Martin Baron has seen a lot of news in the news business. “Big stories seemed to erupt shortly after I became a publication’s new top editor,” Baron writes in Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post: the Elián González raid and then the Bush-Gore presidential recount, at The Miami Herald; the 9/11 hijackings out of Logan Airport and then the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, at The Boston Globe.
Here, near the start of Baron’s memoir of his term at The Washington Post, he is referring to Edward Snowden’s leaked documentation of the N.S.A.’s secret, omnivorous surveillance program in the spring of 2013—the Post’s most momentous story, in Baron’s estimation, since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.
That’s Chapter 2, though. The truly world-changing news for Baron and the Post, the Chapter 1 news, happened roughly two months after Snowden. That was when the Post’s publisher, Katharine Weymouth, invited her editor out for a drink to tell him that her family, the Grahams, was selling their heirloom newspaper to the multi-multi-billionaire owner of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
Baron had left the Globe aiming merely to move from a respected regional paper that seemed to be “surviving on borrowed time” to a celebrated quasi-national paper on its own downward financial trajectory. Now, suddenly, there was money and ambition to turn the paper around—from an owner who’d built a juggernaut business and who knew essentially nothing about journalism.
It’s a promising setup, but Baron offers very few juicy or even semi-juicy tidbits about his experience with Bezos, a figure with a “bald head, short stature, booming laugh, and radiant intensity,” who “was deeply engaged, asked penetrating questions, and seemed prepared to invest in an emerging strategy” and who was “a model of hospitality.” The juiciest revelation is the now widely reported news that Bezos decided that editors were “indirect” contributors to the Post and not worth paying for (“a horror show, a complete misreading of how quality journalism is practiced”), so that Baron had to disguise new editing hires as “analyst” or “strategist” positions.
Also, Bezos never bothered to give Weymouth, his first publisher and the last representative of the Graham family, his phone number or direct e-mail: “Her emails went to the same address any Amazon customer could use to write him.” Watergate legend Bob Woodward apparently did rate a direct e-mail connection to Bezos, which he used to browbeat the owner into hopping on his jet to show up at the funeral of the Post’s former editor/demigod, Ben Bradlee. Witnessing the Bradlee memorial, Baron writes, led Bezos to conclude that he’d finally figured out what he’d bought—that “this is a badass newspaper.”
Baron appears to genuinely respect Bezos, or what he did for the Post, but the delicacy of his approach is a reminder that a major newspaper editor is the original sensitivity reader. The daily news report is the editor’s attempt to render a version of reality that is factually accurate while also being acceptable to an imagined public, or to the publisher, or to the publisher’s imagined public. Opinions are dangerous, and even information can be risky. In one revealing moment of over-scrupulousness, Baron writes, “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.”
Under the new ownership of Jeff Bezos, Martin Baron had to disguise new editing hires as “analyst” or “strategist” positions.
And then into this garden of cultivated disengagement and neutrality comes crashing the figure of Donald Trump—declaring war on the Post, on the rest of the media, and on observable reality. The Post, Trump repeatedly gripes, is simply a puppet of Amazon’s business interests (though Baron makes a good case, conversely, that Trump’s attacks on Amazon’s postage rates were pure retaliation for the Post’s coverage of him).
Baron puts on a brave face in the Trump era. “Just do our job. It’s that simple,” he tells the staff as the shocking fact of Trump’s victory sinks in. From the campaign trail through the end of the administration, Baron tells how the Post produced some of the most penetrating and meritorious reporting about Trump. He allows that Trump’s assault on the press was good for the press business, as some two million new paying subscribers rallied to the Post and its newly created slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (which was in the works before Trump, Baron writes—beating out, with the help of a last-minute Bezos veto, “A Free People Demand to Know”).
Baron is less prepared to address the larger paradox about Trump and the media, which is the futility of it all. Bezos urged the Post to “dominate 2016,” and it did, breaking story after story of Trump’s mendacity, corruption, and—with its scoop in publishing the Access Hollywood tape—outright degeneracy. Anyone even halfway paying attention to Martin Baron’s Washington Post understood that Trump was totally unfit for office. And he won office anyway.
Traditionalist that he is, Baron retreats more than once to the cliché that the media, in its “bubble,” failed to go out and “take the country’s mood.” The press simply hadn’t pointed its traditional tools in the right direction, and with enough reporters in enough swing-state diners, that could be set right.
