The former executive editor of the Washington Post on what worries him about America’s future — and why defeatism is not an option.
Is the American press broken?
I’ve been asking some variation of this question for the last four years and my answer, more often than not, is yes. The Trump era exposed some core pathologies in American journalism, and it’s not just the commercial incentives driving coverage (that’s been a problem for a long time). It’s also the reality of the internet and social media and all the ways they have transformed how we consume — and therefore practice — politics.
So I decided to talk to Marty Baron, who recently retired from the Washington Post after serving as executive editor since 2013. Baron came to the Post after a long and storied career in the business. Most famously, he oversaw the Boston Globe’s reporting on the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church (which was later turned into the Oscar-winning film Spotlight). And he was at the helm of the Post as it transitioned into the digital era.
Now that he’s stepped away and had some time to reflect, not just on what he did at the Post but also on our profession more generally, I wanted to discuss what has gone wrong, and why I think the problems we’re facing might be deeper than he wants to believe.
You can hear our entire conversation (as always, there’s much more) in this week’s episode of Vox Conversations. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, follows.
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Sean Illing
In the world of journalism and academia, there are more or less two camps over the last four years. There are those who think American democracy is flawed but stable, and ultimately resilient. Then there are those who say, “This is a fire alarm.” Where are you on that spectrum at the moment, Marty?
Marty Baron
I guess I am somewhere in between. I think there are enormous concerns right now about the future of our democracy. I think it’s shown itself to be more fragile and more vulnerable than we have ever imagined. On the other hand, I’d like to keep in mind that our democracy has been tested in ways that were more grave than what we’ve seen over the last four or five years. We had a civil war in this country. I maintain confidence that we’ll get through this, but I think that we’re encountering some severe threats to democracy today. Particularly the challenge to truth, the questioning of objective reality.
Sean Illing
Trump is sort of the elephant in the room there, so let’s just start right there. You said recently that you were proud of how you covered the Trump administration. I’m curious, what are you especially proud of?
Marty Baron
Well, look, I think part of the job of a news organization like the Post is to hold government to account. Particularly if they’re not telling the truth. There were a lot of falsehoods, a lot of lies. A lot of misinformation and disinformation over the course of the previous administration. I think some of that is true of any administration, but it was taken to a degree that we had never seen before in this country. I am proud of how we kept faith with the truth, notwithstanding the attacks that we came under.
Sean Illing
You also said that “We’re not at war” — we being the media, or the Washington Post — “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.” I’m curious about what you meant there as well. Obviously there are a lot of Trump voters who disagree with that.
Marty Baron
Well, it’s not just Trump voters that seem to disagree with that. But I don’t think that I am deluding myself. The Trump administration wanted us to be seen as the opposition party. I think we have to be careful not to become the opposition party. Our job is to report the facts, put them in proper context, tell people what’s going on in an unflinching and honest and honorable way. That is not engaging in war, that is just doing our work. We do that work regardless of the administration.
Sean Illing
A lot of us in this business did not want to accept that adversarial role, but I’m not sure we had a choice. We were thrust into that by virtue of doing the job, which is to say the truth as best we see it. We were going to be an oppositional force to someone like Trump, who was invested in lies. Is that the wrong way to see it?
Marty Baron
People have talked about the adversarial relationship between the press and government and politicians for a long time. I would say that we found ourselves in an adversarial relationship perhaps more frequently with the Trump administration.
Sean Illing
You were just saying a minute ago that journalists kind of held the line and stood firm against this assault on objective fact, on reality, really. I know what you mean, but I’m curious if you think the work that you did, the work that any of us did, really mattered in the way we wanted it to matter.
Marty Baron
I do think it mattered, first of all. Because the best work was well done and was truthful, and kept faith with the facts, with objective reality. Whether people were willing to accept that or not is another matter. There’s a lot of distrust in the press and mainstream media. I think it’s a huge challenge for society as a whole, the fact that people are unwilling to accept basic facts. But I think our work mattered. I also think that we need to keep the long term in mind.
I look back at Watergate, and the press was accused of a lot of the same things that it’s been accused of over the last four or five years. But it turned out that the work of the press was validated. That took some time. I think we can’t be impatient. The work that we’ve done will be validated. By the way, a lot of it already has been.
Sean Illing
I’ll just put my cards on the table here and let you reflect however you want, because you’re probably in a better position than I am to reflect on these things. I have felt personally like the work I tried to do didn’t really matter all that much. And the work that a lot of us tried to do really didn’t matter all that much. Because for me, a journalistic project committed to the defense of truth is only successful, or maybe meaningful is the right word there, if it creates a world in which lying is costly. In which the tendency of powerful people to lie is at least checked. If that’s the measure, I feel like I failed and a lot of us failed.
