Stories That Need to Be Told

WASHINGTON POST LEGEND MARTY BARON ON A COLLISION OF POWER

Spring 24

“While there's no free press without a democracy, there's certainly no democracy without a free press.”

This statement may ring familiar. It comes from an editor of integrity in a trade under threat time and again. News staffs under his leadership have won 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including 11 at The Washington Post, six at The Boston Globe, and one at the Miami Herald, where Marty Baron was executive editor for eight years. Baron was editor at The Boston Globe during its landmark investigation into the Catholic church's concealment of the fact that priests were sexually abusing children, portrayed in the Oscar®-winning film Spotlight.

Baron had it out with CNN’s Jake Tapper on the issue of whether or not a tweet was inappropriate by a reporter following the death of Kobe Bryant, a topic that Baron writes about in the recently released book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post. Baron gives his account of the challenges and triumphs, the disappointments and the victories of being the top editor of some of the most prominent newspapers in America. Baron and I sat and talked about a wide array of topics covered in Collision of Power. He is witty, cool, and funny—after you pass his straight-faced demeanor. Our talk took place over bagel sandwiches in my Great Barrington office. He didn’t have to travel far to get there; Baron is a full-time Berkshire resident and knows the area well. He is often found exploring and hiking, as well as encouraging friends to move to the area. According to Baron, the Berkshires is one of those beautiful places on earth that has the potential of being America’s literary hub. He was a featured speaker at last fall’s Authors Guild Words, Ideas, and Thinkers (WIT) Festival held in Stockbridge. View the talk at authorsguild.org/event/wit-festival.

The Beginnings

Baron always wanted to be an editor for a major metropolitan newspaper. He started as editor of his high school newspaper at Berkeley Prep School in Tampa, Florida, and then editor of Lehigh University’s newspaper by his junior year. For ten weeks every summer for three years, he worked at The Tampa Tribune. He received special permission to take graduate classes as an undergraduate, earning a BA in journalism and MBA in four years. “I don't think the faculty were very happy that I was granted that waiver, but that's another matter,” he says. He landed a job at the Miami Herald after graduating in 1976 and worked in the small town of Stuart, Florida. Six days a week, he and another reporter had to fill a page in the newspaper with articles and photos from that region of Martin County. Digital photography wasn’t a thing at the time, so the film had to be on the 10:30 a.m. bus to Miami for processing. “Sometimes we'd say, ‘We'll take your photo and then come back and interview you later,’ ” recalls Baron.

Baron moved to Boca Raton, then Miami to cover the business beat. He took a job at the Los Angeles Times, where he rose in the ranks to business editor by age 29. (Manual typewriters were still being used in the newsroom; he still has his old Underwood at his home.) In 1991, Baron was made in charge of Column One for the Los Angeles Times, as well as computer-assisted reporting and the newpaper’s polling organization. The Los Angeles Times had a regional edition in Orange County, in direct competition with The Orange County Register. At the time, it was the fifth most populous county in the country; Baron oversaw a staff of 165 people from 1993 to 1996.

Baron was offered a job in 1997 at The New York Times as associate managing editor responsible for nighttime news operations, as the newspaper was developing a national edition. His day began at 3 p.m. and ended in the early-morning hours. He oversaw updates of every edition—two national, two regional, and three local editions. If stories broke late at night, the paper would be updated, and sometimes the front page would be torn apart. If there was a problematic headline or story lead, if something significant was missing in a story, Baron was in charge of dealing with it.

Editor

In 1999, Baron was approached by the Miami Herald for a job he always wanted: editor of a major metropolitan newspaper. It was a perfect fit. Baron was a native Floridian. He had been studying Spanish. He knew Miami and had worked at the Herald. It was right at the time when the Elián González case had broken and emerged as a huge controversy. (Elián was the five-year-old Cuban boy found floating on an inner tube off the coast of South Florida.) Then there was the 2000 presidential election (Bush v. Gore). The newspaper did its own ballot recount, even when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Florida would not conduct a recount. A year and a half after starting at the Herald, Baron was contacted by The Boston Globe about a job offer that he couldn’t refuse: leading an even bigger newspaper (500 people on staff, compared to 325). The Boston area also had larger institutions to cover—major universities, a big financial community, a large scientific community, and a major media market. The Knight Ridder company was making significant cutbacks to the Miami Herald. It was time for Baron to move again.

“I didn't know anybody except one couple in Boston. I didn't know anybody at the paper,” says Baron. On the first day at work, he ordered up the Catholic Church investigation. Six weeks later, the unimaginable happened, 9/11. And in 2004, the Red Sox won the World Series, the first time in 86 years.

