The Baron Bump*

Last week was a study in contrasts. Three thousand people showed up to hear Sha-Na-Na in concert, but a mere 100 listened to Carl Rowan, a renowned nationally syndicated columnist…. The music of the ’50s and the showmanship of Sha-Na-Na are welcome escapes from the routine of study. Students, however, should come to a university primarily to delve into, rather than escape from, the important issues of our time.

   So wrote Marty Baron in 1974 as the editor-in-chief of The Brown and White, Lehigh University’s student newspaper. At The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, where he later worked, and The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, which he later ran, Baron was not known for handing out opinions. But in college he had his own column, and what a record it is of his early independence, seriousness, and intellectual sophistication. On the study of languages: “A revived enthusiasm for foreign languages spurred largely by unique academic houses would signal an erosion of the parochial attitude, so prominent at Lehigh, that the United States, its language and culture are at the center of the world.” On university administrators: “We have a dean of students office investigating women’s security on campus—aggressively, they would have us believe. The fact that investigations into reported incidents follow so soon after Brown and White stories might cause some doubt.” On “pedagogical laxity”: “While a university does not make a guarantee that its students will learn, it does implicitly guarantee that there will be an honest effort to teach.” On “classroom crime” (academic dishonesty): “There’s no pleasure in writing [this] column because the author is destined to be branded a traitor by fellow students. So be it.”

   When Baron spoke at Skidmore College in April 2022, I was tempted to quote one or more of these columns in my introduction. After all, anyone coming to see him was probably already familiar with his career highlights—the Globe’s investigation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy and the 2015 film about it, Spotlight; the Herald’s coverage of the Bush-Gore election and the Florida recount; the Post’s reporting on the Access Hollywood Trump tape—and anyone who wasn’t could consult the program bio. I wanted to offer a glimpse of the undergraduate he’d been; at the same time I worried that Baron the prodigy might provoke too many student chuckles. (Picturing him on a 1970s campus, where he was elected editor of The Brown and White as a sophomore and graduated after four years with both a bachelor’s degree and an M.B.A., is a bit like imagining Mozart in kindergarten music.) In the end I went with a story about a story. During his first year at the helm of the student newspaper, Baron and a fellow journalist started reporting on an audit of student activity funds. Fearing that news of the investigation would be “unfair to individuals for future stature in life”—a fraternity brother in particular—three male undergrads set out to thwart The Brown and White. After failing to obtain a court injunction, the men plotted to confiscate copies of the paper. Baron, tipped off and undeterred, ran a front-page article about the plot in which he was quoted: “Upon learning of the possibility of some foul play, I alerted our circulation people and we changed our distribution routes. Dean Quay asked the campus police to stand by when the papers were brought in. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused readers.” To the professors and community members in the Skidmore audience, this episode would make clear that Baron had always been Baron—principled, fearless. For students interested in journalism, there would be a direct message: You want to know how it’s done? Study this guy.

Except that I already had, and I couldn’t say how he did it.

Perhaps I should note that nearly all renowned editors baffle me. How do they get so smart about so much? What do they do all day—or, rather, what don’t they do? In Turn Every Page, a documentary about the biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, the latter notes that he has always tried to respond to a writer’s book manuscript the day after receiving it. Anything else is “cruelty to animals.” Gottlieb had a family and a habit of attending the ballet. How were overnight turnarounds possible? I also don’t understand how Robert Silvers, the sole top editor of The New York Review of Books after co-founder Barbara Epstein’s death, worked so late even well into his eighties that he required two shifts of assistants. And I don’t understand how Robert Boyers, another reader of astonishing depth and responsiveness, not only edits this magazine, which he founded sixty years ago, but teaches energetically, entertains prodigiously, and publishes book after book of his own.

