree to disagree. Gwen Ifill, as a moderator of civil debate, didn't allow it to get personal, precisely by the strength of her own personality. She struck a tone of civility that kept the focus on the facts.

Civility doesn't call names. Green doesn't attack Pink. If they don't respect each other, under the moderating influence of Gwen Ifill at least they learned to respect the process.

Kermit and Gwen and Walter all provided the news their audiences needed. It's sad to have lost Ifill just when we needed someone like that more than ever.

Still, they left us their example. In the months to come Americans will do their own fact-checking and gut-checking about what they hear. As they do after every election, they will watch and learn whom to trust and whom they cannot trust.  

Lisa McGinley is a member of The Day's editorial board.