Marty Baron, former Editor of the Post, writes in this 2023 book:
* As our visit commenced, at seven p.m. The Post published a report that was likely to secure our No. 1 spot [on Trump’s enemies list] for a while: Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III was inquiring into Kushner’s business dealings in Russia, part of his investigation into that country’s interference in the 2016 election. The story landed on top of a previous one by The Post that revealed Kushner had met secretly with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and had proposed that a Russian diplomatic post be used to provide a secure communications line between Trump officials and the Kremlin. The Post had reported as well that Kushner met later with Sergey Gorkov, head of a Russian – owned development bank.
* But Trump, his family, and his team had affixed us on their enemies list, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. We had been neither servile nor sycophantic toward Trump, and we weren’t going to be. Our job was to report aggressively on the president and to hold his administration, like all others, to account. In the mind of the president and those in his orbit, that most fundamental journalistic obligation made us the opposition.
There was political benefit to Trump in going further. We would not just be his enemy. We would be the country’s enemy; in his telling, we would be traitors. Less than a month into his presidency, Trump had denounced the press as “the enemy of the American People” on Twitter. It was an ominous echo of the phrase invoked by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels and deployed for the purpose of repression and murder.
Trump could not have cared less about the history of such incendiary language or how it might incite physical attacks on journalists.
And it was clear from that moment, if it had not been earlier, that he saw all of us at that table as his foes.* …Donald Trump, who would upend the political system and govern with a mix of populism, nativism, and fantastical thinking that defied verifiable facts.
Taking shape was a collision of power: The occupant of the White House, the world’s most powerful person, aiming to bring The Post to submission through ceaseless public attacks on our journalists and unrelenting pressure on our organization’s owner; The Post ’s owner, with ample power of his own as one of the world’s richest humans, seeking to avoid open confrontation with Trump but unwilling to succumb to his censure and coercion; and The Washington Post , famous for its role in felling a prior president, aggressively revealing the administration’s unsavory secrets, persistent lies, flagrant constitutional sabotage, and pattern of incitement.* I was no fan of newsroom unions. I appreciated their often – necessary role in our business as a negotiator for well – deserved better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Over years, however, I had seen the newspaper guild stubbornly resist needed workplace transformation when journalism’s success — survival, really — urgently depended on it. Newsrooms routinely suffer from a strong gravitational pull back toward what used to be at the expense of what needs to be. Unions had reinforced that intransigence. Plus, I had diminishing tolerance for their belligerent portrayal of managers as malefactors, willful ignorance of what’s required to run a sustainable business, self – righteous moralizing, and reflexive opposition to enforcing customary standards for employee behavior, including standards that staffers agreed to upon being hired.
Baron does not like self-righteousness from others, but he enjoys indulging in it himself.
Trump aimed “to bring The Post to submission.” Yes, and what was The Post’s attitude to Trump? Was it not trying to destroy him?
America’s institutions are dominated by the liberal-left, which has its own distinctive partisan hero system, and naturally opposes those hero systems that threaten it, such as populism. We all hate that which threatens us. It’s natural that Trump should feel some hatred towards the MSM as the MSM will towards Trump just as it is natural that Jews and Christians should have some negative feelings about the other.
Baron writes: “The Post has a long history of aggressively investigating major – party nominees for president.” What exactly did these investigations turn up about Barack Obama? All of the MSM’s investigations of Obama look weak when compared with the deep work of historian David Garrow.
Baron writes:
The Post’ s independent editorial page, incensed over Trump’s resentful, race – baiting populism and unending falsehoods, made him a regular object of rebuke. On December 5, 2015, a searing editorial declared Trump “corrosive to the U.S. political debate in at least two ways.” One was “his basic contempt for facts.” The other was that he “sees people as caricatures and stereotypes to be poked at and exploited rather than as individuals with dignity.”
Even in the most individualist countries such as America and Australia, strangers are still primarily viewed as members of groups rather than as individuals. They’re seen as Jews or blacks or gays or Japanese. We’re wired to do this because our survival over the millennia has depended upon instant identification of potential friends or foes, often on characteristics such as skin color. The Post is a liberal organization and thus sees people primarily as individuals with inalienable rights.
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Nationalists and liberals see the world differently. Nationalists can be liberals and vice versa, I’m talking about one’s primary worldview.
Philosopher Rony Guldmann writes in his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia:
* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression resent… the properly ordered sociability of the buffered identity. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives express their longing for a mode of experience that is less compromised by this sociability’s demands—less rationalized, intellectualized, and disengaged—a yearning for what they intuit to be human nature’s default, and hence authentic, form of consciousness.
