- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(upbeat music) - Coming up on "Perspectives," an interview with the former executive editor of The Washington Post, Marty Baron.

- I would say the single biggest crisis is the crisis of local journalism.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Perspectives."

I'm Rob Lorei.

Marty Baron led The Washington Post newsroom for eight years, beginning just as billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was buying the newspaper.

Over a journalism career that took him from Miami to New York, to Los Angeles, Boston, and eventually to DC, the newsrooms he led won a total of 18 Pulitzer Prizes, 10 of them at The Washington Post.

Liev Schreiber portrayed him in the film "Spotlight," that was the 2015 Oscar-winning movie, that depicted The Boston Globe's investigation into sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

Marty Baron is out with a new book called "Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post," and he joins us now.

Marty Baron, thanks for coming by.

- Thanks for having me.

- Good to see you.

- Good to see you.

- Since it's a presidential election year, the press has at times underestimated Donald Trump.

And I want to ask you about the ways the press did not catch Donald Trump, his popularity, in 2015, in the summer of 2015, shortly after he announced his run.

Why do you think reporters missed the mood of Republican voters back in 2015?

- Yeah, well, I think we actually started to miss it even before Trump declared his candidacy.

We didn't anticipate a candidate like Donald Trump.

We hadn't taken the measure of the level of grievance in this country.

People were coming from, they were in a lot of communities that were struggling, and they had a lot of grievances against the so-called elites.

You know, we weren't out in the country enough, I think, to take the measure of people's anger and frustration.

And then when Trump announced, I mean, I do think that we took the measure of how much support he had.

Because as soon as he announced, and he talked about Mexicans coming across the border and being rapists and all of that, he really surged about 35% support among the Republicans, so that we knew that he would be a strong candidate.

But we always anticipated that some of these statements of his would get him into trouble, and that he wouldn't necessarily last.

But the way that the public was looking at these statements was very different from the way that the press was looking at these statements.

So as I pointed out in the book, you know, we would focus on constitutional questions and legal questions.

And people were seeing it through an entirely different lens.

So thinking that he would do something about terrorism, or thinking he would do something about the border.

And they weren't obsessing about the legal particularities of these issues, the way that we in the press were.

- The Trump who ran for president was different than the Trump who was the developer and kind of like the guy that went to parties and nightclubs in New York in the '80s and '90s and built that reputation.

He loved the press.

He really tried to make inroads with newspaper reporters and magazine reporters.

At one point, somebody described it as seducing the press.

What changed?

Why did Trump turn against the press?

- Well, look, I mean, he cultivated the press when he was in New York as a developer and as a man about town and so-called womanizer, which was actually a reputation that he himself wanted for himself.

That's a totally different environment than running for president of the United States.

When you're running for president of the United States, you're supposed to be held to account.

The press is going to be much more aggressive in questioning you.

Whether you happen to be a Republican or you happen to be a Democrat, look, you're positioning yourself to hold the most powerful position in the world.

So the press was looking at him through a very different, from a very different perspective, whether he was qualified to hold the position, not whether he was just a great man about town and nightclubs and things like that, and an interesting character.

He was certainly an interesting character, but you had to look at him in greater depth.

What were his policies going to be?

What kind of president?

Did he have, in fact, the sort of the personality, the right personality for that kind of a job?

Did he have the experience for a job like that?

That was a level of questioning that he wasn't accustomed to, it wasn't what he necessarily expected, and it certainly wasn't what he liked.

He wanted people to be on his side all of the time, 100% of the time.

Not even 90% of the time, 100% of the time.

And if you weren't, then he viewed you as the opposition, as his enemy.

- So you used the term, at this point.

Some press were really upset at what was going on and would attack Trump and kind of offer their opinion.

You used this term at this point that we're not at war, we're at work.

- Well, look, I mean, on Trump's first full day in office, he went to the CIA headquarters.

And standing in front of a memorial for fallen CIA agents, what did he choose to talk about?

The media.

And he said to those CIA agents, "As you know, I'm at war with the media," seeming to suggest that the CIA agents should be enlisted in his war with the media.

