Former leaders of America’s top newsrooms dissect Trump victory, look ahead at what’s in store for press

By Ruth Johnson >>

The press failed to understand the voters who are returning Donald Trump to the White House, former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said.

As in 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president, “we didn’t understand the country well enough,” Baron said during a recent conversation with former New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. “They didn’t understand that he would win in the voting segments that he won to the degree that he did among Black Americans, among Latinos, among even women, among, you name it.”

Trump won a larger share of Black and Latino male voters than he did in 2020 when he lost to President Joe Biden; his numbers decreased slightly among Black and Latina women. White votes stayed about the same, with over half their votes going to Trump both election cycles. His gains were primarily among men under age 45, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 120,000 voters.

“I don’t think we detected that level of desire for change,” Baron said, adding that the press needs to work harder to understand the country. “I don’t care whether we go to a diner or wherever we go. We have to get out into the country.”

Baquet echoed the need for more reporting around the country, but he said newsrooms are getting noticeably smaller. “I visit newsrooms now that had 500 reporters, and now they have 10, 20 reporters,” he said. 

Baron said it’s a trust problem.

“Most Americans don’t even come into contact with a journalist anymore,” he said. “I think that we need to send people around the country more. Not treat people with contempt or condescension. Our job is to explain different parts of the country to each other.  We need to support the growth of local journalism.”

There has been a loss of over 3,200 local newspapers since 2005, according to Northwestern University’’s State of Local News Report.

Baquet also identified the diminishing role journalism plays in lighthearted topics like weather reporting and product review as a negative impact on trust in the press. “When I started in journalism we did about 20 things and 18 were non controversial. Now, all the 18 that weren’t controversial are gone. You used to go to a paper to know about using an umbrella, or about buying a video game,” he said. “The innocent things have gone, all that’s left is the things that piss people off.”

In a wide-ranging conversation between the two former newsroom leaders on Nov. 13, Baron and Baquet, who is now the editor of the New York Times’ Local Investigative Fellowships, warned that Trump’s attacks on the press are likely to accelerate once he becomes president again.

Trump “will try every tool that he has, and there’s a lot of tools in the toolbox,” said Martin Baron who retired as top editor of the Post in 2021.

Trump, who won a decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris after a contentious campaign, has long shown disdain for many modern media outlets, critiquing publications any chance he can.

Baron said he is “quite sure” that Trump will go after the press across multiple fronts, one being national security leak claims. “He’s salivating to do that. He’s talked at rallies about wanting to put journalists in prison for that,” he said.

Baron and Baquet produced a list of items they believe Trump will hit once reentering the White House:

• Rescind licenses of network affiliates 
• Classify more documents 
• Deny people access to the interviews and documents that once were available 
• Regularly bring libel and defamation suits for the purpose of harassment and financial strain
• Demonize the press

“I don’t think you can overstate how much his relentless attacking of the traditional press, the Post, The Times and others” hurts, Baquet said. “It not only hurts our credibility, it calls into question our deepest reported stories, that we can prove.”

The term ‘fake news’ has soared in popularity since Trump began touting it when he entered the political arena back in 2016. “We can’t agree on a common set of facts… It’s worse than that, we can’t even agree on what a fact is,” Baron said, adding the rise in critique of experts and traditional sources. “That’s the goal, to have the public believe that you can never tell what’s true or false.”

TV “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl recalled Trump telling her why he attacked the press so consistently. “‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

Baron and Baquet talked about media ownership and whether journalism can still have a big impact.

When The Washington Post announced Oct. 25, 11 days before the election, that the paper would no longer publish presidential endorsements, Baron suspected owner Jeff Bezos feared Trump would influence his businesses if they endorsed Harris.

Looking back at the beginning of Post presidential endorsements in 1976, Baron said it was “because it came after Watergate and there was a president who had abused his power and weaponized the government against his political enemies… Does that sound familiar to anybody today?”

While editorial boards make decisions about endorsements, other newsroom staff brainstorm engagement strategies. 

The Guardian recently announced the paper would no longer post on X, formerly known as Twitter, citing the “disturbing content promoted or found on the platform” as the main reason for their departure.

While Baquet agreed with the decision, saying X owner Elon Musk abuses his control of the platform, Baron did not. “Our role is to be where the readers are,” Baron said. “We not only have to do the work, we have to make sure that people see the work and read the work.”

As another potential abuse of power, Trump is already trying to circumvent the Senate confirmation process with the appointments he has picked. 

“I do not feel that the same barriers to some of the things the Trump administration will want to do exist,” Baquet said. “He’s already said to the Senate he wants his appointees just to go through.”

“The courts have made it clear that they think the president has a tremendous amount of power that previous courts did not think,” Baquet said. “But frankly, there is one important guardrail, and that’s the press. It’s one thing we have to hold on to mightily.”

Ruth Johnson is a freelance journalist currently living in Chicago. She is a recent graduate of the Columbia College Chicago journalism program and an alum of the Columbia Chronicle.