* Like the elites of old, today’s liberals insist that the lower orders be “not left as they are, but badgered bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled, and organized to abandon their lax and disordered folkways and conform to one or another feature of civil behavior.” Seen in the context of the mutation counter-narrative, the E.P.A. and other liberal institutions are merely carrying forth this longstanding tradition. Conservatives understand their conservatism as their resistance to the badgering and bullying, and this is why they cannot be see liberals as tyrants and usurpers, cryptofascists who are always scheming to undermine the natural liberty of the conservative. Liberalism has become ascendant, not by providing compelling solutions to discrete problems, but by suppressing and discrediting the free human nature that the conservative strives to retain.
As good liberals, members of The Post want to educate and uplift their fellow citizens into the same sort of disengaged, reflexive, buffered, strategic and rational identity they enjoy.
What we have here is a failure to communicate between different hero systems.
Guldmann writes:
Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control “wants our lives to be bound by rules,” manliness “is dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.” While rational control “wants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,” manliness “favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,”107 Manliness “seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.”108 It “tends to be insistent and intolerant,”109 just as it is “steadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible.”110 Manliness must “must prove itself and do so before an audience.” It seeks “to be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.” By contrast, rational control “prefers routine and doesn’t like getting excited” and must therefore seek to keep manliness “unemployed by
means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.”111Manliness thus conceived is the antithesis of the buffered distance, the repudiation of its ordering impulses. The defense of manliness is at its deepest level a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, a rationality that is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these embodied, however they are now expressed.
Marty Baron writes in chapter six:
There was genuine news in the Democrats’ emails that spilled out in the months before the election. Coverage was unavoidable; necessary, too. But the stories during those first several months after the hack fell short of all that the public needed to understand.
There was a far more significant story taking shape, and it took the press too long to fully communicate it: Russia was aggressively interfering in a presidential election. A superpower adversary was doing what it could to propel Donald Trump into the White House. At The Post we learned a lesson: If there was a hack like this in the future, we would be putting greater emphasis on who was behind it and why, not letting the content of stolen information distract us from the motives of the hackers.
It’s 2023 and we still have no evidence that Russia’s interventions swung the 2016 election.
Baron writes:
Russia might possess compromising information on Trump and might have cultivated the GOP candidate as an intelligence asset. He didn’t go so far as to mention the report’s reference to “perverted sexual acts” by Trump that supposedly occurred at Moscow’s Ritz – Carlton hotel, a bizarre tale of Trump allegedly paying prostitutes to pee on a bed in the presidential suite where President and Michelle Obama had once stayed. “Golden showers,” as the report called the purported episode.
Politics editors asked the national security staff to help chase down the leads. Nothing would be published unless verified. The message, Steven recalls, was, “We have got to mobilize.”
Why? Why would you think that story required mobilizing your resources?
Baron writes:
That afternoon at about four p.m., The Post ’s David Fahrenthold broke a story that delivered a brutal blow to the Trump campaign. Dave obtained a 2005 hot – mic recording of Trump bantering on a bus with Billy Bush, then of the Access Hollywood program, as they arrived on the set of the soap opera Days of Our Lives . The presidential candidate’s remarks on the video were so grotesque that we wrestled with the proper words to describe them, settling on “lewd” and “vulgar.” With beautiful women, Trump said, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Billy Bush responded, “Whatever you want.” Trump went on, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
What’s grotesque about these remarks? Marty Baron pretends he’s never heard guy talk. It might be that Marty Baron is a particularly tender soul, but given that he oversaw the Boston Globe’s investigation of child abuse by priests, that explanation doesn’t hold up. If Trump’s remarks are grotesque, what do you call priests molesting boys? Really grotesque?
Baron consistently lacks any sense of proportion. Naughty words are considered grotesque and Russia doing what dozens of nations do to other nations is super important. Remember, there’s no evidence that Russian interference swung the results of the 2016 election.
Baron must have achieved his success in journalism by mirroring the sentiments of journalists.
Baron writes: “Trump was boasting, after all, of nothing less than sexual assault.”
No, Trump was talking about moving aggressively on women who wanted to have sex with him. He wasn’t talking about assaulting women who had no interest in sex with him.
