Berkeley Talks: Veteran news editors on how the media covered the election

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes come out every other Friday.

Also, we have another show, Berkeley Voices. This season on the podcast, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re looking at how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Lydia Chávez: I’m reading this. Welcome and thank you for joining us tonight in person. And there’s a whole crowd of you on Zoom. Welcome. My name is Lydia Chávez. And I was a professor here at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism for many years. And I’m now the executive editor of Mission Local, which was founded here. Great students. The school I know is excited to welcome Marty Baron and Dean Baquet to North Gate Hall in what is now the Logan Multimedia Center. And Jon Logan is here. So, thank you, Jon. It’s a beautiful room.

When the school planned this talk with two of the nation’s most heralded journalists and editors who have led the nation’s preeminent newspapers in times of war in controversy, we knew the event would be on the heels of a historic election. Eight days ago, we didn’t know and, indeed, nobody seemed to be able to predict with any reliability the outcome of this election. Now, we know. And we all have a lot of questions, questions about the media’s role in coverage of the election, what’s to come for the media under a second Trump term, and how the next generation of journalists, including many sitting in this room or watching on Zoom, should be thinking about their roles and the role of journalism in this moment and over the next four years.

I want to recognize that the emotions are high, fears are strong right now, and criticisms abound. So, the school asks that, during the event and the Q&A, we recall the principles of community, which include our commitment to learn from each other, speak from our own experience, and not demean the experience of others. Trust that people are doing the best they can.

So, to introduce this wonderful journalists, Marty Baron is an award-winning journalist who spent 11 years as editor of the Boston Globe, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal. He has also worked at The Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. He became the executive editor of the Washington Post in 2013 and served in that capacity until his retirement in February 2021. As you can see from this page, he’s still editing. He did this in the car over. He cannot help himself.

Over the course of his 48-year career in journalism, Marty Baron oversaw the coverage of multiple elections, presidential elections. News teams under his leadership won 18 Pulitzer Prizes. His book, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, came out in 2023. And if you haven’t read it, you should. It’s really very, very good.

This year, for the first time since 1976, The Post, under owner, Jeff Bezos, direction, declined to endorse in a presidential race. Baron reacted, “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.” He has much more to say than that, and we’ll hear about that tonight.

Dean Baquet has served as editor-in-chief of the New York Times from 2014 to 2022 and is currently editor of the New York Times Investigative Fellowship Program. He, too, is still editing. He grew up in New Orleans when his first reporting job was at the New Orleans States-Item, which later merged with the Times-Picayune. He later worked at the Chicago Tribune where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for covering corruption in the Chicago City Council. He went from there to be an investigative reporter at the New York Times and then went on from there to the Post to managing editor at the LA Times. That was a big jump, Dean. (Laughs)

Dean Baquet: [Inaudible]

Lydia Chávez: Thank you. Dean Baquet’s tenure as executive editor at the New York Times, the paper had significant audience and subscriber growth and won 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including two for public service. At a recent speaking engagement in Hawaii, Baquet reflected on coverage of elections and other divisive political issues. He said of journalism, independence means that you ask hard questions of everybody.

Before we begin, I want to note that I am deeply grateful to Marty Baron for serving on my board in Mission Local and for his service to journalism, and to Dean Baquet for serving on the advisory board here at the Graduate School of Journalism. They’ve both done amazing things for the world of journalism and continue to do so. So, welcome. And onward.

Dean Baquet: So, we set this up as a conversation. I’m going to kick it off with a couple of questions and we’re going to go back and forth. I’m going to try to touch on everything from, frankly, a little bit of the elegance of how newspapers, to use the old word work, to covering Trump. Of course, I will ask Marty to talk about Jeff Bezos, and he can ask me similar questions. But as I told him on the way in, I had this perfectly formed well-thought-out plan for asking the first question, and I was going to ask him, let’s talk about what editors do. And then Matt Gaetz was appointed, was nominated attorney general, which, in my career, I was the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times for a while. And I’ve run Washington coverage as is Marty for a while. And I think that’s the most provocative nomination. He said the Tulsi Gabbard nomination is equally provocative.

So, I’m sitting in my hotel room. And this doesn’t happen that often where I’m actually missing being at the helm of the paper. But I’m levitating, I’m going crazy. I was trying not to bother the New York Times because they don’t need a knucklehead sitting in his hotel room in Berkeley. But how do you cover these guys? How do you cover … if you were still running the Post, what’s the conversation you’re going to have with the Justice Department reporters now?

Marty Baron: Well, I think they would know what to do on their own, first of all, just as your reporters at The Times would. But clearly, you want to do a thorough scrub of Matt Gaetz in every possible way. His entire background, we know a lot about it, but we should go even deeper than we’ve had before. We certainly want to know what the House committees turned up in its own investigation of Matt Gaetz with regard to allegations involving his own sexual behavior.

We would like to know what the Justice Department came up in its own investigation, which it did not proceed with. But I think we should try to find that out. We certainly want to look at what his likely agenda is at the Justice Department. And he has made some, to use the word he used, provocative statements about how he would totally upend what we have understood as the role of the Justice Department. He’s a person who has complained about the so-called weaponization of the Justice Department.

Dean Baquet: And who himself was under investigation.

Marty Baron: Who himself was under investigation. And we want to see he actually, no doubt, has been appointed in order to weaponize the Justice Department against Trump’s political enemies. So, all of that we want to do, we want to look at the reaction within the Justice Department among career prosecutors and the likelihood that you will see a massive exodus of people, professionals within the department, and then the kinds of people who he’s likely to bring in, who may not be quite so professional.

Dean Baquet: You’re touching on, and then I’ll go back to my pre-planned beginning, but you’re touching on one of those issues. How do you, you like me, I would do much of what you described. I would do it first.

Marty Baron: But you would do it better.

Dean Baquet: I would do better and first, yeah.

Lydia Chávez: I was going to say that.

Dean Baquet: No, I said it first.

Marty Baron: [Inaudible] because I was about to say you need to answer your own questions because you always are going to do it better than I’m. So, this gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that.

Dean Baquet: But here’s the question. The thing you described, which is how my brain works, too, is you immediately went to the reporting. Here is the reporting I would do. I have my own thing where I think that one of the issues that’s not discussed enough in journalism, I think, is the fact that actual reporting has lost some of its primacy in other crafts or pushing it aside. But in this case, language. Because the thing your paper and my paper got gets beat up most for is language. Picture the story you’re going to publish on the home page of the Post. How would you describe those two appointments, Gabbard and Gaetz? Because by the way, I struggle with that, too.

Marty Baron: Well, I saw the New York Times called it provocative, which look, it’s a struggle to come with the word. I don’t have a word right at hand, but it’s hard, because really, you want the reporting to really tell people who these people are, rather than sticking people labels on people, which is I think what a lot of people would like us to do. I understand their desire for that, but it’s not all that helpful. I think what we need to do is say, “OK, what is …” and you’re talking about the primacy of reporting, and you’ve talked about that a lot, and so have I. And the way that I talk about it is I want people to focus a lot more, not thinking they have the answers before they’ve started the reporting, but focus on the questions that need to be answered and then go about trying to answer those questions.

And so, what we exist for in news department is to do actual reporting, to collect those facts, put them in the proper context, and then tell people what we’ve actually found to be true, and then show them the evidence that we have. And so, that’s really what ought to represent us, rather than, we use this word or this label or something like that.

Dean Baquet: Agree. So, let’s both now back up to my original plan. Let’s each take a stab at this question, but I’ll ask you to go first. Because your book …

Marty Baron: The reason you’re asking me to go first is so that you can then correct me.

Dean Baquet: That’s true.

Marty Baron: And say that you have it better.

Dean Baquet: We’ve been doing that for years.