A couple of weeks after that, I was asked for my reaction, and I said, "We are not at war with the administration.

We are at work."

So this is what I meant by that.

I think we need to think back to why we have a free and independent press in this country, and in doing that, we should look back to the First Amendment.

And James Madison was the principal author of the First Amendment.

And in writing that, he said that the press needed to, the purpose of the press was freely examining public characters and measures.

Free we can understand.

Examining means that we're not just stenographers.

We're journalists.

That means we need to look at who's responsible for these policies, who are they going to affect, who influenced them, whether they were powerful individuals or powerful institutions, going deeper than stenography.

And then public characters.

Those are the politicians, the government officials, the individuals and institutions that influence them.

And the measures.

Those are the policies.

That was the original assignment given to the press in this country.

It is the reason that we have a free and independent press in this country.

It was the reason behind the First Amendment.

So that is our work.

That is what we're supposed to do.

And it's necessary, by the way, for democracy.

There is no democracy without a free press.

- Let's talk about how you got involved in journalism.

You grew up in Tampa, and your parents had emigrated here from Israel.

Talk about why they emigrated from Israel.

- Well, yeah, they went to Paris actually initially.

So they left Israel in 1952.

My father and his family had left Germany in 1937.

So they went to Palestine, what was then British Mandate Palestine.

And then my father was in the Israeli Independence Army.

And then they went to Paris, were there for two years.

And then my father was, he met somebody who was from Florida.

And so they came to Florida in the summer of 1954.

I was born three months later here in Tampa.

My older brother was born in Paris.

It was my father's opportunity to come, and he took it.

And so he came, and he worked in the citrus industry, and he worked for an agricultural cooperative marketing organization called Seald Sweet and became head of exports, and had a lot to do with the export of Florida citrus to a lot of different countries, but particularly those in Europe.

- You went to school in Tampa.

You went to Gorrie Elementary.

Eventually went to Berkeley High School.

What was that like?

- Berkeley was a great educational institution.

I learned a lot there.

They were on Davis Island at the time, in that old converted hotel.

So the facilities were less than great, that's for sure.

But the individual teachers were really good.

- Those were interesting times.

We just emerged from the civil rights movement.

The assassinations had rocked the country of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King.

We were ending or about to end the Vietnam War.

I mean, there was a lot of news back then.

- There was.

And there was busing here in Tampa, also.

So it was a tense moment racially in this community.

And so, yeah, there was a lot going on.

I thought I was gonna get drafted to go to Vietnam, and was getting very close.

I graduated from high school in 1972.

And so as every year passed, I thought, "Well, this war's not gonna end by the time I'm draft age."

But just at that moment, they discontinued the drafting or enlisting people.

And so I didn't get drafted.

- What was your first job in journalism?

- My first paying job was as an intern at the Tampa Tribune.

I worked there for three summers, covering schools, covering cops, covering the courts, covering the city council, covering the county commission, believe it or not, well, business, and believe it or not, I even covered religion.

As I recall, the editor for religion at the Tampa Tribune was herself an atheist.

But she was so gracious with everybody who came in to talk to her.

It was really a marvel to watch her.

- Since 2004, about 2,100 local newspapers in the country have closed.

That's about 1/4 of all the papers that were being published just 20 years ago.

Another study is about how corruption increases without a local newspaper.

What's your take?

- It's the single biggest crisis we have in American journalism.

American journalism has many, many crises to deal with at the moment, but I would say the single biggest crisis is the crisis of local journalism, and that so many news outlets locally have disappeared.

Democracy really begins at the local level.

Watching your school board, watching your police department, watching your courts, watching the city council and the county commission, all of that.

And who does that?

Well, local journalists do that.

Without them, who's doing it?

Nobody, really.

Maybe gadflies here and there, that sort of thing.

People who have agendas that they're pushing.

But from an independent standpoint, nobody's doing it.

And not just politics, by the way.

The arts.

Things like the arts and all of that.

And without local newspapers, they don't get covered at all.