Baron writes:
The gravity of the evening set in. This election would be historic, but not in the way that so many expected. Some women in the newsroom who had envisioned, and hoped for, the first woman president teared up as it became apparent 2016 would not be the year for that. A news staff that had endured Trump’s threats and insults faced the prospect that we were in for four, or eight, more years of the same or worse. Few expected Trump to be any different as president than he had been as a candidate. With The Post’s video department aiming its cameras at our news hub for a live webcast, I made one request of the people within view: Show no emotion.
One of the common lines about journalism is that there shouldn’t be cheering in the press box, but I guess that dictum doesn’t hold true anymore for people in the MSM.
Baron writes:
After a few days had passed, Steven asked if I would speak with the politics staff. Many were in shock that so much of what we reported about Trump apparently had been disregarded by voters. There was a “disconnect between the reality of what we saw and the reality of what they saw,” Steven recalled. “I think the really strong feeling was, ‘What difference did our work make?’”
The next Monday the politics team poured into the main conference room, named after legendary editor Ben Bradlee. My message was brief. I said what I genuinely believed: All we could do now was to keep doing our jobs. We give the public the information they need and deserve to know. They decide what to do with it. That’s how democracy works. We should remember that this is the same democracy that allows us to publish with the freedom we do. All that we had reported about Trump was now in the public domain. Citizens would have to process it over time. “Just do our job. It’s that simple,” I said.There was only so much assurance I could provide. Trump, we knew, would stop at nothing to question our credibility and integrity, even our humanity. “With any election, you just see election day as the end,” Steven recalled. Now, “The finish line was the starting point. That was overwhelming to think about … It was hard to imagine that we were going to have to muscle up for the four years we knew were coming.”
What snowflakes and what idiots. They really thought they could sway the election returns? Doesn’t sound compatible with being neutral and striving for objectivity. Baron doesn’t know anything about democracy and how it works though he loves to pontificate about these things. There’s nothing in democracy that allows for freedom of speech. Democracy and rights are two separate things.
Baron writes:
Before editors and reporters joined us for a forty – five – minute lunch of deli sandwiches in the ninth – floor “publisher’s suite,” Bezos asked me what he should know in advance. I told him the staff was suffering a bit of PTSD from the incessant attacks by Trump. They wondered whether their work resonated at all with the public. They were anxious about enduring four to eight more years of vilification, harassment, and obstruction in a Trump presidency. That middle finger he had given the press was about to become a fist.
Do these journos have any self-awareness? How often has their work devastated lives? Why would they need comfort? If they are so vulnerable, perhaps they should get a different job. If getting attacked by Donald Trump gives you PTSD, you definitely should get a new career. Why would you worry about your work resonating with the public? You have no control over other people’s brains and emotions. Their reactions belong to them. It must be upsetting for these staffers to find out they don’t control Americans.
How many American journalists have been murdered because of things Donald J. Trump has said? I can’t think of any. By contrast, we know that the valorization of Black Lives Matter by American elites, including the MSM, led to thousands of additional murders. It was first called the Ferguson Effect and then the George Floyd Effect.
Marty’s kids are mystified that anyone would vote for Donald Trump. Why? Because nobody they know would vote for Trump. Perhaps Marty’s kids would benefit from a bit of ideological diversity? The Post, as Marty describes it, is monolithically on the left.
Baron writes:
At a Phoenix rally in August, where he sought to deflect criticism of his vile response to the violence by right-wing hate groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump faulted the media for schisms in American society and incited the crowd against the “failing New York Times,” CNN (with the crowd chanting “CNN sucks”), and The Washington Post…
So what did Trump say that was so vile?
“You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be condemned totally — you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
Why is that vile? Is the MSM irrelevant to schisms in American society? The Democratic coalition depends upon shared loathing of America’s white Christian majority. Who stokes that hatred? The MSM.
Baron writes:
Our general policy at The Post was to refrain from comment when a manic Trump went on the warpath against us. What would be the point of responding to his eruptions? Exceptions were made only when he named individual reporters, with the obviously malicious intent of setting them up for harassment and physical threats.
And does The Post’s reporting set up people for harassment and physical threats? Of course.
I don’t like most of Trump’s tweets and I don’t like his wild and baseless accusations. Trump deserves sustained criticism for his petty, nasty, and false things he says, such as denying the validity of the 2020 election.
In the back and forth between Trump and the MSM, I fall in the middle, thinking they each have important things to say (the MSM is usually more accurate).