Marty Baron: And this is like transparent technique.

Dean Baquet: By the way, we do Bar Mitzvahs and weddings. If anybody wants to hire …

Marty Baron: How would you answer that? And then I’ll say what you forgot to say.

Dean Baquet: We do an hourly rate. One of the things that I liked about your book a lot was, and I liked a lot about it, was beyond the Trump parts of it, it really was a portrait of editing in modern journalism and what an editor does. And many people here aren’t journalists. And one thing that always surprises me when I’m in the real world is people will ask me, when I ran the New York Times, people would say to me, “So, do you edit every story in The New York Times?” Depending on the questioner, but I would influence the answer. But people don’t actually know what the executive editor does. So, why don’t you take, and I’ll do it, too, let’s just talk about what the job is.

Marty Baron: Yeah. Well, it’s a lot of different things. And obviously, primarily, I think you want to set the course for your newsroom, the kinds of stories you want to pursue, the ambitions that you want to set, the standards that you want to set for that reporting. You want to mobilize your staff and organize your staff in a way that can be mobilized in the most effective possible way. You want to find people with certain talents and elevate those talents and take advantage of those talents and then create teams so that people can compensate for each other’s weaknesses and build on each other’s strengths.

But in terms of day-to-day, you get very involved. In terms of stories, primarily the most sensitive stories, the ones that require the most difficult judgments. And that’s where you find yourself involved in where you should be involved. And one of the reasons that I wrote the book is that I felt that the public has all these stereotypes and assumptions about why we do what we do and why we make the judgments we do. And those are theories that I’ve never witnessed and I’ve never practiced. And I thought people should live through the really difficult judgments that I had to live through and that you’ve had to live through and say, “OK, well, here were the set of circumstances,” whether it’s a #MeToo story or issues on the Steele dossier and the Russia investigation, separately from that, or all sorts of stories that we were covering. And here are the set of circumstances, and we made this judgment. What would you have done? Because they’re really hard judgments.

Dean Baquet: Yeah. I agree with all that. The couple things I would add that I think that is a great description of being an executive editor, I think one other job of the executive editor is to figure out, and this is what you said, too, what do you want your paper to be about? Different news organizations have, besides covering the news, different … I wanted the New York Times to be more of an investigative news organization than it had been. When I joined the New York Times, it was an investigative reporter from the Chicago Tribune. There were only two or three. And I wanted that to be an important part of what the paper did.

I also think the other part of modern editing is each of us had to completely recreate the news report for the digital age. We both grew up in the world of print. And we also had to set a direction for modernizing and rebuilding a news report and a newsroom without changing its core. So, I think that was the other part I would add.

Marty Baron: Yeah, we have a responsibility that goes beyond the journalism and to the actual economic sustainability of our business and really connecting with people in terms of how they consume information. What we’re seeing today and what you were adapting to and embracing at The Times was that there’s radical changes in how people consume information. And that means there have to be radical changes in how we deliver information.

And that’s a huge challenge because I do think, in our business, there’s always a gravitational pull to what used to be. And we really need to focus on what needs to be. And yet, at the same time, maintaining high standards and high quality for the journalism.

Dean Baquet: Yeah. I also thought that the hardest part about driving change in an institution, I remember my first speech when I became editor of the New York Times to the whole company. And the New York Times staff was at 1,200 when I gave the speech, which was huge. But I said we were going to have to get smaller. We were doing layoffs. We were doing buyouts. We did not have the digital audience we have now. And when I left, it was up to 2,000 and I don’t even want to ask how big it is now.

And I always thought most of my mistakes, as well as most of my achievements, was because of my desire to say “yes” to new things. And I said “yes” to new things that work out great. And I said “yes” to new things that I hope nobody remembers. And I thought that one of the hardest things about driving change in a newsroom is figuring out what things can’t change and then being willing to change a lot of other stuff that people were not expecting you to change. Does that feel right to you, too?

Marty Baron: Yeah, I gave way back when I gave a speech at UC Riverside and I talked about how it’s as if we’re moving into across the country into a new neighborhood that we don’t know. And you’ve got to decide what to leave behind and you’ve got to decide what to take with you.

Dean Baquet: That’s right. It’s hard.

Marty Baron: And it’s very hard because people are very attached.

Dean Baquet: And the people in your family don’t want to let you leave some things behind.

Marty Baron: Right, exactly. But I think we needed to always take with us our core values no matter, but we needed to change the way that we were communicating with the public. And because that’s the world as it is, and we have to confront the world as it is. It’s amazing to me that we’re a business that always talks about what we’re telling you about reality, but frequently, we’ve avoided our own reality and we haven’t been willing to face up to our own reality. And that is we live in a digital era. The way that people are consuming information is different, attention spans are short, all of that. And we need to figure out, how do we maintain our values in a time like that?

Dean Baquet: So, now, I’ll ask you the question that everybody wants to hear you talk about, which is Jeff Bezos.

Marty Baron: I didn’t think you were going to get to that.

Dean Baquet: You tell people what happened and why you reacted to … in your book, just Bezos is portrayed, and I think you meant this and would repeat it again, as a very good owner, who not only gave the paper a runway, but also had the advantage of being somebody who had built a modern technological organization, which is what The Post had to become, too. So, talk about the trajectory of your relationship with Bezos, and then your reaction when he made the call not to endorse a candidate a week or 10 days before the election.

Marty Baron: Yeah. I think up until this thing which I’ve sharply disagreed with and said so quite bluntly, I think he has been a good owner for The Post. There’ve been some things in the last couple of years and tumult and all of that. But core to that as he did, he did want to transform us. I think we did need to be transformed to the digital era. He was willing to invest in new initiatives, the kinds of initiatives you were talking about. He wasn’t willing to invest for the long run. He talked about what we’re going to be in 20 years. I never heard anybody talk about 20 years, not an owner or publisher or anybody. They usually were talking about next year and, often, next quarter, by the way.

And I was so delighted to hear him talk about what we want to be in 20 years. He got involved in the technology and the marketing, all of that stuff, the business aspects of the company. But he never interfered in any of our coverage, not once, not in a single instance. And I can guarantee you, if he had, you sure would’ve heard about it because newsrooms are the leakiest places on earth. The Washington Post may be the leakiest of all leaky newsrooms.

Dean Baquet: And even when it was about him, he didn’t interfere.

Marty Baron: He didn’t interfere when we were writing about Amazon. He didn’t interfere when we wrote about Blue Origin, his space company. He didn’t interfere when we’re writing about his private life, because he went through a divorce and had an affair and the National Inquirer exposed that and all that sort of stuff. Didn’t interfere in that. Didn’t interfere in our reviews of Amazon products. I think that our tech reviewer never had a positive word about a single Amazon product. And he called it, at one point, he said, it just shows how creepy the company, is the word he used, “creepy.” And I was wondering what Bezos may think about that, but I wasn’t going to ask him what he thought about it, because if you don’t want interference, don’t invite it. So, don’t bring it up. But I was very upset over this, because, look, if he had decided three years ago, two years ago, or a year ago to say, “We’re not going to do presidential endorsements,” that’s fine. That’s a choice, OK?

Dean Baquet: Would you have agreed with that choice? It’s not in your world, it’s opinion.

Marty Baron: Honestly, it’s not that important to me whether they do presidential endorsements or not. And you can make arguments about other political endorsements, OK? And you can make arguments about editorials, generally, which people do. And some newspapers have decided not to do editorials or to do far fewer of them. And I think The Times is doing it more than it used to do.

Dean Baquet: That’s true.

Marty Baron: But I think this came 11 days before the election, it was portrayed as an initiative about restoring trust and a declaration of our true independence, as it always says, an independent newspaper at The Post. But I think that is not credible, frankly.