Marty Baron
If that’s how we feel, then we should just all give it up, and I don’t believe in giving up. We live in a period, we live in a time, where people expect things with results. I think that creates unreasonable expectations on our part. I’m willing to be more patient. Can it be frustrating? Sure, but I don’t think we should be defeatist and I don’t think you should be defeatist.
Sean Illing
I was thinking about Glenn Kessler, the fact-checker for the Washington Post, who famously documented the 20,000 lies that Trump had told over the course of his presidency and campaign. Obviously all that fact-checking wasn’t a deterrent. Were we not just sort of banging our heads against the wall here?
Marty Baron
Well, I would say it takes time. I mean, go back and look at the McCarthy hearings. Joe McCarthy was able to get away with a lot for a long period of time, but it didn’t last forever.
Sean Illing
Something I’m kind of inching my way towards here is that we’re reached the end of what some people would call the “gatekeeping age,” and I’m not sure we really understand the implications of this.
Before the internet, before social media, most people got their news from a handful of papers or TV networks, Walter Cronkite or whatever. These institutions function like referees. They call out the lies. They had the ability to control or manage the flow of information; in that way, impose borders on the public conversation, on the discourse.
Today, gatekeepers still matter. But there’s so much more competition for clicks and audiences. That has altered the incentive for what’s newsworthy in the first place. The consequence of that is we’re in this kind of epistemological wilderness.
Marty Baron
Not just media outlets, but any individual can essentially become a media outlet, and many do. They spread all sorts of falsehoods and conspiracy theories. At the same time, there are individuals who have been given a greater voice who are very useful sources of quality information. Those are voices that may not have been heard in the past. There are communities that are being heard in a way that they haven’t been in the past.
Sean Illing
Do you feel like the benefits of this addition of new voices, which are obvious enough, outweigh the costs?
Marty Baron
I’m not sure I’ve settled that in my own mind. At the end of the day, there’s nothing I can do about it. What I think is not going to change that. The question is, how do reliable sources of information persuade people that they’re presenting objective reality and facts.
Sean Illing
Do you think we’re living in a post-truth era?
Marty Baron
I haven’t thought that much about the term. I’m not a particular fan of it because I don’t think there is such a thing as post-truth. To say we live in a post-truth world suggests that there is no such thing as truth and that everything is malleable, that it’s all just a matter of opinion, or it’s a matter of who holds power, or who has the biggest megaphone or what have you.
Sean Illing
I think I’ve come to hate that term for different reasons. For me at least, we can’t be post-truth because we never really lived in truth in the way people suppose we did. What we had, in my opinion, was a liberal order, in which media gatekeepers like the Post dictated what passed as truth, or at least imposed limits on the number of claims to truth. That order has unraveled. Even if it still existed, we have this other, related problem, which is the collapse of public trust in elite institutions.
That collapse of faith and authority is incredibly important and not terribly understood. Truth ultimately is a function of authority. We all believe all sorts of things to be true, not because we’ve tested it in a lab or did the work, but because authorities we trust said it was true. If there are no recognized authorities, we’ve kind of lost truth.
Marty Baron
I understand your point, but I do think there’s such a thing as truth. The media has not always been successful, but it’s been successful quite a bit. If you go back and you look at, let’s say, the coverage of the Vietnam War, ultimately the press was showing what a disaster it really was. Even though it was being denied, it turned out that was the truth.
Sean Illing
Just to clarify, I don’t contest that there is a truth. I’m not a relativist. I would just question a lot of people’s romantic understanding of the role of truth in governing public life in the before times.
Marty Baron
Sure. There are misses in history. There are misses in our current affairs. Certainly as news organizations, we have many failings of our own and we can all point to them.
Sean Illing
Do you think our liberal democracy can continue to function in an information climate like the one we have, which presumably is not going away anytime soon?
Marty Baron
I think it’s going to be really difficult. It is already really difficult because in order to have democracy, I think we do have to agree on a common set of facts, basic facts. We can’t seem to do that. I mean, we can argue over the policies. We should argue. We should argue over what the problems are. We should argue over how to solve those problems. But fundamentally, we have to agree on some basic facts. We seem incapable of doing that today.
Sean Illing
I saw a Gallup poll that’s maybe a year or two old. Maybe there’s newer data, but the poll showed that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press. Why do you think people are trusting major media outlets less and less?
Marty Baron
I don’t think the press stands alone in that regard. I think the greater threat to society is just a lack of trust in institutions. How do we get that back?
With regard to the press specifically, a lot of it has to do with the rise of the internet. People can now turn to something that reinforces their preexisting view. They live in their own echo chamber and they want that. The internet allows that. It facilitates that. It even rewards that commercially.
Sean Illing
Do you think it’s even possible to cover bullshit without amplifying or normalizing it?