And that's a real crisis for community.

It actually undercuts the notion of community, the idea that we all belong together, and that we work together, and that we're living together, and we figure out how to live together.

And that we govern ourselves.

So it is a huge problem.

I'm not sure that anybody has settled on a sustainable model for local news organizations just yet.

There are some signs of hope, I think, and I'm encouraged by that.

I think I like to be an optimist.

I don't think we can actually afford pessimism in our field.

I don't know anybody who's ever succeeded by expecting they're going to fail.

So I choose to be an optimist.

I look and I see some news organizations around the country that seem to be doing okay.

My old newspaper, The Boston Globe.

Minneapolis seems to be doing okay.

San Francisco.

There are some nonprofits that are doing pretty well, and there are some that are emerging.

And so I think people are finally beginning to figure out that they can survive.

It's a little bit like, maybe it's not a perfect analogy, but, you know, many people said independent bookstores were all gonna go outta business.

But some independent bookstores figured out how to survive, and they changed their business model and the way that they work.

And that's a really good thing.

And they become more part of their community.

They serve their community, all of that.

So we need to figure that out.

I would say that's priority number one for our profession.

- What do you say to the public, who might think that they can't trust their local newspaper or TV station or radio, other media source?

What do you say to people?

- Well, first of all, trust in local media providers is a lot higher than it is for the national publications.

So when they do these surveys, they're really looking at national media, and there's a lot more distrust of national media than there is of local ones.

But trust varies, depending on your political point of view.

So people who are on the right, they have an enormous amount of trust in Fox News.

Enormous amount of trust.

But among Democrats, there are very low levels of trust in Fox News.

When you ask about, let's say, the New York Times or CNN, well, the Democrats have huge trust in those outlets, or very high levels of trust, but Republicans have very low levels of trust.

So we have a very polarized environment in terms of media consumption.

But overall, it's declined a lot.

I mean, so pretty much ever since Watergate.

It was actually at a high-water mark after Watergate.

You remember Nixon actually accused the press of it being engaged in political effort to destroy him with that investigation.

But it turned out that the work that The Washington Post and other news outlets had done was validated.

He ended up resigning.

And then trust in the media actually rose significantly after that because its work was validated.

Ever since then, there's been a real decline in overall trust.

And, you know, that's something that we clearly have to work on.

I think there are a variety of things that we need to do.

None of them is a guarantee, that's for sure.

But one thing I think we have to do is we have to cover the entirety of our communities and our country.

People of all ideologies, people who are struggling, people who let them see themselves actually fully and fairly reflected in our coverage.

I think that's very important for people to do.

And if they see that, they're more likely to believe us on other matters.

Perhaps other matters that are more hot-button issues.

The other thing that I think it's really important for us to do is to be more transparent about how we go about our work and what is the basis for this reporting that we're presenting to you.

So we have the tools to do that now with the internet.

So let's just show them what the basis is, because there is an enormous amount of work that goes into these stories, regardless of the type of media outlet that's involved.

And I think people should see exactly how that work is done.

And so I think, you know, in a way, it's like being a lawyer in court.

Show the evidence.

So we need to show our evidence, we need to show our work.

- At the beginning of the war between Israel and Gaza, a hospital was bombed.

Some of the reporters in the West, some of the media outlets in the West said, "Attributed to Israel."

Turns out it wasn't Israel.

How does that, do you think, affect the press's credibility in this country?

- Well, it didn't help, that's for sure.

So I think it's really hard, I mean, in Gaza to get information.

I mean, most American news organizations don't have correspondence in Gaza.

They have correspondence in Israel.

So you're relying on freelance individuals, freelance writers, freelance reporters in Gaza.

And some may be operating with relative independence, and some with not so much independence, given Hamas is the governing authority, which is a terrorist organization, is a governing authority in Gaza.

So you have to be super careful.

I think people at the time, or the people who ran those headlines at the time, felt, well, we've attributed this to the Palestinians.

That wasn't enough, given the amount of weight that was put on who actually had demolished that hospital, had bombed that hospital.