Dean Baquet: So, you think he did it because he feared that a Trump presidency would influence his businesses, or am I going too far?

Marty Baron: Yeah, I think so. I think he was yielding to pressure on his other businesses. Keep in mind, what did he resist during the 11 years prior to that is Trump, during his first term in office, was constantly criticizing Bezos, tried to increase postal rates to hurt Amazon. He then interfered in a defense department cloud computing contract to make sure that it didn’t go to Amazon. And Amazon has a lot of contracts with the government, particularly for cloud computing. It does rely on the postal service for some of its deliveries. And Blue Origin, his space company, is almost entirely dependent upon government contracts and has fallen way behind SpaceX.

Meantime, you’ve got Elon Musk who gave $120 million to Trump’s campaign, gave him all the free advertising that came with his ownership of X and Twitter, using it the whole time to spread wild conspiracy theories and total lies and falsehoods, to the point where he is the single biggest spreader of fake news in the entire world, and all on behalf of Trump, and now is sitting in on conversations with Zelensky and Ukraine in his meetings with the congressional leaders and all of that. And so, you’ve got that, and you’ve got to be looking at that, saying, “That’s a real concern.”

And look, if this had been more than just seeding to pressure, there would’ve been a trust initiative at the Washington Post about all. It’s a complicated subject. And I’ve never seen any evidence that a presidential endorsement is a big factor in people’s trust. It’s only runs once every four years. And there would’ve been a trust initiative. The New York Times has had a trust initiative for three years. The Post doesn’t have one.

And there’s just a lot of … and you look back at, well, why did they start making presidential endorsements in 1976? By the way, it’s a odd thing that, all of a sudden, at the Washington Post, they’re a bunch of originalists. Who knew? Who knew? And so, now, they’re originalists. But in 1976, they started making endorsements. And it wasn’t, who made that decision? It was Katharine Graham who made that decision. I think she understood spirit of independence of the Washington Post. I don’t think she was violating the spirit of independence at the time. Same thing with when Don Graham became the CEO and publisher. I think he understood the spirit of independence that his family had instilled in the Washington Post. And they did it in 1976. Why did they start in 1976? Because it came after Watergate, and there was a president who had abused his power and weaponized the government against his political enemies. I don’t know, does that sound familiar to anybody today?

Dean Baquet: Do you think the industry has become too in-love with the idea of the … in my new gig, I’ve spent months in newsrooms all across the country, mostly smaller, not-for-profit newsrooms, as well as big newsrooms. And the ownership structures vary wildly. The Baltimore Banner has, I don’t know if he’s a billionaire, but he’s rich. Founder who doesn’t meddle with it, gives him a runway, has hired a staff, and they’re doing great. Mississippi Today has a mix of philanthropy and a couple of rich guys. The LA Times has its own struggles with its billionaire. It’s just similar to Bezos.

How do you think about what the right ownership structure is for news organizations? My own view is there’s not going to be. There’s no magic bullet. Everybody was waiting for the rich guy, the rich local guy to start a paper, and everybody would say, “Great.” But that ain’t going to happen. Not all rich guys are created equal. What do you think of um … what do you think?

Marty Baron: If you were going to ask me that question, I was going to say you go first because that way I could correct you this time.

Dean Baquet: You can’t correct me, I went first.

Marty Baron: We fundamentally agree. I have seen every ownership structure. So, back when newspapers were owned by publicly traded companies, the big problem, they were making 40, 50% profit margins, maybe more. They were largely monopolies or oligopolies. We didn’t write much about our own monopoly and oligopoly, by the way. And they were investing for the short run. They were giving dividends. They were trying to boost the stock price. And they were insufficiently investing in the future of our business. And we have paid a severe price for that. And they were very short-term-oriented, just trying to jack up the price of the stock.

You have wealthy people, they have other commercial interests. That’s true with Jeff Bezos. It’s true with Patrick Soon-Shiong at the Los Angeles Times. It’s true with other really wealthy owners. Marc Benioff, owner of TIME magazine.

Dean Baquet: I sent the Sulzberger family a note after the Bezos controversy erupted, saying that I’m really glad that they didn’t own anything else and were poorer than all these other owners. Not poor, but poorer.

Marty Baron: “Poor” is not the word I would use to describe them. But yeah, poorer. So, then you look at, well, a lot of newspapers are now being brought up by private equity and hedge funds. And that’s a disaster. They treat newspapers as annuities. They try to extract as much profit as quickly as they possibly can without any concern about the mission and the long-term sustainability of the business. And then there’s the nonprofit model, which a lot of people think is great, and it is. And I’m on the board of Mission Local, proudly, but I don’t think there’s enough philanthropic money in this country to sustain the media ecosystem as it needs to be. And on top of that, many of the nonprofits, they look for funds from, hey, guess who? Rich people who have other interests, and from foundations that would like to see their own causes promoted.

And so, there are problems there, and they’re constantly looking for money. So, I don’t think there’s a perfect model. I think we should judge news organizations by the work they do.

Dean Baquet: That’s right.

Marty Baron: Not the ownership structure they have.

Dean Baquet: The one problem, and we can talk to Lydia about this after, when I visit smaller newsrooms, and I’ve actually loved these smaller newsrooms because they feel closer to the ground, they’re principled, they’re not big enough to do, for the most part, to do, for all of the criticism of traditional regional papers, they were big enough to do all kinds of stuff, if they chose to. The Boston Globe could do stuff, as it did. And the smaller news organizations cannot. But they can do other stuff we couldn’t do.

Let’s talk a little bit, both of us, about, I said in 2016 that I thought we did not capture the country well enough that we didn’t, and I was talking about the New York Times, that we were shocked that Trump won, so was he. But we just didn’t understand that the country was ready to elect a Donald Trump. I actually think that the press has done a much better job this time around. And my argument would be that, and people have trouble accepting this, but all of the stuff you know about Donald Trump, his abuse of the tax structure that David Fahrenthold wrote about, his taxes and his tax dodges that the New York Times, including David Barstow wrote about, the allegations of women, all of the things that became controversies about Donald Trump were written about in the American press and the American people voted Donald Trump in anyway. So, I actually think the press did a much better job. How do you think the press performed this election?

Marty Baron: Well, I think there was a lot of good work. I would say this. I do think that our failure, when people ask me about, how did we do in 2016, I said, our problem predated 2016. Our problem is that we did not understand America well enough to understand that this country would produce a candidate like Donald Trump. We did not understand the level of rancor and grievance against elites, including, and maybe particularly the press, to understand that they didn’t want Jeb Bush, who was called the front-runner at one point. They wanted exactly the opposite of Jeb Bush. They wanted somebody who was not part of governing the ruling elites, the political families. They wanted somebody who was going to go to Washington, basically be an arsonist, burn everything down, punch people in the face. And that’s what they elected. And we didn’t capture that. We didn’t understand the country well enough. I do think that we suffered from the same problem this time, is that that’s why so many people are shocked, is that.

Dean Baquet: But this time, people knew that there was a good chance he’d win.

Marty Baron: There was a good chance he would win, but I don’t think people anticipated that he would win as decisively as he has. And they didn’t understand that he would win in the voting segments that he won, to the degree that he did, among Black Americans, among Latinos, among even women, among you name it. To win all of the swing states, I don’t think that that was anticipated at all.

And so, I don’t think we detected that level of desire for a change. And to me, that is, I think we need to work harder at really understanding the country. And there were a lot of dismissive remarks made by our critics about, “Oh, those stories from the diners around the country.”

Dean Baquet: I remember.

Marty Baron: I don’t care whether we go to a diner or we go wherever we go, but we do have to get out into the country. We do have to take the measure of the sentiment in this country. We just owe it to the American public that they not be surprised and not surprised ourselves. And I think it was a real failure on that point.