Baron is considered an enigma even by some who have followed his career closely. “Such a consistent body of great work under one editor demands an explanation,” the media columnist Jack Shafer wrote in 2023. “Lots of editors get lucky when a big story breaks their way, but nobody gets lucky long enough to accomplish what Baron has…. Talking to reporters who’ve worked with Baron does not help unlock the mystery of his success.” Reading what they’ve said only intensifies it. Here is Walter (Robby) Robinson on Baron’s response to a four- or five-thousand word draft of the Globe’s sex abuse cover-up story: “It was as if one of the smartest editors you had ever known had spent two weeks poring over your copy and sent back a brilliant first edit. And he did it in two hours.” Margaret Sullivan, on sending Baron a draft of her Washington Post media column—in no way an urgent or high-stakes piece of journalism (“the top editor had far bigger things to think about than his new media columnist”): “I got back an incredibly detailed note, with suggestions about sources to talk to, other angles to take, problems with what I’d written so far, and some copy editing, down to the errant semicolon.” As for minor goofs in already published articles, surely they would have been beneath Baron’s concern, yes? According to Vanity Fair, no: “Baron read everything and was known to send emails at all hours of the day and night, colloquially referred to as ‘Martygrams,’ pointing out a grammatical error or typo.” That Baron also read everything that came his way from readers seems improbable: at one point during his tenure at The Post there were three million digital subscribers. And yet I have it on good authority that if a stranger emailed him with a question, a correction, or even a word of praise, he might get a reply within minutes. “It’s like seeing Santa Claus,” Janice Page, who worked with Baron at the Globe, told Esquire. “Wow, someone like that really exists!” I’d say Superman, but with all feats performed as Clark Kent.

* * *

Marty Baron’s first book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, does not demystify those feats. It does not set out to. True to its subtitle, the book is an exhaustive account of the president and the paper, written by the only person in command of and equipped to set down the details. It’s all in here—what it was like to report to Jeff Bezos, who bought The Washington Post for $250 million seven months after Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of Kay Graham, had appointed Baron editor; the challenges of covering Trump; the insurrection; the pandemic. Also Edward Snowden, Roy Moore, the Steele Dossier, Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, #MeToo, the murder of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The New Yorker knocked the prose: “Baron… for unclear reasons, has composed much of his memoir in what used to be called Timestyle, an eccentric journalese of missing articles and inverted grammar associated with the Time magazine of Henry Luce and Briton Hadden.” I wasn’t bothered. For one thing, Time is usually slick; Baron, never. For another, anastrophe predates Luce and Hadden. (If Baron took Latin at his Episcopal high school in Tampa, he may have picked up the habit there.) What puzzles about the style of Collision of Power is its pull. How is it that a book with few memorable sentences never bores? And if the prose didn’t stick with me, why do most of the points? Orwell’s ideal—writing like a window pane—appears also to be Baron’s, but Baron may come closer to achieving it. Unlikely though I am ever to reread all of the book’s nearly 500 pages, whenever I return to a chapter to check a fact, I’m freshly hooked.

My only real disappointment with Collision of Power is that when I bickered with Baron in the margins, the last word was mine. I would have welcomed rebuttals. (Soon after he and I first met, and in response to a query from me, he sent along evidence discrediting a piece that sought to cast doubt on the “Spotlight” sex abuse investigation.) I wanted to challenge him, for instance, about the value of an ombudsman, or public editor. Baron, who thinks the role a waste of resources, agreed with Bezos that the internet could serve as ombudsman. Alas, no: capable of pointing out problems and raising questions, the reading public cannot always obtain answers. I was also taken aback by the way he prepared for dealing with one of the two men in the book’s subtitle. In the months before Trump took office, Baron thoroughly schooled himself on authoritarianism and the manipulation of public opinion. His annotated reading list deserves to be reproduced in full:

