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Marty Baron, ‘the ultimate old-school editor’ retires from Washington Post | Newspapers


One of the arts of editorship is knowing when to delegate. It spared Marty Baron, stepping down after eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post, from having to follow Donald Trump on Twitter.

“I figured that we had a staff who could follow his Twitter feed and I could find out from them whether there’s something consequential he said,” Baron explains, a year to the day since his own last tweet. “I’ve basically gone cold turkey on Twitter and I feel fine.”

Baron’s reign at the Post will surely be best remembered for its coverage of the Trump presidency, just as Ben Bradlee’s time in the role was for the Watergate scandal that felled Richard Nixon. The Post’s factchecker alone, which found that Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims over four years, looks indispensable to future historians.

Baron also presided over a renaissance at the newspaper that notched 10 Pulitzer prizes and made the Post profitable in the once-feared internet age. His legacy includes 3 million digital-only subscribers, a global expansion that will boast 24-hour operations in London and Seoul, and a doubling of journalists from about 580 to what will soon be a Post record of more than 1,000.

But, like other media organisations, the Post has spent the past year both reporting on and trying to cope with a once-in-a-century pandemic. Its headquarters on K Street, which opened in 2015, have become a state-of-the-art ghost ship.

“Within weeks, it was easier to have everybody work at home rather than a nucleus in the office,” explains Baron, who will retire on 28 February at the age of 66. “When we embark on journalism these days, particularly the bigger projects, there are a couple of dozen people in a room. Now they’re all in the Zoom room and the work can be done and it’s being done well, but you’re missing something.”

Baron has spent 45 years in journalism and 20 years leading newsrooms. He held senior roles at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times and edited the Miami Herald and Boston Globe. His intense, unshowy demeanor was portrayed by the actor Liev Schreiber in Spotlight, an Oscar-winning film based on the Globe’s investigation of a child abuse scandal in the Catholic church.

When he became editor of the Post in 2013, Baron could little have dreamed what was around the corner. Within months Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, bought the paper from the venerable Graham family for $250m. It was a kiss of life that lifted the threat of cuts and turned the Post into a truly national news outlet soon paying its own way.

Then, in 2015, politics was upended by Trump’s wild ride to the White House. The reality TV star railed against the media as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” and often singled out the Post. Baron and his staff have received death threats, threats of being maimed and threats to their homes and families.

Did the Trump era change him as a journalist – and change the Post as an organization?

“I think we confronted circumstances that we had not really confronted before: a president who made false statements, who made misleading statements, who lied with such consistency.

Donald Trump. The media was unprepared for a president who would mislead ‘so deliberately, so consistently, so intentionally’, Baron said.
Donald Trump. The media was unprepared for a president who would mislead ‘so deliberately, so consistently, so intentionally’, Baron says. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

“You’re always accustomed to politicians who will spin things their way, who will lie on occasion, who will mislead, but not with that degree of regularity and not so deliberately, so consistently, so intentionally. That’s something that we had not experienced before and so I think we became, over time, just more direct in how we talked about that.”

Anyone who paid attention to the Trump presidency will recall a torrent of news alerts, often based on White House leaks, from the Post and the New York Times, each trying to outdo the other. To romantics it felt like an old-fashioned newspaper war that lacked only swaggering, chain-smoking, wise-cracking reporters in fedoras, racing for the last working phone.

Baron says: “I don’t see it as a war. Other people characterized it that way but we have a great staff, they have a great staff, we compete like all other news organizations. That makes us better and it means that everybody has to stay on their toes and we did that.

“Certainly we felt competitive and during many weeks it felt like they would win one and then we would win one and then they would win and then we would win. It’s good for the public to have competing news organizations, otherwise you become complacent and there’s no room for complacency these days.”

‘Critical role’

In 2017 the Post earned some jibes by adopting the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness”, coined by the veteran reporter Bob Woodward, on its masthead. The American press is sometimes criticized as earnest, pompous and self-important. In the time of Trump, however, Baron has reasonable grounds to argue that the media played a “critical role” in safeguarding democracy.

“In a period where the public’s being fed so much misinformation, it’s important to have news outlets that are telling people what’s true and what’s false and we have an absolute obligation to do that. Once you’ve done your reporting thoroughly, we have an obligation to tell people directly and unflinchingly what we’ve found in the most straightforward way that we can.

“We get portrayed as partisan for doing that but that’s not a partisan act. That’s core to the mission of news organizations and we shouldn’t be intimidated by the attacks on us; we shouldn’t let that deter us from doing what we’re supposed to do. Just because people are saying you’re being unfair doesn’t mean you’re being unfair. Just because people say you’re being biased doesn’t mean you’re being biased. Maybe they’re being biased, which is often the case. We just have to fulfill our mission day in and day out.”