Dean Baquet: Yeah. Our critics on the left, I can say, because when I was running the Times, got really off whenever we went. And the diner story became the representative. I would get emails from people saying, “Why are you talking to those people? We don’t care what Trump voters had to say.” That was a consistent. And I agree with you, we needed to understand why majority or why so many people wanted to vote for Donald Trump.

I would add one other texture thing. It is still true, if you look at a map and with the decline of local journalism, the dramatic decline of local journalism, the newsrooms, I visit newsrooms now that had 2, 3, 4, 500 reporters who now have 10, 20 reporters. I’ve visited newsrooms. I did an all-hands meeting at … I’m not going to say which newsroom. And to my amazement, the all-hands meeting took place in a small room. And it was the entire staff of a newspaper that you would’ve called, 20 years ago, a powerhouse. So, with the hollowing out of local news, too many reporters live in New York, Washington, and LA. So, what do we do about that?

Marty Baron: You mean what do we do about local journalism? Or what do we do about …

Dean Baquet: It’s two questions. What do we do about local journalism? And then what do we do to make sure that we don’t have reporters falling all over each other in three American cities when, as you say, we need to do a better job of understanding the rest of the country?

Marty Baron: Yeah. Well, it wasn’t that long ago that one of the major chains in this country said they were going to assign a reporter full-time to covering Taylor Swift. I don’t think we can make a very good democracy that we serve a useful role when that’s how we’re assigning our reporters. I understand the level of public interest, but I don’t think full-time covering Taylor Swift is a productive use of our …

Dean Baquet: You don’t like pop music, though.

Marty Baron: Well, that’s true. But in any event, I think that, for the biggest newspapers, biggest news outlets, we need to send people around the country and spend time in those communities and really understand people and certainly not treat people with contempt or condescension or anything like that, but do a lot of listening. And our job as journalists is to explain one segment of the country to the other segment of the country, so they understand where they’re coming from. They don’t have to agree with each other. We don’t even have to agree with them. But we do have to have people say, “OK, this is your country,” or, “This is your community.” And that’s very important to do. We also have to find a way to … we really have to work on building up local journalism, which has suffered immensely. It is the single biggest crisis in journalism today.

Dean Baquet: Totally.

Marty Baron: And most Americans don’t even come into contact with a journalist anymore. And that’s part of the trust problem, is because they don’t know any journalists and they’re judging journalism by what they see on cable news, where people are sitting there in a partisan way, just arguing with each other all the time on everything. That’s never been my life as a journalist. It hasn’t been your life as a journalist. And most of the journalists, the vast majority of the journalists, I know 99% of them, that’s not what they do. And so, it’s really important that we create news organizations at the local level that are sustainable, that cover their communities well, and find a way, an economic model. That is easier said than done.

Dean Baquet: Yeah, obviously.

Marty Baron: But it’s really important that we do that.

Dean Baquet: The job I had since I stepped aside as editor of the Times, I run a program where the Times partners with local news organizations that have an idea that they don’t believe they could pull off without help. And we edit the stories, we pay the salaries of the reporters, we pay the travel of the reporters. And there are a couple striking things to me. First off, a whole generation of reporters grew up in newsrooms unlike the ones we grew up in, where their belts were extremely tight. If they wanted to travel … I was in a conversation with one of these reporters who I was working with on a project. And he said, “I think I got this guy who’s got all these great documents. He’s in CDX.” And I said, “Well, go.”

He grew up in newsrooms where the only person who could say, “Go, take a trip,” was the publisher. And then many of them also spent a year in COVID newsrooms. Remember, these are young reporters. Where, for a year, you couldn’t travel anyway. And also, it’s gotten a little bit easier to find out things online. So, there’s just less of the traditional reporting that we grew up doing, and I think we got to figure out a way to deal with that.

Marty Baron: Well, I think even in the local communities, it’s not a matter of necessarily getting on a plane, but it’s getting out of the office.

Dean Baquet: That’s right. That’s right.

Marty Baron: And cultivating sources and meeting people in person and not just communicating with people you want to communicate with via a text or an email or things like that. And I think there’s far too little of that, where too many people are just sitting at a desk and sending out a text. And that’s partially because the production levels that are required these days or required of them don’t allow them to get out of the office because they’re not necessarily producing a story. But if they want the community to know them, if they want to discover new information, if they want to cultivate sources, they have to get out and talk to people and meet them and allow those people to know them and for them to know the people who are potential sources.

Dean Baquet: So, I met by Zoom this week with a group of reporters who work for a small nonprofit in the Mountain West. And their editor asked me to meet with them because they were depressed. And their question was …

Marty Baron: It’s a good thing they didn’t send me.

Dean Baquet: Well, they asked first, and I said no.

Marty Baron: I don’t know if we get the call and say, “Hey, they’re depressed, come speak to them.”

Dean Baquet: As you can tell, we’re friends. So, what they wanted to talk about was, can journalism still have impact? And one thing I pointed out to them is that, first thing I said was nobody said it was going to be easy. Nobody said it was going to be easy to go out and report hard stuff and try to have impact. But I also pointed out to them that two of the biggest social movements of the last generation, one was the questioning of the Catholic Church, the other was the #MeToo movement, came from newspaper reporting, came from traditional reporting that had far-reaching impact. So, my argument to them was, of course, you can still have impact, but you got to do the reporting. Do you think journalism can have big impact? You talk about it.

Marty Baron: Well, yeah, and I’m glad you mentioned that because there’s so much commentary now that the 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 about us is because they know that we do have impact.

But look, you talk about stories like the ones you talked about, the role that The New York Times played with the #MeToo stories, the role that the Boston Globe played with the investigation of the Catholic Church. I can’t think of stories that are much more impactful than those kinds of stories. And there are many others like them. And both those stories were done because of incredible ground-level reporting, knocking on doors, talking to people, getting people to go on the record, looking at documents, all of the basics. Knowing how to do that and not just sitting back and commenting on what somebody else did and not sitting in a studio and just opining, but actually going out and doing real reporting. And we need more of that. And we need to find a way to underwrite that work financially. But we need more of that work. And this journalism does have an enormous impact. The impact of #MeToo will last forever. The impact of the Catholic Church investigation …

Dean Baquet: [Inaudible], yes.

Marty Baron: ... [Inaudible] it’s about the archbishop of Canterbury having to resign. And so, this goes on, year after year after year. I become a little bit famous or infamous for my concerns about social media practices. And I keep asking, well, show me a tweet from a journalist that’s had impact in this world. One. Please mention one. I’ve yet to hear from anybody. And it’s like, no, what we really ought to be focusing on is the actual journalism, the stories, make sure that they are rigorously reported and incredibly well-delivered.

Dean Baquet: So, what do you think is the worst that Donald Trump can do to hurt the press?

Marty Baron: Well, I think he’s going to try everything. You can add to my list. But I think he will try every tool that he has. And he has a lot of tools in the toolbox. And he’s hinted at … he hasn’t hinted, he’s actually declared some of them quite openly. I’m quite sure that he will prosecute the press for perceived national security leaks.

Dean Baquet: He’ll look for one as soon as …

Marty Baron: Well, he’s salivating to do that. And he has talked about at rallies about wanting to put journalists in prison for that, where, as he puts it, “They will meet their bride,” meaning that they would be subjected to sexual assault. I don’t know very many people who talk that way, by the way. He’s the only person I know who talks that way. He’s talked about rescinding the licenses of network affiliates because of coverage that he finds to be unfavorable to him. My guess is that he will probably classify more documents and then claim that the leaks are national security threats.

I believe that they will deny people access to the kinds of documents and even the interviews that have been traditionally available to the press. I would not be surprised to see him threaten advertisers. So, there are a whole range of things that I think he’s likely to do. And I think that his allies, by the way, as they already have done, as they did when he was in office before, regularly bring defamation in libel suits against news organizations, merely for the purpose of harassment and to cost us a lot of money.