Baron writes:
Black journalists at The Post were telling me we had not done nearly enough — that their voices weren’t being heard at senior levels and that our diversity efforts needed to go deeper than a top – level appointment or overall numbers. I should have assessed our newsroom with a wider lens. Our immediate growth needs were existentially pressing, but other needs should not have been ignored. Whether I expected to be successful or not, I should have advocated for a top – level editor who could lead our diversity efforts, not just for purposes of hiring but also to strengthen our coverage of long – standing, unresolved issues of race, ethnicity, and identity. Success at getting the resources might have eluded me, but failing to try was regrettably the most serious error of my tenure at The Post.
In the aftermath of the town hall meeting in 2020, as my standing with Black journalists and others on the staff suffered, it was imperative to name a managing editor to ensure we made significant, consistent progress on diversity and inclusiveness in everything we did: coverage of race, ethnicity, and identity as well as improved recruitment, retention, and career advancement for journalists of color. After a national search, I named Krissah Thompson, an accomplished writer in our own features department, to that position. In the meantime, managing editor Cameron Barr had been listening closely to staff concerns and proposed that we do far more — add almost a dozen positions to focus on race, ethnicity, and identity in a variety of ways, from the administration of justice to environmental and health inequities. It was the right idea but a big budget request. I presented it to Fred Ryan as publisher with my strong endorsement. The world had changed, and within days it was approved. The hiring was an important signal that The Post would take concrete steps.
Even so, I felt that some on staff were still aiming to portray me as grossly insensitive on matters of race. It was painful then, and remains painful now. I feared that my professional reputation, more than four decades in the making, was about to be unjustly shredded. I also had grown weary of well – meaning but moralistic young journalists — and their forever enabling union — lecturing me on best management practices when precious few had ever managed anyone, had any experience with budget constraints, had ever been tasked to compete in hiring and retaining diverse talent, had ever worked for bosses as demanding as my own, or had any appreciation for the difficult task of meeting ambitious growth goals that bestowed benefits on all of them.
I had never led a staff with the express goal of being liked. Too many newsroom managers did, in my estimation. I saw it as a serious flaw when our industry’s survival demanded tough, inevitably upsetting, decisions. I only cared to be respected for journalistic and commercial achievement in an environment that was humane, fair, professional, collegial, and civil. Not everyone’s wish could be fulfilled, even if the union seemed to regard that as my obligation. I had become hardened over many years to being attacked by powerful figures who received press scrutiny, but the invective leveled against me by colleagues — whose skill and bravery I admired and whose news organization I had busted my butt for eight years to turn around — was tougher to take. Nothing was more hurtful.
Nothing was more hurtful than criticism from peers and from blacks.
When Marty Baron decries Trump’s assault on democracy, he is not worried about the future of majority rule. He primarily fears the Trumpian assault on rule by experts such as himself.
* “Dear Washington Post Newsroom staff,” read the letter sent to me one week after Donald Trump took residence in the White House. “In the short (and very long) few days since the inauguration, it has become painfully clear that our democracy is on the line, and your work — your words, your integrity, your pursuit of truth and good storytelling — is essential to holding it up. We admire and deeply appreciate your effort and your ongoing commitment to keeping us informed. We hope in the doubtlessly long hours you are putting in, that you remember good journalism is an act of patriotism. Ignore the insecurities of the Critic in Chief, and remain brave. We need you.”
The letter began with one reader in Berkeley, California. She shared it with others, who signed. They passed it along to still others. After collecting eighty signatories — from Idaho, Oregon, California, and Nevada — they sent it to me. With Trump’s inauguration, letters like that came in a flood, cresting again a month later after he declared the nation’s news media “the enemy of the American people” notwithstanding his pledge to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Never before had I witnessed such an outpouring of support for journalists’ work. By then I had gloomily concluded that American citizens took a free and independent press for granted. They had no reason to believe it would be endangered and had scarcely thought about the consequences if it faced extinction. People were now awakening to the risks.* Many of our new readers clearly were looking for The Post to help secure democracy. A new motto for The Post seemed to promise just that. One month into Trump’s presidency, The Post affixed the words “Democracy Dies in Darkness” under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, at the top of its website, and on everything it produced.
As Bezos envisioned it, this was not a slogan but a “mission statement.” With its timing and grimly aggressive tone, Trump’s allies saw it as a shot at the president, which it was not.* Trump’s government was shaping up as the leakiest in memory. Trump would blame the “deep state,” but the reasons were more varied. Trump had assembled his administration haphazardly, enlisting many individuals who had no government experience and no history of previously collaborating with each other — “kind of a crowd of misfit toys,” as Josh Dawsey, a White House reporter for The Post, put it to me.
