Former Washington Post Editor Martin Baron sat down to discuss his time in a “critical time for democracy” in a visit to Annenberg Hall on Wednesday, Oct. 11.
Part of the LA Times Book Club series, Kevin Merida, executive editor for the LA Times, interviewed Baron Wednesday night in the Annenberg Hall foyer. Baron spoke about his new book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” which covers his time leading the Post between 2012 until his retirement in 2021. However, the interview ended up beyond the pages, with Baron touching on his personal view of where the industry was going. He had seen a rift between his own views and the views of his colleagues, prompting his self-imposed send off from the industry.
“For all the internal conflicts, I just have enormous admiration for the people on the staff,” Baron said. “They’re incredibly courageous, work at all hours, go into dangerous situations, endure threats, and have a strong sense of mission. But I did feel like it was time for me to go.”
Baron’s career has been a long and notable one. Portrayed by Liev Schreiber in an Oscar winning film, Baron was executive editor of the Boston Globe during its investigative reporting of sexual abuse in the Boston Catholic Church. He then served as executive editor of the Washington Post, overseeing the publication through an ownership transition to Amazon, the Trump campaign and presidency, and the 2020 presidential election. He got his start in 1976, a year which he said was “a bad year for journalism,” and “it’s been a bad year every year since.”
But now, almost five decades of experience later, there’s an acknowledgement that the industry has changed dramatically. In his book, he recounts how the election of 2016 began to shake the institution of journalism.
“The next day [after the election], people felt like our work didn’t matter, the people of the American public didn’t take us seriously, that it didn’t register,” Baron said. “What are we doing if it doesn’t sink in? Just telling people about who he was and his history and his lying and all of that. And I said ‘we did our job. This is how democracy works. It’s the same democracy that gives us the freedom to write what we feel we should.’”
Barron recounted Trump’s first full day in office, when Trump visited the Central Intelligence Agency and sought to repair a relationship between the department that he often attacked and the president himself. In his speech to CIA agents, he brought up his “running war with the media.” A couple weeks later, Baron was asked his thoughts on this idea of warfare between journalists and Trump, to which he gave the famous quote “we are not at war with the administration, we are at work.”
“I don’t see myself, or us at the Post, or any news organization, being at war with him,” Baron said. “I see that we have a job to do that goes back to the crafting of the First Amendment. That’s what I believe. And it’s sad that a President of the United States who swears an oath to the Constitution doesn’t seem to understand that.”
To this day, he still considers journalists as exactly that: workers doing a job. Joking that the phrase will probably end up on his tombstone, he acknowledges it was also critiqued by some colleagues who argued that it was important to acknowledge the active conflict. But, he maintained his stance that journalism was a much simpler endeavor.
Trump made repeated remarks during both his campaign and term in office targeting the media at large and specific publications — the Washington Post among them— which only prompted his supporters to take their own actions. Baron recounted how the Post had to step up their office security in response. Online harassment was commonplace. Some people on staff received threatening indications that people knew where they lived. One reporter had pellets shot through a window at their house.
“The threats against reporters were horrible,” Baron said. “It’s just not what a president ought to be doing. He shouldn’t be inciting violence against anyone, and here he was inciting violence against his perceived enemies, and of course his biggest perceived enemy was the media.”
On two occasions, Trump personally reached out and called Baron in order to complain about stories that the Post had published. In writing the book, Baron used notes he took during the conversations, as he had figured he should take notes with the “President on the line.”
During one call, Trump accused the paper of being influenced by Jeff Bezos after he disliked an article published about him. Amazon had purchased the paper in 2013, around seven months after Baron took over as editor. Baron said that he tried explaining that Bezos only was concerned about the business side of the paper, never the reporting, but said Trump was only angered by the answer. Another call was made by Trump about a piece that he felt had painted him as a child.
“And then he said words that I never thought that I would ever hear from a President of the United States. He said ‘I am not a child,’” Baron said, giving a bit of a chuckle. “Which I thought was actually kind of childish.