And so, there are a whole range of things that I think he’s likely to do. And he will try to do what leaders in the rest of the world who are aspiring authoritarians have done. And those are the kinds of measures that others around the world, people who are aspiring authoritarians, put in practice. And those are the kinds of things that he’s advocating today.

Dean Baquet: The one thing I will add, and I think this is probably the last, before we take questions from the audience, one thing I will add is, I don’t think you can overstate how much his relentless attacking of the traditional press, the Post, the Times, and others, it not only only hurts our credibility, he calls into questions our deepest reported stories that we can prove. He’s also given a playbook. When I work with local reporters around the country, a lot of the people they cover, a lot of the people they investigate do similar stuff. Fake news has become, an expression we’d never heard of pre-Donald Trump, has become, is trafficked in by local sheriffs and others all around the country. And they use very much the same language, too. So, I think that constant attacking of the press is also something he’ll do.

Marty Baron: Yeah. And this is a point that I’ve made with regard to the whole issue about the presidential endorsement of the Post, is that the real battle over trust is not over opinion pieces. It’s over facts, all right? That Trump said after 2016 and before he took office and he told Lesley Stahl, she asked him, “Why do you keep attacking the press?” And he told her, “The reason I do it is so when you publish something negative about me, people won’t believe you.” And that’s the goal. And so, those constant attacks, the demonization of the press, not just the demonization of the press, but the dehumanization of the press, which is what he’s doing, by describing us as garbage and a vermin and …

Dean Baquet: The enemies of the people.

Marty Baron: … enemies of the people, all of that is an effort to dehumanize the press. And that has taken its toll. And the situation is that, as a result, we can’t agree on a common set of facts. It’s worse than that. We can’t even agree on what a fact is at this point because all of the elements that we’ve used in the past to describe what a fact is …

Dean Baquet: Did you ever think we’d get to think, we’d get to the point where a vice presidential candidate would get upset because there was an agreement that he not be fact-checked.

Marty Baron: Yeah, right, exactly.

Dean Baquet: That’s a pretty remarkable …

Marty Baron: Well, what have we used traditionally to fact-check? We used, what are facts? Who do we turn to for facts? Well, we rely on people who have the relevant education, who have the relevant expertise, who have the relevant experience or their own personal experience. And actually, above all, evidence. And every single one of those has been dismissed and denied and denigrated and all of that because that’s the goal, is to make sure, is to have the public believe that you can never tell what’s true or false.

Dean Baquet: So, I think I made my 40 minutes. So, we take questions from the audience now.

Facilitator 1: Yeah, we’re just going to start with the Zoom audience question. We have about 100 people joining us on Zoom. So, we’re going to give them the opportunity.

So, this is a question. I’m just going to read it verbatim. But there was a period for the online New York Times when Daniel Okrent was public editor after the Jason Blair scandal. And his writing about the kinds of challenges Dean just described earlier in this conversation, was some of the most interesting reading for me. And it provided important transparency to the reader about difficult judgments for how or what to report. It also had the freedom to call out areas where it could be improved. What happened to such a public editor and the remit for that role?

Dean Baquet: So, first, what I would always have to tell people is that the public editor never reported to the executive editor. So, it was actually the publisher’s decision to get rid of the public editor. But here’s the reason the public editor was created. It was created after Jason Blair because there was no way … what happened in the Jason Blair case is people knew he was making stuff up and they had no way to get that information to the New York Times and for the New York Times to respond to it.

That’s just not true anymore. There are so many ways to critique, find our flaws, talk about our flaws, debate our flaws, that I, personally, again, it wasn’t my call. I personally don’t think the role of the public editor as it was created during Daniel Okrent’s time all the way through Margaret Sullivan’s time, served the same purpose it was created to serve. And I also think, frankly, that you get in a position where the public editors themselves have a strong point of view. And I think some public editors had very strong point of view, and it just made it harder to actually do critiques of the newsroom that were frankly better than some of our outside critics. And we now have a full world of strong outside critics for both of our news organizations. But it wasn’t my call.

Audience 1: Hi, this question is for both of you, but first, Dean, I want to address you with the question. You talked to Terry Gross right after President Trump won last time. And I remember that conversation very, very well. And I went back to listen to it. And one thing she asked you was, if you were worried about the courts being politicized. And your response was, “I am not worried. The courts are fortified.”

Dean Baquet: I was wrong.

Audience 1: “And our laws are fortified.” OK. And you brought up originalism. So, I was like, “I need to ask this question.” How do you feel now about the courts and the courts being politicized?

Dean Baquet: Well, I won’t talk directly about the courts, but I do not feel that the same barriers to some of the things a Trump administration would want to do exist. I think it’s pretty clear. He’s already trying to make sure that … he’s already said to the Senate he wants his appointees just to go through. He’s already tried to make it so that the Senate is not a place where there’s going to be full-bodied debate as there has been in the past. At least that’s his goal.

And frankly, I do think that the courts have changed enough so that the courts have made it clear that they think the president has a tremendous amount of power that previous courts did not think. So, I don’t think there’s the same guidelines. But frankly, there is one important guardrail. And that’s the press, which is one reason we’re here, and it’s one thing we have to hold on to mightily. Do you want to …

Audience 2: Hi, I have a question. One of the biggest stories of this century was the killing of George Floyd, which was reported by a citizen journalist. So, instead of treating social media like a nuisance or a hassle or a threat, should we, local journalists, write stories that pass on best practices to citizen journalists?

Dean Baquet: I don’t think that anybody thinks that there is not some journalism being done on social media. I don’t think that’s the question. So, yes, journalists have used social media to cover stories, to witness. Social media has become invaluable to international reporting. So, I think social media is an important part of reporting. I think what Marty and I are worried about, he’ll speak for himself, is that it’s also become something else. In that mix, it’s also become a toxic place.

Not everybody is doing the journalism that you’re describing. Not everybody is witnessing and making sure the world sees it. A lot of people are using social media to spread deception, to spread falsehoods, to spread things masquerading as non-partisan information. So, I don’t think anybody’s saying that the first part of social media is not important and good. I think we’re just wary of the rest of it. And you should …

Marty Baron: You’re just talking about two different aspects of social media. And I think they’re being conflated in your question. So, yes, the role of individuals who are witnesses to events, as was the case in the George Floyd killing, sure, that’s incredibly useful. And that individual want to pull surprise for that, and rightfully so. And so, those are incredibly useful. In fact, we have hold the Post and the Times and some others. We have these forensic teams that gather video from all around social media, from security cameras, from everywhere you can, satellite images, all of that, and put it all together and say, “Try to reconstruct events.”

So, we have made a practice of using all of that information, that kind of information, on a regular basis. You do have to be careful with it because you weren’t there. You didn’t have one of your own reporters there. So, you need to make sure, as with any video, whoa, what happened before and what happened afterward? Do we really have the entire picture here? So, you have to be extremely careful with that. But it’s a great tool. My concern is that something is completely different, and that is the staff using social media to express themselves typically impulsively, often unthinkingly and regularly irresponsibly, but I don’t feel strong about this subject on social media …

Dean Baquet: You should put some of that in a book.

Marty Baron: … in a way that is totally contrary to the standards of the institution they work for. And that actually has the effect of undermining the reputation that they joined because of its reputation.

Dean Baquet: Just for the record, add one thing to … social media and the ability to collect information through social media and technology, period, has made, to my mind, journalism about a billion times better than it was, has made the world a smaller place. It’s made it things that, when I was an investigative reporter, took months and weeks to do can be done much more quickly. So, I don’t think anybody’s decrying the rise of technology or social media. I think we both think that that’s been fantastic. We’re talking about a slice of it.