So they should have just said the hospital was destroyed, and then much later, somewhere in the story, said, well, the health ministry or Hamas, or whoever, said it was because of Israeli bombing, but the Israelis said otherwise, or have not yet issued a statement about it.

Because you didn't know.

So you have to always be conscious of what you don't know, and what is the source of information, and how reliable is that source of information.

- Yeah.

Along those lines, you know, there are media watchdog groups in Israel that say that The Washington Post is too deferential to Hamas.

And I wonder if you've seen those reports.

And what do you think?

- I haven't actually seen those reports, but there are people who say that The Washington Post is too deferential to Hamas.

There are people who say it's too deferential to the Israeli government.

Look, I've been responsible for a lot of coverage, and I've been accused of bias every which way.

I've been accused of being biased against...

I can't tell you how many people I've been accused of being biased against.

And I was in Miami during the whole Elian Gonzalez thing, and on the same day, on the same story, I was accused of being biased toward the Cuban Americans in Miami, or being biased against the Anglo population in Miami.

On the same story people would say I was biased this way or that way.

We face that all the time.

I think The Post and other major media organizations are trying to cover a very complicated story from all angles.

And there are many different angles to that story, and there are many different perspectives.

And I think it's important that they do that, and that they maintain their independence.

And it's such a complicated story with a deep history.

And a lot of the critics are people who have agendas.

And some of the criticisms are legitimate, and you should look at what they say, of course, and adjust course, if necessary.

But a lot of them are merely intended to just put pressure on media organizations to lean this way or that way, so.

- Younger reporters of The Washington Post, and elsewhere, want to increasingly express their opinion on issues.

Some have signed letters about what's going on in the Middle East right now.

What do you think about reporters who, not during their job, but in their off time, begin to take stands on controversial issues?

- Yeah, I'm adamantly opposed to that.

I mean, I believe that as we were talking before, that there's a role for advocates.

There's a role for a activists in a democracy.

That's not our role.

Our role is to maintain our independence.

Our role is to be observers, to communicate what we're observing and discovering to the public, and to do so in an objective and independent way.

- Do you feel like we're headed into a "Fahrenheit 451" situation where more and more people are relying on TV, the printed word has become less important to people.

And what do you think about TV news as a substitute for print news?

- So people tend to gravitate toward sources of so-called information and news that reaffirm their preexisting point of view.

And that's a temptation and a tendency that would be very, is very hard for any media outlet to combat.

But yes, I think people are relying a lot less on media organizations that have a legacy print heritage.

A lot of people are watching television.

And unfortunately, a lot of people are getting their news from social media and places like TikTok.

So in a matter of seconds, somehow they're supposed to understand complicated political and social and international issues.

And that's just impossible.

But that is a big influence in our society today.

Somebody who watches a, you know, a TikTok video, and it lasts a few, not even a minute, by the way, it's like seconds, 15 seconds, and they think they understand what's happening in the world, that's just really difficult.

- So during the Trump years, when he was president, conservatives were gunning for the media.

They established a fund to go after and investigate reporters.

One of the groups that tried to go after The Washington Post was Project Veritas, which is a conservative news outlet that edits heavily videos and tries to show liberals and others in a damaging light.

They targeted The Washington Post.

What happened?

- Well, there were many efforts on their part to target us and other media outlets, but perhaps the most notable was when we had done an investigation of Roy Moore, who was the Republican candidate for the Senate in Alabama.

And we discovered as part of our reporting that he had a particular affection for younger women, and according to the allegations, he actually had sexual contact with one young woman who was underage.

And so we reported that.

And so they then tried to engage in this sting operation.

They had some woman contact us, claiming that she had had an abortion at Roy Moore's behest.

We ended up meeting with the woman.

But we had very serious doubts, right, going in as to whether she was really legitimate.

And so we engaged in essentially a reverse sting operation.

We did video that encounter, and we found out who this woman really was.

We discovered that she really worked for Project Veritas, and that this was really an effort to deceive us, maybe to get us to say embarrassing things, to say that we were gonna bring down Roy Moore or something like that, which we didn't say that because that is never our intent.

