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
Well, I agree with you on that. I think, look, this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected. And I always say it wasn't the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that, years prior to that, is that we didn't understand the country well enough. We just did not understand people's
struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there's no question that, look, everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody's life experiences, by definition, narrow. It's just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people.
And we need more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that.
That's a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country. And I think that's something that definitely needs to be corrected and corrected quickly. It's caused for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us in the media.
And we need to make sure that that doesn't continue.
Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We've seen a radical change in the kind of media there is and a radical change in the way that media is consumed. And a lot of the new media is communicating with a level of authenticity or at least perceived authenticity that institutional media has been unable to deliver.
We in traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process, all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is. At the same time, we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that A lot of the new media are.
And because we don't do that, because we don't communicate authenticity, we're not getting credit for the authority that we have. And people who do communicate authentically or perceived authentically, a lot of the new media, they're being given credit for authority that frequently they don't deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that.
But a lot of them don't deserve the authority. And look, this is a huge challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, of course, to reach more people, but it's a huge challenge to traditional news institutions. And that's one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change.
Yeah, look, there are an enormous number of bad actors. I mean, by using the word authenticity, I don't suggest that many of them aren't bad actors. There are good actors, too. There are people who are doing really good work.
I think there's a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or at least potentially a more effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well.
So I don't want to discredit everybody who's in new media because they don't deserve to be discredited because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors and spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days.
is that it allows for that because it's a highly fragmented market and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain. And that's exactly what's happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by
people in that new media field by a lot of our politicians today, including, you know, Trump and Musk and, you know, whoever. And the reality is that we remain irrelevant. There is a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant. That would be insane.
And by the way, when Elon Musk stepped out of his, just recently stepped away from the White House, Who did he give interviews to, amazingly? Traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along.
Yeah, it's media. I mean, I think it is media. Media writ large? Absolutely. People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what's happening, let's say, in the Middle East based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok.
Now, that is appalling, of course, anytime you're dealing with a complex environment. subject like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it. You don't want to think that you've absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there's no question that's media. That is how people are receiving their information, like it or not.
Well, look, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us is that we can't agree on a common set of facts. We can't even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we've used in the past, education, experience, expertise, and actual evidence have all been discredited and not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated.
I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking, does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have experience in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this?
Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information and determine whether in the past you've relied on them. I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there's a natural disaster, guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media.
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