Audience 3: Here’s a question from the back here. If you, guys, as executive editors of the Washington Post and the New York Times, come to the conclusion that Donald Trump, part two, that he is absolutely determined to become the autocrat that you mentioned, Marty, and everything that we’ve seen in the first week, talking about limiting Senate oversight, he’s now talking about running for a third term, the appointments that he’s made convinced you based on the facts that this guy is absolutely bound and determined to take a sledgehammer to the democratic order of this country, and you’re running a newsroom, how are you going to marshal your resources and your structure, and especially if you’re effectively the final guardrail that stands between us in an autocratic conversion, a la Hungary, what are you actually doing structurally to those newsrooms to meet this actual moment?

Dean Baquet: Well, first, remember, neither one of us is running a newsroom right now. So, I think you quadrupled down on reporting. When I say the centrality of reporting has been diminished over time, I think our job is to find shit out. I think our job is to get deep inside the Justice Department. If you were going to have one person covering the Justice Department, maybe if you’re a big news organization like ours, maybe you need five, as these agencies implode, there are going to be people coming out of them who know stuff and who are upset because their agencies are being turned on their heads.

You have to double down on reporting. And then I would add one other thing. Too many people want journalists to get caught up in language, epic debates over what you call Donald Trump. There are many people who can. That’s fine. There are news organizations all over the country who can choose to call him whatever they want to call him.

There are only a handful of news organizations who can go out and prove it, who can do the digging to prove it. And then the last thing I would say is we have to be incredibly transparent about what we’re doing, how we did it, how we found it out, because we go into the game this year knowing that there’s a huge audience that doesn’t believe us, that thinks we’re making it all up, and that we’re writing about people who will stoke that fear.

Marty Baron: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think, look, during the election, I’m sure the Times did, certainly the Post had a team to look at challenges to the people’s right to vote and voter suppression and all of that. So, there were substantial teams that were deployed all around the country to look at what was happening in every state and localities and all of that.

I think such a team deserves to be created now to look at what happens to the institutions of our democracy and how they come under siege, whether they come under siege and how that’s happening, and to make sure that we’re documenting every single thing that’s happening so that people are at least aware of what seems likely to happen to this democratic system of ours. And so, I think there should be a core group of reporters who are dedicated to documenting that.

Dean Baquet: If I can just say one small thing, there was a movement for people to cancel their subscriptions to the Washington Post after the Jeff … Don’t. And I’ve said that publicly. There are only a handful, and you can count them on one hand, in fact, they won’t fill a hand, of news organizations with the ambition, energy, and size to do that kind of work that we are talking about now. And the Washington Post, no matter what Jeff Bezos did two weeks ago, is one of them. So, I think it’s fair game to criticize him, to ask questions as Marty did, but I suspect Marty would agree. Don’t run it out of business. We need the Washington Post.

Marty Baron: Yeah. Well, I still have my subscription, and I intend to keep it-

Dean Baquet: So, do I.

Marty Baron: … and I encourage other people to keep it as well. A lot of what you know, and Dean alluded to this earlier, so much of what you know today about Donald Trump, including our most severe critics, say, know about Donald Trump, is from … because it came from the New York Times or the Washington Post, so much of it. And so, it’s important to be able to have strong news institutions. If the Washington Post newsroom is weakened, you’ve handed Donald Trump a victory that he will celebrate. And so, I think it’s important to keep subscribing.

One of the things that drives me crazy, by the way, is the people who post on Twitter, the picture of their cancellation notice, while they’re on Twitter, Elon Musk platform, celebrating that on Twitter, that they’ve canceled their Washington Post subscription or going on Facebook, and you’d look at the impact that Facebook has had on our democracy as well. So, it’s like maybe you should think through exactly what you’re doing here. You’re calling for the erosion of a great newsroom, which continues to do extraordinary work, while you’re actually supporting these other institutions that have had a damaging effect on our democracy.

Audience 4: If they really wanted to hurt Jeff Bezos, they would cancel their Amazon Prime subscription and keep the Post subscription.

Marty Baron: Yeah. Well, I’ve heard a lot of people say like, “Yeah, but I don’t want to give that up,” and I’m not sure, right? There aren’t enough to … You realize how many people they have is … You’re not going to hurt them, but whatever. I’m not calling for that. People can make their own individual choices. I’d say, I’m not canceling my subscription. I don’t think other people should cancel their subscription. They’re going to hurt a newsroom that is doing extraordinary work and needs to continue doing that.

Audience 4: I agree. That’s not my question. I was just posting that. The reach, the role, and the influence of traditional journalism just continues to shrink dramatically. Studies show that the vast majority of people get their news and form their opinions from social media, from Twitter, from Instagram, from TikTok.

And both of you have said, in your remarks tonight, that you really think we need new models for the journalists in the journalism that you have come from, but really, the only thing I’ve heard you talk about is we need damn more reporting and better reporting and dig deeper. That’s not going to cut it by itself. Don’t you have more ideas of where we go, how we support it?

Marty Baron: Manna from heaven. No, yeah, I have ideas about how we should do that. Look, we’re in a challenged state. No question about it. Most people actually get their news from their family and friends, not even from social media. It’s just what they hear among their family and friends, the tribal influence of how … Well, they get it somewhere. It’s like they get it from their family and friends, and somebody got it from social media or wherever.

Many people can’t even tell you where they got their news, but your point is well taken. We live in a time where, look, news organizations, for a very long period of time, since 2007 onward, have depended on enormous traffic from Google search and enormous traffic from social media, particularly Facebook. Facebook now doesn’t carry news because Zuckerberg is afraid to, and Google is deploying algorithms to provide answers to your queries.

And while there might be links, most people aren’t going to go to the links. So, we face a huge challenge there. We have to develop news organizations that have a direct relationship with their readers and that their readers are willing to pay for that information. And we have to adapt how we communicate information. If people want information in shorter form, if they want it more visually, we have to provide it that way.

So, we have to be able to provide both authoritativeness and authenticity at the same time. And that requires, I did say earlier on, I didn’t give specifics, but if the way that people are consuming information is being radically reinvented, we have to radically reinvent the way that we are delivering it. And that’s something that every news organization today should be working on.

And then we’ll also be thinking through how do we fortify our relationship with a … Go back to, look, when we didn’t have the internet, and we had newspapers, and the people bought those newspapers, and they were loyal to that brand for one reason or another, and there are a variety of reasons why, that’s where we got to go back to where people say, “I’m attached to that brand. And I will pay for that brand. And they’re providing me value every day.”

And we should think through every single day, what is the value that we are providing our readers? And did we provide value today? If we didn’t, what did we miss? And what are we going to provide them tomorrow? And that’s a discipline that we have to have in our news organizations. And that’s not a magic pill. It’s not even close to a magic pill, but it’s a discipline that we have to go through.

Dean Baquet: There are, just for the record, local news organizations working to do this kind of stuff. What is the future going to look like? It’s going to look like a mix of smaller to medium-sized, some for-profit, some not-for-profit, news organizations around the country, a handful of big news organizations like The New York Times and the Washington Post. And this is why I’m doing what I’m doing, I think we have an obligation, those of us who’ve turned the corner, to help local news organizations and work with them and partner with them.

Steve Adler made the case for this in the Columbia Journalism review this week. And I think that’s one of the things, but there is no magic bullet. You’re in the middle of what happened 100-some odd years ago, when there were tons of little newspapers all over the country covering ethnic communities, some of them going out of business, some of them struggling, some of them doing great stuff. And then finally, people started bundling them all together. And we’re in the middle of another revolution like that.