He was there for a total of 11½ years, the longest he has been at any one newspaper job. It became pretty clear that The New York Times Company was going to sell The Boston Globe, which was dealing with some grave financial challenges, Baron says. Then, to his surprise, The Washington Post offered him the editor’s position.

Less than a year after Baron had taken over as executive editor of The Washington Post, this legendary newspaper that helped bring down a previous president through its coverage of Watergate was purchased by Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. That was in 2013. Baron knew that he was living through an important time in history and needed to keep track of what was going on at the newspaper. He took down notes and kept documents along the way, throwing them in a box with no particular plan to write a book.

A key element of any outstanding newspaper is its objective coverage, and that was important to uphold when the Graham family sold The Washington Post to Bezos, says Baron. This is how he describes it: “They decided to sell because of all the pressures in the industry and because they ran out of ideas on how to make a sustainable business in the current digital environment. Then they sell to one of the richest people in the world—a huge surprise. He then sets out not only to try to transform the organization for the digital era, but also to make it a media organization that would appeal to people throughout the country and even through- out the world. And then in the summer of 2015, here comes Donald Trump, a candidate unlike any we'd ever seen before, who then gets elected and as a president, unlike any we'd seen before. During his campaign, and during his presidency, he attacked The Washington Post. Because we wouldn't be servile or sycophantic, he then started to attack Bezos, hoping that his attacks would have an impact and that Bezos would try to temper the work that we were doing and to influence it in Trump's favor. Bezos didn't do that. The press plays an important role in our democracy, and The Post played an important role during this particular period where there were enormous threats to our democracy.”

Baron held steadfast to what he believed, despite the extreme challenges at times. He had been thinking for a while about retiring and finally did after the presidential inauguration, in February 2021. “The most important role as an editor is to make sure that we're doing the best job to create the conditions that allow people on the staff to do their best work, whatever that might involve,” says Baron. “Some of that involves hiring the right people. Some of that involves hiring the right reporters, hiring the right editors, put- ting the right teams together, inspiring good stories, listening to their ideas, and letting those ideas emerge. Or shaping those ideas. There are a whole variety of things that one has to do in order to make sure that you put out the best possible journalistic product. That's the primary responsibility of an editor.”

Within weeks after retiring, Baron was at work again, this time on a book. He went back to the box of notes and documents and started organizing them in files by subject and category. He put those files in narrative sequence and then followed that pattern. Most of the book was written from his home in the Berkshires. The book was constantly in his head, and he was eager to get it on paper—even when he wanted to go out and hike. Instead, he stayed home and kept writing. “It’s as if somebody was occupying my brain,” he says. It took two years to complete—not bad in the book publishing world. Not for Baron, though. “I’m used to working in minutes, not in years. It just seemed like a long time to me.”

The Berkshires

Baron’s interest in the Berkshires grew out of rejection, so to speak. When he was looking at colleges, he toured Williams College and applied. He was rejected. The same goes for Amherst. But he got a feel for the Berkshires, liked it, and it stuck with him. He moved to Boston in 2001 and asked people at The Boston Globe where they went in the summer. Everybody said they went to the Cape or Maine. “When I was thinking that I really wanted to get away, I thought maybe I should go in the other direction,” he says. Baron knew the Berkshires was a cultural center, and he is a lover of classical music. “I studied classical piano for eight years. I don’t have any talent, but I did that for eight years.”

The Berkshires was everything he was looking for. Ultimately, Baron bought a condo in 2007 and kept it when he was in Boston and D.C., only coming every few months to check on it. Then, during the pandemic, he would come to the Berkshires for two weeks at a time. Anticipating retirement, he started looking for a larger home, which was accelerated because of the pandemic. “I figured I’d better get a start on it,” he says. He bought a house in Stockbridge, a small apartment in Manhattan, and sold his place in D.C.

Reflections

Baron wanted to write about Bezos, the person and personality, rather than a caricature drawn by other publications. In Collision of Power, Baron provides an account of the newspaper’s coverage of Bezos’ divorce, affair, Amazon, and so on. Baron also describes his own interactions with Bezos, his insights into Bezos’ business philosophy, and Bezos’ steadfast support for The Washington Post despite enormous pressure from Trump.

Baron met Trump once and received two phone calls from him. The meeting happened five months into Trump’s tenure as president. He met secretly on June 15, 2017, with the brain trust of The Washington Post—owner Jeff Bezos; publisher Fred Ryan; editorial page editor Fred Hiatt; and Baron. Bezos was driven to the White House in a black SUV with tinted windows, and Baron’s reporting staff were kept in the dark about the meeting and what was discussed.