He rejects the notion that some of the language used by the press went too far and made them combatants in the political arena.

“I don’t think that the words we choose here and there are going to make a huge difference, frankly. The reality is that people who are Trump partisans are not necessarily going to be persuaded by what’s in the Washington Post or the New York Times or the Guardian.

“Many of them are living in a different information universe and don’t care whether we said ‘lie’ or ‘falsehoods’ or ‘misleading’. Many of them are dismissing anything that contradicts their preconceived views, regardless of the source, and maybe particularly if it’s one of our media outlets. So the idea that if you use this word or that word, or you put this paragraph higher or that paragraph lower, it’s somehow going to make a difference with supporters of Donald Trump is just fantasy.”

Trump always boasted that he was great for “ratings”. In 2015, Les Moonves, then a power in US broadcasting, infamously said the ascent of Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”. Now the circus has left town, and the Post’s town in particular. Baron acknowledges that the Biden White House will be “less leaky” but denies that a return to normal necessarily means fewer readers.

Marty Baron with Liev Schreiber, who played him in the 2015 film Spotlight.
Marty Baron with Liev Schreiber, who played him in the 2015 film Spotlight. Photograph: Supplied by LMK

“I don’t think we’re headed for a boring era of politics. It’s pretty clear that we’re a very divided country and politics is going to continue to be intense. People are going to continue to do combat, I hope not physically but certainly ideologically, and so politics will continue to be of intense interest to the public because the stakes are so high and now people have a deeper appreciation for what the stakes actually are.”

If there is a post-Trump downturn, the Post enjoys the considerable safety net of being owned by Bezos, the founder of Amazon and world’s richest man. In the Twitter tirades that did not pop up on Baron’s phone, Trump frequently referred to the “Amazon Washington Post”. In truth, the editor says, Bezos is a very hands-off patron who never told him what to cover or how to report on Amazon.

“I don’t talk to him that much, to tell you the truth – hardly ever,” Baron says. “It’s not like we have one-on-one conversations with any frequency whatsoever. He’s got a bunch of other interests. I’m sure he reads us closely but he just doesn’t get involved in the day-to-day of our newsroom. He has not questioned anything that we’ve written about Amazon or about him at all.”

‘The ultimate old-school editor’

Last summer’s protests against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd prompted a reckoning that included newsrooms across the country. The Post, in a city where nearly half the residents are Black, was no exception, with some current and former journalists of color condemning a lack of representation. Critics suggested that Baron – dubbed “the ultimate old-school editor” by the New York Times – was out of touch with a new generation voicing its demands on social media.

Baron points out that the very first decision he made after joining the Post was to hire Kevin Merida as managing editor for news – the first African American to hold that position at the paper. (Merida subsequently left to join the ESPN sports and pop culture website The Undefeated.) Last year the Post announced the appointment of Krissah Thompson as managing editor for diversity and inclusion.

Asked if he could have done more, Baron says: “All news organizations can do more. We’ve worked very hard at it. We are amongst the most diverse major news organizations in the United States; the statistics show that. The biggest deficiency is at the upper ranks, there’s no question. We’re not unique in that regard.

The Washington Post has taken steps to boost diversity, Baron said.
The Washington Post has taken steps to boost diversity, Baron says. Photograph: Pablo Martínez Monsiváis/AP

“We have made concrete efforts in the last nine months or so to improve and we dedicated almost a dozen new positions to cover matters of race, ethnicity and identity across a broad spectrum of subject areas. We added the managing editor for diversity and inclusion and she’s already had an impact. Our hiring this year has been highly diverse and we want to continue making progress.”

The 1976 film All the President’s Men, which recounts Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate, depicts a Post editorial conference that consists entirely of white men (although the paper’s female publisher, Katharine Graham, is referenced in the movie, she never makes an appearance). The New York Times, meanwhile, has been edited by both a woman and a Black man in recent years. How important is it that Baron’s successor break the Post’s white male streak?

There are some questions that he prefers not to answer during the interview and this, it transpires, is one of them.

“The issue of my successor is not a subject that I should be talking about because it’s not my decision and that’s for other people to decide.”

Another is what he will do in retirement, now his farewell party – held virtually, inevitably – is out of the way.

“I haven’t made any decisions,” he says, although he does plan to leave Washington. “I’ll wrap up at the end of next week and take a breather. I don’t want to make any decisions until I have time to think about it. I think there’ll be plenty of options.”





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