But also to perhaps get us to publish this false story that she was peddling, which we did not do that either.

But what we did do is discover who she was and who was behind it, and it was Project Veritas.

As part of that investigation and our reverse sting, we actually ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize.

And I was very tempted, I have to say, to send the head of Project Veritas, a guy by the name of James O'Keefe, a thank-you note for helping us win a Pulitzer Prize.

I did not do that.

I restrained myself.

- Well, you were at The Boston Globe when you exposed the church scandal, the Catholic Church scandal, and the abusive behavior of many, many, many Catholic priests.

How did that affect the reporters and yourself?

Were you under pressure?

Did you feel that the Catholic Church was fighting back and pushing back at The Globe?

- Well, they were fighting back.

I mean, we had to go to court to get internal church documents.

We felt that that should be made public, and so we went to court in order to achieve that.

So the church actually even threatened to seek penalties against us merely for interviewing priests, merely for talking to people about these cases, given that they were covered by this confidentiality order.

So, you know, there weren't physical threats or anything like that.

I don't think the church would ever do anything like that.

And there weren't physical threats from people within the church, but certainly there was pressure on a legal front.

- Did anybody in the Catholic Church thank you for exposing this?

- Yes, many people have, as a matter of fact.

So certainly the survivors have thanked me many, many times, and it's incredibly gratifying.

I've also had people who are deep in the faith, who are devout Catholics, who have thanked me for the work that we did.

They thought it was incredibly important.

They were concerned that the very principles of the church had been betrayed.

And they were right.

They had been betrayed.

They, the most faithful parishioners, had been betrayed.

So they thanked me for bringing that to light.

And I've also had priests thank me.

And that's surprised me, because I've had priests come up and say, "Look, this has affected us in a very profound way.

Our reputations have been damaged.

People suspect us just by seeing our collar.

But it needed to be done.

So we thank you for that."

- How accurate was the movie "Spotlight" about that situation?

- It was pretty accurate for the overall arch of that investigation and how that unfolded, how that evolved.

It's not a documentary.

It's a movie, and you're compressing everything into two hours.

It was a little more than two hours.

But there's only so much you can do, and you also create some drama.

But in terms of how that investigation unfolded, on all the key points, it was accurate.

- How did you feel about Liev Schreiber playing you in the movie?

- He's taller than I am.

He's more fit than I am.

He's better looking than I am.

And so when people hear my name, they think of him, and I have no complaints.

I'd be an awful, grumpy person to have any complaints.

But I think he did a great job, and so I was very happy with that movie.

I thought it really demonstrated the importance of investigative journalism.

I thought it demonstrated how hard it is to do investigative journalism.

I thought it made clear to people in our profession the importance of listening to people who don't have power, because they often have very powerful things to say.

- Where do you think newspapers will be in 10 years?

Will they be around?

What will they look like?

- People have been predicting the disappearance of physical newspapers for a long period of time.

A lot of people who read physical newspapers are very loyal to that.

They just want a physical newspaper.

That's a diminishing portion of the population.

We live in a digital era.

Most people are getting their information digitally, and most frequently on digital devices.

So your phone.

And that is going to be the trend.

We will become ever more digital.

I don't can't tell you the date when physical newspapers will disappear, but they're going to disappear.

I would not be surprised if they disappeared within 10 years.

It's possible that, let's say, local newspapers might have a Sunday Edition or something like that that's more like a magazine, but nothing during the week.

There are already newspapers that have discontinued publication on certain days of the week.

So I think we're moving in that direction.

And look, I think what's really important is not whether you get your news on a piece of paper, or whether you get your news on a website, or on your phone, or on an app, or whatever it might be.

I think what's important is the quality of the information you're getting.

So that's what I think we in our profession should focus on, rather than whether it's delivered on a piece of paper or not.

- Marty Baron, thank you very much for coming by.

- Thank you very much.

- Thank you for watching.

This program is available to view at wedu.org/perspectives.

(upbeat music) (bright uplifting music)