Audience 5: I’d like us to talk about how we protect journalism and journalists and journalistic organizations because come January, everything is going to be weaponized in this government against us in this room. And the rules are being made by them, not by us. It’s not by the Constitution. It’s not by the First Amendment. And I think we really, really need to figure out how the First Amendment, and everybody who believes in it, and all these organizations, are going to stand up to what could be a really unpleasant and dangerous situation.

Marty Baron: Well, that’s certainly true. And that’s what I was talking about earlier. And I’ve seen that very vividly. I go every year to Bogota to help with a training program for Latin American journalists. And this past January, and I’ll be there again in January, the past January, there were 20 participants. And one-third of them are working in exile. All of the journalists from Nicaragua, they’re living in Costa, Rica. Journalists from Guatemala and journalists from El Salvador, they’re living in Mexico. Venezuelan journalists could be anywhere. Miami elsewhere.

So, because journalism has become criminalized in their countries. And I do worry that that is the intention of Donald Trump is to try to criminalize the ordinary practice of journalism notwithstanding the First Amendment. I do think it’s really important that we support those organizations that provide legal support for journalists. So, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press could use a lot of additional resources. So, they provide invaluable support to a lot of … both in terms of access to information, which is also important, but also legal defense. And they just need more resources. We need more lawyers.

And that’s one measure that I think we need to take. And then we need to, of course, provide for the physical security of our journalists. Every journalistic institution, certainly at the Washington Post, I know with the New York Times, we’ve had to substantially increase the level of security for our people. I worry about it all the time. All it requires is one person to do something horrible, and who is being incited by when you have Donald Trump standing in front of his rally saying he wouldn’t mind if journalists took a bullet, you’ve got a real problem.

Audience 6: You were talking before about newspaper organizations needing to change with the times, finding innovative ways of keeping up. So, then what are some ways that you have seen that, whether it be major news organizations or smaller ones?

Dean Baquet: You mean made changes to keep up with the times?

Audience 6: Yes. So, yes.

Dean Baquet: Marty mentioned one, and I’ll talk a little, which was we created, as to the Post, a visual investigations team, which, to me, was when the video editor came to me to pitch it, I wasn’t even quite sure I knew what she was talking about, but it’s done remarkable work. It’s been able to show cases in which the U.S. killed civilians in wars. It’s been able to prove errant police shootings during the era of the George Floyd investigations. I think it’s like the most … We now have a full, pretty giant investigative team doing it.

I think that’s modern investigative journalism at its best, taking advantage of all the technology available to us and doing journalism, by the way, that is really hard to deny, right? It’s not anonymous sources. In one case, it’s the picture of Erdoğan’s guards beating people up in Washington D.C. with the video. So, it’s just terrific unassailable journalism. And one of the things that I’d like to see happen, we’re working with a lot of local news organizations, is to get to the point where some of them can do that kind of work. They may not be able to have the kinds of teams that the Post and the Times have, but there’s stuff to be done. That’s one example.

Marty Baron: I think we have a lot to learn from places, some that don’t exist anymore, but have a lot to teach us, like Vice, TikTok, and influencers generally. So, we shouldn’t be so haughty and shouldn’t be so arrogant to say that we don’t have a lot to learn from them because we do have a lot to learn from them. And that is to make sure that we’re delivering … First of all, it’s highly visual. Secondly, how do we make it short? All right. The phrase is long … It’s long been said. It’s harder to write short than it is to write long.

And how do you take an element and turn it into a video and maybe a series of different elements, and then whet people’s appetite to read more if they wish to do so? And how, with influencers, do you get people who communicate authenticity? We can write with authority, but we don’t necessarily communicate with authenticity. And people are deeply suspicious of large institutions and so-called corporate media and all of that sort of stuff. How do you get the right journalists who know how to do that, know how to produce those kinds of videos? And we are communications companies, but our weaknesses are failures as communicators has been laid bare. All right.

And so, we need to look at what’s succeeding and incorporate that into our newsrooms and fight against what is undoubtedly going to be our own little bit of resistance in our own newsrooms to doing that on the pretense that somehow undermines quality. We need to make sure that we do it by holding onto our values and our principles, but doing it in a way, communicating in a way that is effective in the current era, whether we like the way things are or not. So, that’s the way we need to think about it.

Audience 7: Hi. I’m a student from the Berkeley J School. And my question is that, from your point of view, do you think the distrust and the dehumanization you talked about in the current journalism industry is only caused by the technological and political change in our country, or do you think the media should be responsible to that?

Dean Baquet: I would argue some of it is our fault. I would argue, by the way, though, that you can’t … I wouldn’t dismiss the fact that we’ve had the President of the United States now for nearly half a generation beating us up every day and the people around him. I have a pet theory about why, untested by any, we’ve lost some of our trust. When I started in journalism, newspapers did about 20 things and 18 of the 20 things were not controversial at all. So, when I worked at the Chicago Tribune and lived in Chicago for six years, there were people who read the Chicago Tribune and hated much of the Chicago Tribune, but like Mike Royko.

And at the Sun-Times, there were people who hated a lot of the Sun-Times, but they liked Siskel and Ebert. So, what happened is, of those 20 things, and I’m oversimplifying it, two were controversial, the other 18 were not. All the 18 that were not controversial are gone. When I started, to show my age, you had to look at the newspaper to know whether to take an umbrella out. If you wanted to sell your car, you read the comics.

You couldn’t get every game, so you watched. If you wanted to know whether your team won, you had to look at the local paper. So, even if their editorial position pissed you off, and even in the deep South, the Atlanta Constitution, when Gene Patterson was writing these historic columns, people kept reading the Atlanta Constitution because they had to. All the most innocent stuff we did are all gone, leaving us just with the stuff that pisses people off. And I don’t think we were prepared for that change. So, that’s my pet theory.

Then I’ll add one more thing. We didn’t help ourselves. I want to make sure I’m making it clear that I think Donald Trump and the people around him made it worse. We were never transparent. We never talked about what we did. We set ourselves up. We were arrogant. I remember as a young reporter, if a reader called up, I thought, “Oh, my God, why is a reader bothering me?”

And I think all that stuff accumulated. And I think we have a lot of work to do to rebuild that trust. I always thought Wordle was a step in the direction of rebuilding that. Wordle and the cooking app for the New York Times, essentially, all it really is rebuilding the bundle that you used to get in your Sunday paper on your doorstep. And even people who don’t like the New York Times, even people who hate Brett Stevens, play Wordle, so.

Marty Baron: Look, there have been major factors that affect trust. There’s no question that … Well, first of all, trust has been declining since the 1970s. So, the high point was Watergate, and it’s been falling ever since, but it’s accelerated during the Trump era, but also it accelerated even before that with the internet. With, essentially, fragmentation of the media market, people can now find a site that affirms their pre-existing point of view. If they have a theory of a conspiracy, they can surely find it on the web.

When Antonin Scalia died, I remember I was with my younger brother, I said, “I bet you …” it was about an hour after he had died, I said, “I bet you can find a conspiracy theory that he was murdered right now. And I went online. And sure enough, there it was. And by the way, Donald Trump passed around that conspiracy theory as well that he might have been murdered. So, that’s a problem. And that has fostered a higher level of polarization in this country.

And higher polarization is going to have an impact on media trust. There’s no question, but there’s also no question that there are things that we need to do. I do think we need to be more transparent. I think we have to get rid of arrogance. Frankly, we have got a lot of people in newsrooms who are … they’re not necessarily coming from the, so-called, working class. They’re coming from higher classes. They are not seeing the world like Mike Royko did or Jimmy Breslin did. And we need that. We need people who do that.

We need people who come from evangelical households who may have been homeschooled. We need to hear that perspective. That has to be part of the diversity of our newsroom as well, that says we need to understand America from all perspectives. And somehow, we need to be able to write about that and/or produce whatever it is, broadcast or audio or whatever it might be, to communicate that and do it in an effective way. And we’re missing that. And we need more of that.