Trump was the source of threats and annoyances throughout his presidency, and beyond, for Baron and the Washington Post. But the industry was also undergoing changes far greater than the influence of the 45th President.
Baron has watched the rise in the role social media played in both journalistic organizations and the lives of individual reporters. In his book, Baron said he loved the profession but felt it was going astray. He attributed it to the growing role social media had in the work of the independent reporters on staff. A staunch believer in objectivism in journalism, Baron had one of his speeches adapted in an opinion piece in the Washington Post earlier this year, arguing journalism demands the same goal of objectivity as the medical or legal fields.
“Baron claims no objective journalist would appoint themselves a moral authority or fail to acknowledge their own limitations,” said journalist Max Moran in an opinion piece in the New Republic. “By Baron’s standards, almost none of the journalists who proclaim themselves practitioners of objectivity actually are ‘objective’ in any measurable way.”
Still though, Baron believes that social media has driven journalists further away from the principles of pure objectivism than ever before. The Post had a policy regarding staff’s usage of personal social media, but it would often draw complaints from reporters, a conflict he found “dismaying.” In a couple instances, these conflicts would turn into public controversy for the seasoned journalist.
“I felt this incredible gap in terms of how a substantial segment of the staff saw their role as journalists and how I thought journalists should carry themselves,” Baron said. “And I didn’t want to be in a position of constantly fighting with them over social media. I didn’t want the institution that I was associated with, that I was responsible for learning, to be defined by an individual tweet by one person who didn’t consult with anybody.”
While not mentioned by name, Baron was referring to incidents involving former political reporter Felicia Somnez. In 2020, she was placed on leave shortly after the death of Kobe Bryant when she retweeted a story about the sexual assault charges brought against the late basketball star. It was later concluded by the Post that she had not violated the paper’s social media policy. Herself a survivor of sexual assault, Somnez sued the Post in 2021, alleging she was being discriminated from covering the topic in her reporting. Then, in June of 2022, Somnez was fired for criticizing a colleague on Twitter, after her colleague had retweeted an allegedly misogynistic joke on his personal account.
Somnez has maintained that all of her actions were justified, and other journalists have come to her defense in the name of self expression. It’s a controversy that stayed with Baron, written about in his book where he defends his beliefs. Following the talk, Baron stayed around and mingled with the crowd, signing books and shaking hands. He was also willing to answer a couple questions directly, and to speak more about his beliefs on individualistic journalism.
“People should be individuals,” Baron said. “One of the great things about working in the profession is I get to meet so many great individuals of all personalities and with their own ideas. Look at all these people.”
At this point, he gestured to the crowd of people who had hung around after the talk. There weren’t many USC students in the crowd due to it being Fall break. Rather, it was mainly composed of Baron’s old co-workers and familiar faces in the industry, including from the LA Times who had worked with Baron back when he was based in Los Angeles. He considered many of them long-time colleagues. In between signing books and answering questions, they would come up to him to congratulate him on the “wonderful speech,” and saying “thank you for being so frank.”
“All of these people, did they give up their individuality? No, they brought their individuality to help serve the organization,” Baron said. “What they didn’t do is go off on their own and say whatever they wanted about any subject whether they were asked to or not. They need to contribute, but I want them to contribute internally. Let’s follow the standards that we as a journalistic institution have long used.”
In sitting down to talk about his new book, journalist Martin Baron made it clear the volume was not just his own experience as leader of one of the most read publications in the country, but a recount of some of the most tumultuous years for his profession. Now, resigned from the Post and retired from the profession, for the first time in his life, he said on stage, he “doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.” Journalism has been a part of his life since junior high school, but with the changing times and a changing profession, he felt somewhat out of place. At the very least, though, he feels OK figuring out what’s next.
“I don’t need to deal with this stuff,” Baron said. “And I don’t want to fight this battle everyday, that’s not what I want to do at work. I’m 66. I can move on.”