Two media personalities recently made their way to Elmer’s Community Center in Ashfield for a discussion on the national media landscape, along with the continued attacks against journalists by the federal government.
Indira Lakshmanan, host of NPR’s Here & Now, moderated a discussion with former editor of The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, Marty Baron. The Oct. 15 event, organized by the New England First Amendment Coalition (NEFAC), focused on Baron’s career, issues that newsrooms are currently facing, and what the First Amendment really means (and what it doesn’t mean).
Baron said he can trace the environment of distrust surrounding journalists back to President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. Similarly, Lakshmanan mentioned that Trump called journalists the enemy of the people, with Baron once again saying his famous line: “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work.”
“This is not just about freedom of the press. … It’s about freedom of expression,” Baron said. “Aspiring authoritarians go after the press first because we are the ones who have the capacity and responsibility of holding these institutions and individuals accountable.”
Lakshmanan asked Baron why he thinks many business executives have “basically completely given in” to the Trump administration during his second term, versus his first term where many business owners (particularly Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos) butted heads with the president.
Baron described Bezos as “a really great owner” while he was at The Washington Post, but shared that Amazon was passed over for a major contract by the federal government, which Baron links back to the newspaper’s coverage of Trump.
He added that after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “everybody thought, ‘This guy is never coming back.'” Then, when Trump was the Republican nominee in 2024, Baron said Bezos saw a real threat to the financial future of Amazon. To make amends with then-candidate Trump, Bezos killed an endorsement that the staff of The Washington Post had written for Vice President Kamala Harris for the 2024 presidential election.
This led to several thousand people canceling their subscriptions, which Baron said didn’t hurt Bezos, but instead hurt the journalists working at the publication.
“You’re not hurting Jeff Bezos at all,” Baron said about people canceling Washington Post subscriptions. “Cancel your Amazon Prime subscription if you want to hurt Jeff Bezos.”
Outside of the endorsement, Baron said his former colleagues on the news side of The Washington Post tell him that Bezos hasn’t interfered with news reporting. He added that the job of journalists should be to give people the facts, regardless of what those facts say.
“If we’re holding people accountable, it should be everyone,” Baron said, adding that he would cover a Republican and Democrat in scandal the same way.
With public trust in major media corporations thoroughly eroded, Baron said journalists need to be more transparent than ever, and show the public the process that newsrooms use. This could include linking to certain documents received through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, showing the data that certain conclusions were drawn from or showing the entirety of a video instead of a selected sample.
“We know today that many folks don’t trust us, and so we have to lay out the evidence. … The message to the public should be, ‘Check out our work,'” Baron said. “You have the right, and we’re giving you the opportunity to check out our work.”
He said the news organizations that often garner the most trust are local news organizations. However, those local organizations are disappearing at an astonishing rate, leaving news deserts where one or no publications exist.
Where news deserts exist, “corruption does seem to flourish” as no one is there being the watchful eye on government officials, according to Baron. He said local outlets are providing real value to the communities they serve, and that if he had the model on how to keep local publications alive, “I’d be selling it.”
One of the bigger threats to journalism, Baron said, is the rise of artificial intelligence, specifically chatbots such as Claude, Google Gemini and ChatGPT, as these chatbots don’t always verify the information that they’re sharing. He said if he operated as a journalist in the same way chatbots operate, “You would suggest alternatively that I should be fired.”
Baron added that local news organizations need to have direct communication with their audience to build back that trust. While this seems like a gargantuan task, Baron said he is reminded of a quote from Bernard Lown, a Lithuanian-American cardiologist who gave an acceptance speech for a Nobel Prize on behalf of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1985.
“Only those who can see the invisible can do the impossible,” Baron said, quoting Lown.