It Can’t Happen Here, the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis. (A populist president who ushers in the end of democracy and speaks of editors ‘in spider-dens’ while ‘plotting how they can put over their lies.’) The Plot Against America, the 2004 novel by Philip Roth. (‘To have captured the mind of the world’s greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth!’) The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s 1951 masterpiece on the subject. (Mass leaders who believe ‘fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.’) The True Believer, the 1951 reflections of Eric Hoffer on mass movements. (‘The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.’) The Image, where in 1962 Daniel Boorstin highlighted mass media’s addiction to ‘pseudo events.’ (How Senator Joseph McCarthy commanded ‘diabolical fascination and almost hypnotic power over news-hungry reporters’ while ‘building him up in front-page headlines.’ They were ‘co-manufacturers of pseudo-events’ and ‘were caught in their own web.’) Amusing Ourselves to Death, the 1985 book by Neil Postman that observed politics entering an Age of Show Business. (‘Political leaders need not trouble themselves very much with reality provided that their performances consistently generate a sense of verisimilitude.’)

From more recent years: On Tyranny, the slim but powerful 2017 bestseller by historian Timothy Snyder. (‘Post-truth is pre-fascism.’) How Democracies Die, written in 2018 by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. (‘We should worry when a politician [1] rejects, in words or actions, the democratic rules of the game, [2] denies the legitimacy of opponents, [3] tolerates or encourages violence or [4] indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.’) And over time, as I saw Trump’s deceptions maintain their hold on many Americans, I read Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, Neil Harris’s 1973 biography. (‘The bigger the humbug,” Barnum reportedly said, ‘the better the people will like it.’)

Contrast this with the way Baron got ready for the new owner of The Post. “I had opted not to read Brad Stone’s The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, published only two weeks after Bezos acquired The Post, so that my own impressions would be free of outside influence.” I recognize the difference between reporting on a president and reporting to an owner. I see why someone might make this decision and why others might laud it. What I can’t do is reconcile it with the Baron I know from the rest of the book. Moreover, to read his memoir is to have difficulty naming anyone less vulnerable to outside influence. That the cool-headed Baron believed his ability to judge for himself could be imperiled by, of all things, a highly regarded book amounts to one of Collision of Power’s few bombshells.

For most reviewers, the memoir’s biggest surprise was how much Baron admired and enjoyed working with Bezos. The editor shown in Spotlight deleting adjectives from a story to bolster its credibility lavishes them on the Post’s owner. Bezos not only formulated “fantastic aphorisms” and “made decisions at a speed that was unprecedented in my experience,” he was “delightful company,” had an “impressively fit” body, and exuded a “radiant intensity.” Hoo boy. I trust Baron, but I was also struck by instances when Bezos seemed a slow study or downright clueless: he had to be nudged by Bob Woodward to attend Ben Bradlee’s funeral, for example, and he viewed editors as nonessential. (Baron’s clever response: “[M]y deputies and I would strip the word ‘editor’ from proposed new positions whenever possible. ‘Analyst’ or ‘strategist’ were among the limited set of workarounds.”) Bezos’s strong points—and on these matters Baron is fully persuasive—included an insistence on taking the long view of the business: “He often spoke of what might be ‘in twenty years,’” Baron writes. “When I first heard that timeline, I was startled. News executives I’d dealt with routinely spoke, at best, of next year—and, at worst, next quarter.” Most important, Bezos didn’t interfere with the editorial side of The Post.

Until, notoriously, Bezos did: in October 2024, just weeks after Collision of Power was published in paperback, the owner of The Post decided that the paper would not run the endorsement of Kamala Harris for president that had already been prepared for publication. In a highly consequential case of changed facts bringing about a changed mind, Baron broke with his former boss. In the years since stepping down, Baron had seldom tweeted (and had returned to social media only as an obligation of book promotion), but he took his dismay to X: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Interviewed about his tweet, Baron said that if Bezos had made this decision halfway through Biden’s term, it would have been reasonable. But this was eleven days before the election. Baron’s motto might be “Harm no institutions,” and he stressed that readers shouldn’t cancel their subscriptions; nonetheless, by October 29, The Post reported, 250,000 subscribers had. He has since noted the immoderate pleasure Elon Musk must have taken in all the screenshots on X, which he owns, of “We’ve canceled your subscription” confirmations. (By January 2025, the cancellations numbered around 300,000.) Asked if he’d spoken to Bezos before denouncing the decision, Baron was discreet. On the evidence of this book, I suspect that before going public, Baron tried privately to persuade Bezos not to pull the endorsement. He, Baron, is a passionate believer in working behind the scenes. In Collision of Power, he writes that reporters who are concerned about or upset by a decision have avenues other than social media for letting their colleagues know.