Elsewhere, though, a more dreadful possibility creeps in. Baron writes about a 2015 story by Dave Weigel describing a focus group with Republican voters, in which “hearing negative information about the candidate made the voters … hug the candidate tighter.” The Republicans, that is, were polarized against the news itself. Democracy could also die in broad daylight.
Anyone even halfway paying attention to Baron’s Washington Post understood that Trump was totally unfit for office. And he won office anyway.
“It was one of the most telling stories of the presidential campaign,” Baron writes. “To my regret, it wasn’t pitched for publication on the front page.”
What does “regret” mean here? The editor’s job is to make sure what belongs on the front page shows up on the front page. The reference to someone else’s failure to pitch it reads like buck-passing.
Likewise, Baron nudges himself away from center stage on the question of the notorious Steele dossier, the half-baked collection of Trump-Russia accusations that tainted the fully baked coverage of Russia’s support for the Trump campaign. “Nobody had told me about the leads they were chasing,” he writes. “Nobody had even told me about the reports from [British former intelligence officer] Christopher Steele.” Months went by, with the Post’s skeptical national-security and Russia reporters battling the political reporters who wanted to chase the story, while the editor had no idea the story existed, because no one had thought to bring him into the discussions.
“Telling me nothing was a lousy call,” Baron fumes. Or was letting a bombshell investigation go unsupervised managerial malpractice?
Baron is stricken by the inability of traditional news to make a difference, but he is wounded and furious about any criticisms that traditional news might not have all the answers. He tends to shut down questions of failure, in the face of Trump-era information warfare, with one simple formulation or another.
Did the press over-cover Hillary Clinton’s scandals and potential scandals? “When you’re a dominant front-runner, that’s what you should expect.” Did the press let the story of her e-mails, especially, distort the whole race? “There was one sure way Clinton could have ensured no coverage, and no FBI investigation, at all. She could have followed those rules in the first place.”
That defensiveness comes into sharpest focus toward the end of the book, when Baron tells of his struggles with various younger reporters who insisted on airing their grievances and second-guessing the Post in public, to their editor’s anguish. He spends pages on the case of Wesley Lowery, a Black reporter who was outspoken on the need to describe racism as racism in print, and who wouldn’t stop getting into fights on Twitter. Baron gave Lowery a disciplinary letter (“the first and lightest variant of formal discipline”), which he concedes contained “some factual errors” and a threat of firing, and Lowery decided to leave the Post.
On his way out, Lowery told the New York Times media columnist at the time, Ben Smith—a recurring nettlesome figure in Collision of Power—that the profession’s “core value needs to be the truth, not the perception of objectivity.” Baron has been both dodging that complaint and kicking back at it ever since; in the book, he writes, “The goal was the reality of objectivity—which means thoroughly, open-mindedly, and honestly looking at all the evidence and then unhesitatingly publishing what we learn to be true (while acknowledging what we don’t yet know).”
Is that really all there is to it, though? None of the whippersnappers and carping critics were saying anything particularly novel. It’s been 29 years since Hunter S. Thompson wrote, on the death of Richard Nixon, “It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place”; Lowery’s own criticism goes back a full century, to Walter Lippmann’s account of the Times’s failed coverage of the Russian Revolution, in which he described how the paper faithfully repeated official claims of success from the anti-Bolshevik side, “seeing not what was, but what men wished to see.”
Baron writes about another vexing Twitter experience, when the reporter Felicia Sonmez (who, he feels compelled to note, was hired on other editors’ recommendations, without his interviewing her) responded to Kobe Bryant’s fatal helicopter crash by tweeting a link to a story about Bryant’s 2003 rape case. Here, Baron argues that accuracy was not enough: the problem was Sonmez’s “perceived insensitivity,” and her failure to consider “tone and timing” or “sensitivity, empathy, and humanity.” Her action was “reckless and offensive.” The Post put Sonmez on administrative leave, only to reinstate her a day later after the staff and union objected.
There’s more to telling the news than relaying the facts. Baron describes, with chagrin, Trump’s behavior the day after Senate Republicans voted, against the evidence but with only one defection from their partisan ranks, to refuse to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial: “‘This is what the end result is,’ [Trump] said, defiantly holding up a front page of The Washington Post with the banner headline ‘Trump Acquitted.’ The audience stood to cheer as he waved the paper from side to side for twenty-five seconds.”
It’s a grim story about Trump’s imperviousness to journalistic truth; then again, I couldn’t help thinking that he might have waved someone else’s newspaper around instead, if only Baron had thought to make the banner “Senate Acquits Trump.”
Tom Scocca is the former politics editor at Slate and the editor at Popula