“This was not a dinner I was looking forward to,” writes Baron, disclosing the meeting with Trump and his wife, Melania, and Jared Kushner for the first time in his book. Over cheese soufflé and Dover sole, Trump enumerated grievances that would be repeated again and again over his tenure. “His list of grievances appeared limitless. Atop them all was the press, and atop the press was The Post.” Within two weeks after the meeting, Trump called Bezos twice to complain how he was portrayed in articles in The Washington Post.

What’s Trump like? “He’s a big person,” says Baron. “He’s physically big. He dominates the room. He's the one who does all the talking. He does very little listening. Extremely little listening. Even when you think he's listening, he's actually just hearing, he’s not really listening. When I met him, he and Melania and Jared tried to be friendly. They were hospitable and all of that. Nobody was abrasive or rude or offensive in any way. It wasn't really authentic. With Bezos there, they had to be friendly.”

In news coverage, one instance that Baron wishes he had done better was regarding the hack of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that resulted in thousands of Hillary Clinton’s own emails coming out, as well as emails of senior officials in the DNC. The Washington Post focused on the content of those emails because they strongly suggested that the DNC was favoring Clinton over Bernie Sanders. “While we did note that the hack most likely was executed by Russia, we didn't spend a lot of time really looking at that and why Russia would want to do that.

Which ultimately the intelligence community concluded was to help Donald Trump in his election campaign. We focused on the content of those emails because there was actual news in those emails, but we should have been better balanced with a lot more attention to why Russia was doing this hacking in the first place. We were in a highly politicized environment at that moment. The intelligence community said that it wasn't even ready to point the finger at Russia for having executed that hack. People thought at the time the likelihood was the hack was just designed to obtain more information about the candidates, not to favor one candidate over the other.”

Baron faced his fair share of challenges at the end of his tenure at The Washington Post. He disagreed with some staff on their use of social media and was determined to enforce the paper’s standards. “In many professions, we ask people not to express their point of view because it's not appropriate. When reporters and editors are working together on stories, collectively they're deciding how we cover those stories so that they conform to those well-established standards of the institution. What happens to those standards when people on staff can do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want? Then all that care that you took with those stories, all those standards that you tried to implement with those stories, they're rendered meaningless. In many instances, those tweets, in, for example, the Middle East, can put their own colleagues’ lives at risk. Because people say, ‘Oh, well, that's The Washington Post,’ and The Washington Post correspondent somewhere in the Middle East would be associated with that comment. That is a risk to people in the field. It is also a risk to the overall reputation of the institution. And now it's just a free-for-all. Are we just a random collection of individuals working in a building that happens to be named The Washington Post? Or does working in that building mean that the work you do is going to conform to the standards of that institution? If people are unwilling to abide by standards that have been articulated to them when they first got hired, then perhaps they shouldn't work there.”

People are skeptical of the press for a combination of reasons, says Baron. They'd like to have their preexisting views reinforced. Particularly now in the internet era, people can pretty much find some so-called source of information that reinforces their preexisting worldview. “If somebody believes in some bizarre conspiracy theory, it's pretty certain that you can find some place on the internet that will tell you, in fact, that's what happened. If you're a mainstream news organization and you tell people that's not true, well, people are going to accept that. Also, I don't think we've done a very good job as a profession that really reflects the totality of community in our coverage. We don't reflect everybody in the community as well as we should. That cuts across all different members of the community, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of religion, all of that. So, we need to work a lot harder at showing people that we understand what their lives are like and reflecting that in our own coverage. The press is not just a target of Donald Trump and the Republicans; it's the target of Democrats. Joe Biden criticized the press outlets, his allies criticize the press all the time. They want the press to report exactly as they as they see the world. And that's not our job.

“I think it's important for us to get out in the community and reflect everybody so that they see themselves in our coverage and see themselves fully and fairly represented. It's important that when we do stories, particularly the more controversial stories, that we lay out all the evidence, that we be as transparent as possible, not just about who we are, but how we came to report this.” That evidence can come in the form of sharing online original documents, video, or audio. News outlets have to go into publishing a story with the assumption that nobody's going to believe a word they read, says Baron. “And then we back up— like a contemporary version of a highly footnoted document.

The Next Chapter

Baron continues to hold book talks and signings throughout the country. In March, he will be traveling to Palm Springs, California; Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona; Chicago; Stanford, Connecticut; and Provo, Utah. He is also holding talks at Northeastern, Harvard, Boston Universty, and Yale. His book will be released in Spanish in May, and a paperback version in English is forthcoming. Nearer to home, Baron will be speaking in early August at Hotckiss Library of Sharon, Connecticut.

Save the date! 

The Authors Guild Foundation’s 3rd Annual WIT (Words, Ideas, and Thinkers) Festival will be held on the grounds of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox from September 27–29, 2024. 

authorsguild.org/foundation for updates!