But what if they lose the private argument? There are innumerable cases of journalists who had important stories but poor cultural timing or timid bosses: their articles never ran. Now, at least, they have a way of publicizing the rejections, bringing the news to light. On the whole, though, I am in agreement with Baron’s views on reporters’ use of social media, to which he devotes a chapter. In a CNN discussion of a controversial post by reporter Felicia Sonmez, who, seventy-eight minutes after basketball legend Kobe Bryant was first reported dead, linked to a Daily Beast article about sexual assault allegations against him, Jake Tapper said to Baron, “It was just a tweet.” “It wasn’t just a tweet, okay?” Baron responded, rather as if someone had dismissed Martin Luther’s theses as just a laundry list. “It was a tweet at a particular moment in a particular way that created an enormous reaction where people focused on us at The Washington Post as opposed to focusing on our coverage of Kobe Bryant.” (The paper’s coverage of Bryant’s death did discuss the allegations.) That “enormous reaction” included death threats sent to Sonmez; she had to move temporarily to a hotel. Something Tapper and other Baron critics have failed to acknowledge is that the number of tweets during his tenure was small because the paper’s social media policy was generally honored. If hundreds of tweets like Sonmez’s had flown around every day, how could the paper have afforded the fallout, including the costs of increased security?

Towards the end of his career, Baron had to deal with reporters clamoring not only to tweet more freely but to bring what they called their “full selves” to work. Baron has pointed out that others (police officers, judges, etc.) are not allowed to do any such thing, and he writes, “I can only imagine the reaction among staff if I, as executive editor of The Post, had chosen to march for a cause that ran counter to the views of many in our newsroom.” In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests, unhappiness with Post policies grew particularly intense, and in June of that year at a heated virtual town hall, “senior management [was] challenged with questions by a staff insistent on unequivocal answers.” Interesting, I think, that Baron’s instructions to the Post video staff on the night of Trump’s 2016 election win—“Show no emotion”—did not provoke a revolt. Nor does there seem to have been staff outrage about the need for professional objectivity in covering the 2017 Women’s March or in the wake of the news of Trump’s Access Hollywood tape.

Around the time Marty Baron made known his plans to retire, “quit lit” became a vogue phrase. A couple of chapters of Collision of Power constitute a particularly heartbreaking contribution to that genre. The man who often spoke of the importance of optimism—he quotes Bezos as saying nothing is possible without it—was, near the end of his tenure as executive editor, deeply pessimistic about his ability to do his own job. In June 2020, he offered publisher Fred Ryan his resignation; he also proposed that Kevin Merida, who is Black, be named his successor. Presumably this wasn’t widely known until Baron published Collision of Power. While he was still in charge at The Post (he ended up staying until February 28, 2021), articles began to appear portraying Baron as out of touch. “Marty Baron Made The Post Great Again,” read a headline in The New York Times. “Now, the News is Changing.” The piece claimed that “the ultimate old-school editor” was “grappling with a moment of cultural reckoning.” An understatement of Baron’s anguish. Of this period, he writes,

I feared that my professional reputation, more than four decades in the making, was about to be unjustly shredded. I also had grown weary of well-meaning but moralistic young journalists—and their forever enabling union—lecturing me on best management practices when precious few had ever managed anyone, had any experience with budget constraints, had ever been tasked to compete in hiring and retaining diverse talent, had ever worked for bosses as demanding as my own, or had any appreciation for the difficult task of meeting ambitious growth goals that had bestowed benefits on all of them.

