My Amazon Review of Martin Baron's "Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post"

 Democracy Dies in Darkness

 

I met Marty Baron in the early 1980’s when I was working as an economist at the UCLA Business Forecasting Project, and he was a reporter/editor at the Los Angeles Times. Who knew he would go on to lead the Miami Herald, the Boston Globe and then become the executive editor of the storied Washington Post. Although he was just starting out, he was a great journalist then and he became greater as the years passed.

 

In this book Baron puts us inside the Washington Post newsroom as it was hemorrhaging cash when he started there in 2013 and was then rescued by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who infused the cash needed to restore the paper back to its greatness. Just to note I have always been a fan of the Washington Post and much preferred it to the hoity toity New York Times. Through Baron’s eyes we se how the Post put together the stories involving the Snowden documents, the Steele Dossier, and its ongoing struggles with the Trump administration. Baron was clear from the start when he stated “We are not at war with the administration. We are at work.”

 

This is important because Baron had to face off with coteries of self-centered young journalists who thought that they were the story and that their opinions should be spayed across the news pages. To me if anything, Baron made a mistake in hiring most of them and the Post as well as other news organizations should look for viewpoint diversity as opposed to racial, gender and sexual orientation diversity. My advice would be to stay away from the Ivy’s; Baron is a case and point; he went to Lehigh.

 

Bezos comes across as a real mensch. Aside from putting up the big bucks needed to grow the newsroom, Bezos became personally involved in the freeing of journalist Jason Rezaian and his wife Yeganeh from Iranian prisons. So much so that when Rezaian arrived in Switzerland Bezos was there with his private plane to ferry them back to the United States. Similarly, Bezos was at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul to protest the murdering of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Throughout it all, Bezos, for the most part, backed Baron and stayed away from making editorial judgements.

 

As someone who in his misspent youth was involved in editing and publishing an underground newspaper, I found Baron’s book fascinating. The reader gets the smell of the Washington Post’s newsroom, a place I visited many years ago before the move to its new digs.

For the full amazon URL see: Democracy Dies in Darkness (amazon.com)