5 revelations from Baron’s book on Trump, Bezos, and the media
Marty Baron’s book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” should come with a trigger warning. Especially for many in the media, the Trump presidency was painful to live through, and revisiting it from Baron’s vantage is at times overwhelming.
The former editor of the Post (and before that The Boston Globe) covers a lot of ground in 500-plus pages, providing an up-close account of what it’s like to deal with a president so contemptuous of the press he refers to journalists as the “lowest form of humanity.”
Baron took over at the Post in January 2013, when the paper famous for exposing the Watergate coverup was, like most metro dailies, struggling to survive amid declining circulation and ad revenue. Fortunately for Baron, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper eight months later and immediately invested in the newsroom.
The relationship between Baron and Bezos is among the most intriguing parts of the book, but there’s a lot in “Collision of Power,” which comes out Oct. 3. Here are a few other headlines:
The worst year in Baron’s career was 2009 at The Boston Globe
The financial issues facing the Post when Baron arrived in D.C. in 2013 were familiar. In Boston, he writes, “I had to slash the number of Globe journalists by 40 percent. Bureaus in Berlin, Bogotá, and Jerusalem were closed, ending a proud legacy of foreign coverage since the 1970s.” By 2009, the Globe’s owner, The New York Times Company, was threatening to shut the paper down unless unions agreed to massive sacrifices in compensation. “The environment in our office on Boston’s Morrissey Boulevard had become poisonous. No year to date in my professional life had been worse. A newspaper, founded in 1872 and with a glorious history, might close on my watch. What a legacy that would be.”
Baron is not a big 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,” he writes, but he viewed them as resistant to change. “I had seen the newspaper guild stubbornly resist needed workplace transformation when journalism’s success — survival, really — urgently depended on it.” In addition, he had “diminishing tolerance for their belligerent portrayal of managers as malefactors, willful ignorance of what’s required to run a sustainable business, selfrighteous moralizing, and reflexive opposition to enforcing customary standards for employee behavior.”
Jeff Bezos defied expectations
Baron was initially concerned that Bezos might seek to interfere with the Post’s coverage of Amazon. “I expected to unearth some agenda that Bezos had been unwilling to own up to,” he writes. “A man of his riches and power deserves to be doubted. But everything I’ve heard and seen tells me that Bezos honestly believes in an essential role for journalism in a democracy, even if for good reason he has become the searing target of it. … I got the sense that Bezos relished the challenge of turning around The Post. Business, as far as I can tell, is his favorite sport.”
The Post’s Iran correspondent was imprisoned for 544 days
It’s a good bet that many readers of “Collision of Power” don’t know that Jason Rezaian was held by the Iranian government — on a phony charge that he worked for the CIA — for 544 days, spending much of that time in a prison notorious for its abuse of prisoners. Baron writes at length about the ordeal and the relief he and others at the Post felt when Rezaian was finally freed. In the days after, Baron and Bezos met with Rezaian at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Bezos, Baron writes, shared a takeout schnitzel and a beer with the reporter at the medical center before offering to fly Rezaian and his wife anywhere they wanted to go — all expenses paid. Their choice? Key
West. When Rezaian explained that he and his wife had no other clothes, Bezos’s associate traveling with the couple said he’d been instructed to buy them anything they wanted. “I asked what the limits of that were,” Rezaian told Baron, “and he said, ‘We’re probably not going car shopping, but anything else is fair game.’”
A dinner with Trump could have been scripted for Hollywood
Baron opens the book with a scene worthy of a Hollywood thriller: A black SUV with tinted windows rolls through the White House gates. Baron, Bezos, Post publisher Fred Ryan, and editorial page editor Fred Hiatt are dining tonight with a president who seemingly harbors only disdain for members of the media, calling them “scum” and “garbage.” Sounds like fun, right? “This was not a dinner I was looking forward to,” Baron writes with a certain understatement. As the group is about to sit down to dinner — cheese soufflé, pan-roasted Dover sole, chocolate cream tart — Trump aide Hope Hicks enters and hands the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, her phone. “Very Shakespearean,” she whispers to Kushner. “Dining with your enemies.”