Behind the scenes, there were Baron’s own medical problems. He suffered from a disorder called hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia. His father had died of it at seventy-four. Baron was sixty-five, the condition was worsening, and twice in 2019 (“but unknown to all but a few colleagues”), he had suffered nosebleeds so severe that he’d had to rush himself to the emergency room. Once he’d needed two units of blood.

Quite apart from the unfair attacks late in his career, something rankles about the emphasis on Baron as an old-school editor. He had many of the virtues, to be sure. But he was also ahead of his time. He started in journalism in the mid-1970s, only a few years after Ben Bradlee said to editor Philip Geyelin of Sally Quinn, who had just been offered a job, “Phil, you can’t hire her because she’ll break up your marriage. Don’t do it.” (Geyelin didn’t, telling her she was overqualified. Bradlee himself later hired Quinn, who became his third wife.) Impossible to imagine Baron ever speaking that way. Last semester, after I mentioned him in a class session, a student approached me to say that her mother had worked for him. She launched into a story about an unusually challenging assignment (“It sucked”). Baron, not yet an executive editor, “worked with her and worked with her and made [the piece] good, and then he nominated her for a Pulitzer.” He was, my student added, the only male editor in those days at that paper—I’ll refrain from naming it—that her mother had not thought sexist or a misogynist. “If you asked, she’d probably send you thirty pages about how great he is.”

In its first few years after Baron, The Washington Post was like the New York City Ballet after Balanchine: many of the people appointed and promoted by the former leader were still around and still performing impressively (though they received less acclaim for it), but the product was not as good and the audience knew it. I remember a morning in 2022 when, unprecedentedly irritated by a pandering home-page Post headline—“That ripped Home Depot werewolf has become the new Halloween flex”—I sought relief at a site with no need to appeal to a younger audience, The Yale Daily News. In its “Last Living Media Elites Tell All” cover story this past fall, New York magazine ran a featurette: “The Trump Bump Gave The Washington Post a Bunch of New Subscribers—then they blew it.” To read in this piece and others about the paper’s troubles is to believe that there was an equally powerful Baron bump, and to wonder whether Baron made Bezos better, too. (It was the business-savvy Baron who, to help the paper compete with the Times, urged Bezos to build up the cooking offerings and lifestyle coverage.) At the end of the clothbound edition of Collision of Power, Baron noted that at the time his book went to press, there was “deep internal discontent” at The Post, of which Bezos had been apprised. Nonetheless, he felt “sure” that the country would have “a healthy, growing, and confident Washington Post.” In the paperback, he made a telling revision: he was “confident” that “once again” the country would have a robust Post.

As I file this piece in mid-January 2025, The New York Times is reporting that some 400 Washington Post employees have sent a letter to Jeff Bezos, pleading with him to meet with them about the direction of the paper. A week ago, The PBS NewsHour interviewed Kara Swisher, who was “thinking about” rounding up investors to buy The Post. Bezos, Swisher told Geoff Bennett, is “doing things that are making it worse. And I’m not sure why…I’m not sure what’s happening with him…. He’s been a very good owner until recently, I would say. And now he just doesn’t—I’d like to know why he wants to own it, what his plans are.” On January 16, we learned of a new Post mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” The next day, Margaret Sullivan wrote in The Guardian that, as things stand, it’s “not unreasonable” to question whether The Post can continue doing the “indispensable accountability journalism” on Donald Trump for which it was celebrated under Baron.

