On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a warning about how Donald Trump’s second term has brought a more systematic and punishing assault on American media, through regulatory pressure, retaliatory lawsuits, and corporate intimidation. Then David is joined by the legendary newspaper editor Marty Baron to discuss how today’s media institutions are struggling to stand up to power. Baron reflects on his tenure at The Washington Post, the new pressures facing owners such as Jeff Bezos, and how Trump has turned retribution into official policy. They also examine how internal newsroom culture, social media, and a loss of connection to working-class America have weakened public trust in journalism. David closes the episode by reflecting on the recent media overhyping of President Joe Biden’s age issues. Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at theAtlantic.com/listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What warning does David Frum give about Trump?
Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at the Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos.
Marty Baron is one of the most important media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully, both in person and in his memoir, Collision of Power, about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press. I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden.
But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term. President Trump began his campaign and his
spent much of his first term attacking the media, calling the media, free media, enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining and generally persecuting and often inciting dangerous threats against individual members of the press.
If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked both digitally and often in person. in ways unlike anything ever seen before. Death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic and misogynistic, racist, the worst kind of garbage. I even got a little splash of it myself.
I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree. But it was nasty. But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term.
Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing, about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while... Their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past.
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Chapter 2: How has Trump pressured the media during his presidency?
And while the pressures on them were real, it did not, in the end, detract from getting the job done for the most part in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media.
He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers won't happen unless the mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way, unless those institutions change the way that the reporting arms behave themselves.
And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements to Trump. Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced.
ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself, because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit. Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which you said, so what?
You don't like our editing? You have no claim on that. That gives you no right of due action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. Other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you. That's not lawsuit material.
The Atlantic, too, after our Signal story, a story that reported that our editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen, in addition to the concerns for accuracy that, of course, we had, we knew that there was a chance that the federal government, under President Trump, would pursue some sort of baseless legal retaliatory action against us.
And we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear. So there are real things to worry about. And they're not just specific to Trump. We've seen other people in American politics do the same.
When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida, or he is governor of Florida, when he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues, threatening the Disney Corporation for exercising its free speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation.
By stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had and punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech because Disney was unhappy that DeSantis administration was penalizing what they saw as the free expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn't do him any good.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do media institutions face today?
fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day. New media does not see that as its mission, but the old media do, but because they've been losing audience share, because they're less wealthy than they used to be, they are subject to various kinds of pressure, and those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us.
Meanwhile, the whole way, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today. alongside Facebook and other social media platforms.
These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not closely involved with the political process and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and are therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians.
We have a new kind of landscape, and it's one that we all have to navigate with great care, and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens. The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him.
Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, one of the rules of authoritarianism is the protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent.
The goal and end state of all of these evolutions, of these pressures, of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world create an America in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors. Instead of knowledge informing our politics, our politics will inform our knowledge.
There's no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully, to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI fed distortion that is surely on its way.
It's going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change.
And we're all going to have to step up and be the best kind of citizens, the best informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology. And now, my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of the Washington Post. But first, a quick break.
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Chapter 4: Why are media owners afraid of Trump?
The owner has not interfered in the news coverage as far as I know. And I think all of us would know because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered. So, yes, I think I would keep my job.
It's a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first term Trump tried to pressure the Washington Post new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump's unhappiness with the Washington Post coverage.
Amazon and the Post don't have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both, or the largest shareholder in Amazon and the sole owner of the Post. Second term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on the Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful. And not just with the Post, but with many others.
I described in my opening monologue some of the other cases, CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of?
Well, I think what they're afraid of is they're afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he's going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he's afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts, particularly in the area of cloud computing services with the federal government.
And he has a private commercial space venture called Blue Origin, which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete really with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket successfully into orbit, but it's highly dependent on contracts with the federal government.
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.
You've had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions. And I'm sure along the way, you have observed close up and directly how angry mayors, governors, and presidents, and members of Congress can get at media coverage. And there's always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger.
This, what is happening since the election in 2024, seems qualitatively different from anything that I've observed. Is that your observation?
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Chapter 5: What is the difference between Trump’s first and second term regarding media?
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.
Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way as compared to what they were half a century ago? Good question.
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.
One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from the New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting.
They claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence, which was on its face and certainly by the result of false claim. But Bennett was forced out. And other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies. You experienced many at the Washington Post. And
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Chapter 6: How has the media landscape changed since the Watergate scandal?
And this was brought home when my wife's stepfather father created a newspaper in Toronto, which was created in the early 1970s, the Toronto Sun, which was like this. And you saw it when you went to the athletic events or the picnics, the softball games, that the reporters might have had a slightly more educated background, but most people who were there were blue collar people.
And when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together, that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the The culture of the city. And it was a manufacturing enterprise. Well, this technology has changed that. Newspapers don't manufacture anymore. They deliver a non-physical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated.
The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff. And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve.
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.
A point I made in my first Trump book about this as a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it's killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to the New York Times search engine and typed in for the year from January 1st of 2016 to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender. And I don't want to derogate from the importance of any issue.
But if I remember right, there were like 80 or 100 times more stories about transgender issues in the New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year. But it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and
In 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country's most elite newspapers. And one of Trump's secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency.
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Chapter 7: What role does diversity play in today’s newsrooms?
They don't turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane is going to hit and what they ought to be doing or where the tornado is or anything like that or where the flooding is going to be. They turn typically to traditional media because look, there's a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they're going to get accurate information.
And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience, and what is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts?
Maybe the good news and the bad news are the same, which is we're all We all have many more opportunities, but we're all going to have to work a lot harder to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it's never been easier if you have some medical symptom, never been easier to find out for yourself. what that probably is.
It's also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need. And so we have seen the decline in vaccination. It's still more than 90% of American children are properly vaccinated. So nine out of 10 people are doing the right thing. But five or eight out of 100,
are doing the wrong thing, and they pose risks not only to their own children, but to everybody's children.
Yeah, and I think the consumers of information have to work harder, but also those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work, to show people why they should believe us, not just to tell them what's happening, but to show them the work that we've done, the evidence that we're relying upon, be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we're covering the entirety of our communities and our society.
in our country and do a better job of that.
Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your candid memoir.
Bye-bye.
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