Dean Baquet: I thought about this with the whole Bezos story. And again, I agree with you. If he had said it two years ago, it would have been … How much does it affect us that so many of our readers are liberal? The Post and the Times and institutions like ours, we have largely liberal audiences …

Marty Baron: I know.

Dean Baquet: … which is why they get mad at us so much.

Marty Baron: Right. And that’s true. And they want us to take a side. That’s what they want. So, I say that we need to … organizations like ours, I want to be ally of the truth, of the facts and the truth, not an ally of a party, not an ally of an ideology, nothing. Tell the people … My view of mission of journalism is to give the public the information it needs and deserves to know so that they can govern themselves. And at the heart of that is holding power to account because that’s why the founders of this country, particularly James Madison, wrote the First Amendment, who talked about freely examining public characters and measures.

And the key word there is examining. But it’s true. We live in a very polarized information environment right now. If you look at the Times, the percentage of its conservative readers is in the single digits. And the same thing at the Washington Post. And so, when people blame, as they have post-election, I find this crazy, and they blame the New York Times for the fact that Donald Trump was elected, and I’m like the people who elected Donald Trump, they don’t even read the New York Times. And if they read it, they read it to dismiss it.

And so, it’s an absolutely crazy argument. And it is a problem because a lot of people, for example, the people who canceled their subscription of the Post, is they were particularly upset. The interesting thing is that Jeff Bezos pointed out the decline in trust where we’ve now fallen below Congress, but if you look at that Gallup poll, the real significant decline in trust since the last Gallup poll was the decline among Democrats.

That’s why we fell below Congress is it dropped among Democrats. There was actually a take-up among Republicans. It’s such a low level, it’s not meaningful, but it dropped precipitously. And we have to make sure, though, that even though that’s our readership, that we’re not just being the voice of a party or the voice of an ideology.

Dean Baquet: I always thought it’s worth … If you have been reading, going back in time, and reading some of the essays of Gene Patterson, I always thought that … Most people, he was the editor of the Atlanta Constitution during the civil rights era, and he wrote these front page columns, editorials they were, essentially just telling his audience how bad they were, telling his audience that history was not going to treat them well. I have somewhere of the collection of his, and I got to meet him when he was living in St. Petersburg. I thought that was like, that’s as courageous as you get. He was telling his audience, the people who paid his salaries, that they were bad and that history was not going to treat them well. And he was right.

Audience 8: I wanted to ask a question about Twitter, since we’ve been bringing it up so much. I’ve been trying to think about this thing of journalists being on Twitter. And I’m not talking about the 2,000 conversation about them being knuckleheads and saying things that might not be journalistic. I guess I’m talking about Elon Musk owning Twitter and weaponizing it, I would say, this time around and amping up the misinformation.

And yet, there’s all these journalists who are still on it. I think giving it a little bit of a sheen of legitimacy, providing free content, when he is everything we stand against. So, I guess I’m wondering, I know you don’t run newspapers anymore, but is it a conversation that anybody’s having yet, bigger news organizations, and what’s that conversation sound like?

Marty Baron: Right. Well, the Guardian announced this week that it was no longer going to publish its … to post on Twitter anymore, or X. I guess that was a popular decision in certain circles.

Dean Baquet: Just on this side of the room.

Marty Baron: And they wrote a piece explaining what their reasoning was. And I think that’s an individual decision. I think it’s an individual decision on the part of a lot of journalists as well. As I said, I’m astonished when people post on Twitter that they’re canceling their Washington Post subscription. That makes no sense to me, absolutely no sense to me. But I don’t participate in Twitter much. Only when I criticized Jeff Bezos did I do that.

So, it was like the first tweet in God knows how many months. I only actually reactivated Twitter, started posting again on Twitter, when I heard that Elon Musk might cancel accounts that had been inactive for a long time. And I was coming out with my book. And I thought, “I got to keep this thing going at least until my book comes out because I want to promote it.” And after I finished promoting the book, I stopped posting on Twitter, but I tried not even to look at it. It was a cesspool before he bought it. It’s like a worst cesspool today.

And he has abused his ownership of that platform. And it has become … And it’s astonishing. And I think it’s outrageous actually. If that had been done by somebody who was liberal, there would be these congressional hearings, Jim Jordan would be having hearings about the politicization of the social media, but nothing that happened before on Facebook or Google or anything like that even begins to compare with the way that Elon Musk has exploited his ownership of Twitter.

Dean Baquet: All that said, I actually disagree with the Guardian’s decision to pull off of Twitter because you got to be where … I mean, our role … of course, the New York Times might do it tomorrow, so our role is to be where the readers are. And I think pulling off Twitter feels more like a performative political act. We’re going to pull off because we don’t like them. Our role is to do the work and make sure the work is seen by as many people as possible. And yes, Twitter become … is a bad neighborhood, but I think there are also people on Twitter who we need to reach. So, being read is, to me, the ultimate act of journalism. So, I would not have done that.

Facilitator 1: We’ve had a lot of questions on Zoom this evening. And we are going to end here. And it is, what is the role for journalism schools when it comes to developing the new ways to deliver reporting?

Marty Baron: You’re on the advisory board.

Dean Baquet: And I’ve talked to a lot of journalism schools over the last couple of years since they’ve been running this program for the Times. I think the most important thing journalism schools can encourage is that the most important craft is reporting. And I don’t mean just like people who write storage reporting. I mean, audio. I mean, video. That is the most important craft. And that they should be open-minded about how their work is distributed and seen. And they should be as skillful and flexible as the world changes in making sure that work is seen.

But my biggest concern about journalism, besides the local journalism, is I do think that the primacy in the … Post-Watergate era, reporters were king. Finding stuff out was the most important thing. I think there’s less to that besides the death of local news organizations. Most of the big new national organizations, whether it’s … I’m leaving out ProPublica and The Marshall project, most of them don’t break stories. They break internal White House gossip. Deep reporting, I just would love for journalism schools to help make sure that that is front and center.

Marty Baron: Well, I agree with that, but I think the questioner raises a good question. And I think that we not only have to do the work. We have to make sure that people see the work and read the work. So, even if we continue to post on Twitter, we have to make sure that when somebody goes to it, if they go … First of all, get them to go to it. And secondly, that if they do go to it, that they will consume it and absorb it. And as I said before, we are communications companies, but we’ve failed as communicators in a lot of ways.

We’re not communicating in the way that is proving to be effective. We need to do that. We need to have incredibly solid reporting. And that should be absolutely essential and priority number one. But we need to figure out how do we communicate that effectively in the environment as it exists today? And journalism schools or communication schools have an absolute duty to experiment and not only teach it, but encourage their students to try to come up with their own better ways because journalism students today are going to be the ones who invent the future for tomorrow.

It’s going to be a very different future than the one that Dean and I grew up with. And I’m excited to see what that is. I want it to be highly effective as a form of communication, but I also want it to hold on to the … I want reporting to be at the heart of that, and I want our values to be at the heart of that as well, but we’ve got to be a lot better at the way we communicate than we are today.

Ed Wasserman: Thank you for that closing note. I’ve been asked to close this out. I’m Ed Wasserman. I was dean here for a number of years. And I’m a professor of the reporting and media ethics. Your presence here, the two of you, couldn’t come at a better time that’s certainly a dark moment for us and for our students.

They’re entering a time when the environment that they’re going to be serving now has an emerging class of implacably hostile politicians. The business model is tottering. And they’re going to have to win the affection of their peers, who seem to be distracted by all kinds of other things. So, that’s why your message tonight was so deeply appreciated. It was humane. It was insightful. And above all, it was inspiring. So, thank you so much for being here.

(Applause)

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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