* * *

   In a book on education in the United States, the historian Jacques Barzun titled one chapter “How to Write and Be Read” and another “How to Read and Be Right.” I thought of those titles when I came across a claim in The Nation that Collision of Power reads like “the world’s longest management memo.” It doesn’t. But a memo from Baron addressed to journalists who want to be read—and another for citizens who wish to be, if not “right,” reliably informed—would be a bracing document. If he’s taking requests for his next project, that’s mine: a book in two parts. After all, Baron has no desire to teach, but there is much all of us need to learn that is not covered in Collision of Power. A guide to making, and making sense of, journalism in the twenty-first century would also likely be widely assigned.

During audience questions at an event sponsored by New York University’s Arthur Carter Institute in November 2023, the novelist Lisa Grunwald said, “I’m not a student…and I’m curious to know what you read, where you get your information, and when you start your day, what’s the first thing that you turn to?” I had long been curious myself. The retired editor’s news diet:

I read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. I get Business Insider. I subscribe to the LA Times, The Boston Globe, The Berkshire Eagle (I live in Western Massachusetts, so it’s my local newspaper). I get The Atlantic. I get The New Yorker. Things like that….I read pretty widely. I read opinion columnists who come from a variety of different points of view.

Not much advocacy journalism, though I shouldn’t assume this is his complete list. For those only willing to devote to the news each week, or each month, the amount of time Baron gives it each day, what advice does he have? What should they read—and just as important, how? I caution students not to rely on “7 Takeaways” or “3 Things You Need to Know Today,” reminding them that during World War II, only a handful of times did a Holocaust event receive a front-page headline in an American metropolitan daily newspaper. But I don’t supply a better way.

In the section for journalists, Baron could tell us (show us!) how he edits a story, what reporters should study in college (does he still recommend double majoring?), what he looked for when hiring. He’s already said that he values intellectual modesty—the quality of being more impressed by what you don’t know than what you do. But certainly this isn’t enough. What kind of general knowledge did he expect? And how much knowledge of the industry? “Journalism is ephemeral,” Margaret Sullivan writes in Newsroom Confidential, “and even the best journalists of their day are quickly forgotten. (Just try asking a cross-section of today’s journalism students about yesterday’s greats, like the Times reporter David Halberstam, who distinguished himself with Vietnam War coverage in the 1960s, or Gene Roberts, who turned a regional paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer, into a Pulitzer Prize–winning machine in the 1970s and 1980s.)” How would Baron regard an aspiring journalist who hadn’t heard of Halberstam, or Walter Lippmann, or Spotlight? (I recently encountered a New York Times journalist who hadn’t heard of Baron.)

Also welcome: practical guidance for developing the skills that many of his own generation acquired in the act of paying their dues. I have a veteran journalist friend who started his career at small papers in California. He covered meetings (“boring ones!” he noted). Then he moved to New York, where he worked as a fact-checker at a glossy magazine. A certain columnist was reliably inaccurate, and my friend ended up routinely rereporting her work. Some fact-checking positions remain, but the local papers where he got his start are gone. When I asked a longtime employee of The Post who was recently a guest speaker at Skidmore what he’d tell a younger version of my friend, he seemed to think I was nuts. “There are more opportunities than ever!” he said, and he pointed to “Your Local Epidemiologist,” a woman who blogged during the pandemic and is now a widely respected authority. “Just do it.” Journalists who are not inde- pendently wealthy cannot. They need money, health insurance, a platform. They need editors. All too frequently, they need the legal protection that only institutions can offer. And—this should go without saying—we need journalists from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Finally, though it may be asking too much, I’d want an autobiographical preface. Autobiography plainly makes Baron uncomfortable. Even mild questions about his early interest in journalism set him fidgeting and joking about psychoanalysis. But this preface would include only the sort of details he might provide in a commencement address. What in his education best prepared him for his most important work? What did he learn quickly? Over time? The hard way? And I’d like a follow-up paragraph, but would settle for a sentence or two, about an astonishing passage in Collision of Power:

My sole fleeting dalliance with politics was in my senior year of high school, when I volunteered briefly for centrist Democratic senator Henry M. ‘Scoop’ Jackson in his failed 1972 Florida presidential primary campaign. I never again felt an affinity for any candidate, party, or political movement and was deeply mistrustful of politicians generally. I regarded myself as entirely independent. I saw value in being an outsider. As it turned out, there was.