Marty Baron
I’m not sure there’s a lot of great research on that subject, frankly, or at least I’m not familiar with it. I don’t know, are we just supposed to ignore it? Does that create its own problems? I mean, it’s really hard. I don’t know that we have good answers for how to deal with that. I don’t.
Sean Illing
What was that evaluation process like for you when you were at the Post? You have tons of really smart, talented reporters doing this work. Everyone there in the room was smart enough to understand what was happening. What was the process like, sifting through that and trying to make those decisions about what to report?
Marty Baron
These decisions are not made by any one person. The Post does hundreds of stories every single day. At the beginning I think we paid more attention to what Trump was saying on his Twitter account than we did toward the end. But his Twitter account also was a real window into the way that the president was thinking. It’s difficult to decide which ones deserve your attention and which ones don’t, because those tweets were often a prelude to actual policies.
Sean Illing
There is some research showing that fact-checking does tend to increase the accuracy of beliefs. But the point of zone flooding is to ensure that there is an overabundance of news so that the importance of any individual story is diminished. If you’re a bullshit artist like Trump, you don’t have to disprove anything. You just have to keep the press locked in this eternal game of whack-a-mole. Trump is gone, but it’s easy to imagine this blueprint being copied, right?
Marty Baron
Yeah. On the bigger issue you were talking about, whether the press can expose lies, let me just use one example. Take a look at the Me Too stories that were pursued by the press. In many instances, it had an impact. The whole world is not Donald Trump. The coverage of Donald Trump is not the entire coverage of the press. I look back on my own career and the work we did at the Boston Globe in exposing the coverup of sexual abuse among clergy in the Catholic Church. It continues to have an impact, and not just an impact on the church, but an impact on how many institutions are dealing with allegations of sexual abuse. I think it’s just way too easy to be too dismissive of the capacity of the press to highlight the truth.
Sean Illing
There is a paradox here though, right? I think a lot of people assume that more information is always a good thing. It’s true, there’s a lot of bullshit percolating out there right now. But also, the access to facts has never been easier. But more information hasn’t produced a more informed citizenry. Or a more enlightened form of civic engagement. It’s led to more noise and more partisanship, and more reactionary posturing.
Marty Baron
It is a paradox. I can’t make sense of it other than people are simply unwilling to accept facts because they don’t conform to their preexisting views. Then they are going to be upset at something that challenges their preexisting views. That’s just human nature. It’s just that the impact of that, the ramifications of that today with the internet, are far greater than they ever have been.
Sean Illing
On that front, do you think the internet has changed us, changed human nature, changed the way people think about the world and how they process the world? Or do you think it just made us more of what we always were?
Marty Baron
I honestly don’t know. Probably a bit of both. I think the internet has revealed some aspects of us that we had not focused on or had not realized before. At the same time, it’s created patterns of behavior that were certainly facilitated and fomented patterns of behavior that wouldn’t have existed prior to the internet.
Sean Illing
I suspect that the internet has changed the way human beings live and think and operate in the world. We’re in this new era that really doesn’t even have a name yet, but it is changing us and the world around us so quickly that none of us can really get around it.
I think the press has been in an impossible position trying to keep pace with this technological change. I really do not think anyone has an answer. The Post, the New York Times, many other places have done and continue to do remarkable work. It just feels like no matter how remarkable or important it is, 48 hours later, it’s forgotten. It’s just dead and we’re on to the next scandal, or the next thing, or the next news cycle. That feels not just disorienting, but politically cataclysmic.
Marty Baron
I think the speed at which news needs to be delivered today, in a way, it’s too fast. I mean, people want information instantaneously, and so we provide them information instantaneously, but it’s information without context. The context is going to have to come along later if it ever comes along at all, so that’s one problem.
Sean Illing
My sense has been for a very long time that we just need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics in a digital age. I think we need a new definition of news. Do you feel that way? Do you think we need to redefine news?
Marty Baron
No, I actually don’t. I’m sorry.
Sean Illing
Come on, Marty. Really?
Marty Baron
We need a paradigm shift to redefine what constitutes news? What do you mean by that exactly?
Sean Illing
I mean a shift in what we deem worth covering and what we deem not worth covering. I mean maybe the press needs a better self-defense system against people flooding the zone with shit.
Marty Baron
Look, we’ve learned along the way. We’ve come to realize our flaws over a period of time. Sometimes it takes too long. The journalism of today is not the journalism that existed 50 years ago. It’s very different. It has evolved. It will evolve even further. Whether we will all be in agreement whether its evolution is beneficial or not is another question. Yeah, we will shift in terms of what we believe is newsworthy. We will shift in terms of how we write about things. That has always been part of the case.
The internet has also changed things because we now have all sorts of tools at our disposal that we never had before. We’ll see changes. I don’t know if we’ll agree on whether those changes are a good thing or a bad thing. We probably won’t agree, but it’s going to change.
Author: Sean Illing
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