Marty Baron
speaker
584 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 5 Feb
Marty Baron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I think that's true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC. So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that, does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires approval by the FCC.
Well, absolutely. Look, I mean, Trump during his campaign promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That's what he's doing right now.
You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms, law firms that have represented individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government, basically punish them in every conceivable way. way, and really he's seeking to destroy those law firms.
The same applies to universities, first with Columbia University, and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he's applying all of the, not just threats, but actually use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes. So that's what's happening. It's qualitatively different from what we've seen before.
And of course, the federal government has enormous power and Trump is exercising that power. Actually, not just exercising it, he's abusing it.
Well, I don't know if it was more robust. Certainly in the case of The Washington Post, they resisted, and I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it's doing a great job, admirable job, of investigating what's happening in this administration.
And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, and then
Of course, donating to the inauguration, preparing at the inauguration, Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money, and then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice. I think what's different now is, well, you don't have a Congress that's doing its job.
I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up. would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world.
And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Congress, a Republican Party, that is completely servile.
Look, in the past, I mean, I think sometimes we romanticize what the media was like. Keep in mind, I mean, we used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government. and abuse their power.
I mean, the Chandler family in Los Angeles, you know, remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to LA to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now a lot of media, big institutional media is owned by, first of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests.
And you have also these parent companies which have other substantial commercial interests, and they're highly dependent on the federal government. And the federal government has probably more power today than it had back in the previous years, previous decades.
Well, I don't disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of particularly the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation.
I think that what that has done, I don't know that it has weakened. Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce social media guidelines, for example. And then also in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership.
But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That's where I think it's done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that's a perilous place to be.
I think that's true. I think that we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have as people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn't go to all the same sorts of schools. I certainly didn't, by the way. I did not go to an Ivy League school and I grew up in Florida and not in the Washington area.
And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of the Washington Post, which was a surprise to me. So I've always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble. And I think it is. And I think, look, we did work when I was at the Post, we did work to increase the diversity and respects other than demographic. And that was we tried to hire more military veterans.
We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years, and yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country and particularly evangelicalism in this country.
And to try to get more people from working class backgrounds as well. We need to do more of that. There's no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don't understand the struggles and lives of ordinary people in the middle of the country. And we need to work harder at that. There's no question about that.
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