In What I Saw at the Revolution, Peggy Noonan writes, “Don’t fall in love with politicians, they’re all a disappointment…. Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up…. Beware the rich, who are overrepresented in politics.” Still, she swooned over Republicans. Does Baron to this day really feel no affinity for the party that, whatever its problems, has not nominated an authoritarian presidential candidate? Surely he voted in the 2024 election? His mistrust of politicians seems almost as cynical, I’m afraid, as the attitude of many uninformed, or anti-informed, Americans toward journalists.

* * *

   Last November, eight days after Donald Trump was elected the 47th president, Marty Baron and his friend Dean Baquet, the retired executive editor of The New York Times, spent an evening in conversation at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. At one point Baquet mentioned that he’d just met over Zoom with a group of reporters who work for a small non-profit in the Mountain West. “Their editor asked me to meet with them because they were depressed,” Baquet said. “And their question was—”¹

Baron interrupted: “Good thing they didn’t send me.” He was grinning. The audience was laughing. “I don’t often get the calls—Hey, they’re depressed. Come speak to them.”

He should get the calls. For weeks after the election, I had been feeling too low to watch the video of their conversation, which is available on YouTube. When I finally did, Baron’s unchanged demeanor—his steadfastness, resilience, and moral clarity—cheered me profoundly. His integrity cheers me. His refusal to behave like an insider cheers me. “Love work, hate domination, and steer clear of the ruling class”: a line “from the Jewish elders,” according to Jeff Himmelman, that Ben Bradlee used to quote; it’s Baron, however, who has succeeded in doing all three. (He even declined to personally contact Liev Schreiber, who portrayed him in Spotlight, to ask if he’d do the narration for the Collision of Power audiobook; Schreiber was approached through his agent.) Margaret Sullivan is right: journalism is ephemeral, journalists soon forgotten. President Biden, in his farewell address, is also right: “Editors are disappearing.” We need a primer—the ultimate Martygram—from this particular editor to ensure that the Baron bump is felt decades from now, when he appears (here’s hoping—an old-school tribute) only on a United States postage stamp.

Postscript

I add this note as the magazine is in page proofs. On February 26, 2025, Jeff Bezos announced to the staff of The Post, and then on X, “a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The same day, Marty Baron issued a statement, part of which read,

Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section. It was only weeks ago that The Post described itself as providing coverage for ‘all of America.’ Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does…. Bezos himself has done personal liberties a disservice by cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty—one who aims to use the power of government to bully, threaten, punish and crush anyone who is not in his camp, especially the press. There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests, Amazon (the source of his wealth) and Blue Origin (which represents his lifelong passion for space exploration). He has prioritized those commercial interests over The Post, and he is betraying The Post’s longstanding principles to do so….What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at The Post. I have always been grateful for how he stood up for The Post and an independent press against Trump’s constant threats to his business interests. Now I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted.

In 2019, Bezos wrote, “The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.” One wonders how long it will take the man to feel ashamed.

Note

1. Their question: “Can journalism still have an impact?” Baron’s response: “I’m glad you mentioned that, because there’s so much commentary now that…traditional news organizations, they don’t matter…. That what we write doesn’t have any impact. First of all, if we didn’t have any impact, I can tell you that people like Donald Trump and his allies and others wouldn’t be paying any attention to us. The reason that they’re so obsessed with us is because they know that we do have impact.” This is true, but it is also true that millions of Americans know of The Washington Post and The New York Times only what Trump and his allies say about them. No one has written better about this problem than The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky: “Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.” Tomasky would probably say I’m burying the lead. Something more suitable for a footnote: on December 27, 2024, all three Jeopardy! contestants failed to recognize The Washington Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” None even buzzed in with a guess.