Marty Baron, Objectivity, and Real-World Journalism
Baron's recent scolding does not reflect the reality most journalists work in.
Last week, former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron wrote an editorial for his old newspaper taking critics of objectivity to task for, well, criticizing objectivity. After reading it, I was surprised the photo in the story was not of a school marm wagging a finger.
Don’t get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for Baron. If the various books and movie are to be believed, he was greatly responsible for finally exposing decades (if not centuries) of sexual abuse by Catholic priests when he was editor of the Boston Globe.
As the leader of the Post, Baron was one of the first editors to throw down the gauntlet when Trump was elected, adding “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to the masthead. I remember sitting at my desk full of pride and anguish when I first saw that in February 2017. Pride because journalism at its best shines light on corruption and defends democracy. And here was my favorite newspaper affirming that. Anguish because we had just gotten another missive from our CEO of Nevada Public Radio reminding us that since Trump was president now, our coverage had to be slanted toward him and his supporters.
This pressure from the CEO, Flo Rogers (who would lead the station to a $2 million debt and the brink of shutting down just two years later) started a couple of days after Trump was elected. I was live on the air, doing a show that had started as a 20-minute segment talking to Latinos about what they were feeling. But when I was working on the segment the day before, the program director met me in the hallway and said, “I haven’t seen people this shell-shocked since 9/11. We need to give people a chance to vent.”
So he and I worked together to expand the segment to open the phones and talk to other groups Trump had vilified.
The next day, I was on the air when about halfway through the show, my editor (who had been inexplicably absent the day before) comes on the headset. “Flo does not like this show. She thinks we need to hear from Trump supporters. Don’t talk to anyone in the studio anymore. Just take phone calls.”
It bears noting that the exact words Flo used were “why are we talking to THESE PEOPLE. I want to hear from Trump supporters.” I only saw that email after the show was over. In the meantime, one of the producers who had conservative contacts - and who had come back to the office after covering Trump rallies laughing and repeating “lock her up” - was getting people to call in. And the people who felt like their world was imploding were silenced.
Eleven months after that show, our entire team walked in shell-shocked on October 2, 2017, as we woke up to learn about a guy who had rented a suite at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, brought in 24 guns (mostly semi-automatics with bump stocks to make them automatic) broke the windows of his room, and began shooting at a crowd of roughly 20,000 people who were across the street enjoying a country music festival.
Fifty-eight people died in what I was calling at the time the Mandalay Bay shooting. Over 400 more were injured.
That day, almost every listener who called into our live coverage wanted to talk about how the shooter got so many long guns in his room, and express their opinions on gun control. I was not on the air, but Flo contacted my co-host and told him to stop taking calls from those people.
The next day, she put it in writing, giving us copy to read as the show started, asking people not to call in about gun control, and telling us we should screen out those who want to talk about guns so we can “avoid people who have agendas.”
Let me be clear on this: we were not allowed to explore the scope of the problem because one “side” had staked a position that gun violence was political - that people’s deaths were simply collateral damage to other people’s rights. And we should be in the middle. And both Flo and the program director bought that - lock, stock and barrel, if you will.
Objectively… that view is biased toward the side that made the issue political in the first place, which I’ve written about before.
Later, my editor agreed with the “lock her up” producer and said we needed to call the shooting something else, because we didn’t want to hurt the Mandalay Bay or its parent company, MGM, by using its name to describe a mass shooting. There would be no exploration of how and why the resort allowed the shooter - hell, HELPED HIM - to bring two dozen guns and thousands of rounds of ammo into his room.
The next day, to top things off, one of our producers scored an interview with Brooke Gladstone of On the Media to talk about the misinformation that was flying around about the shooting. Flo vetoed that, too. Gladstone, Flo thought, was too liberal.
Mind you, Flo was excited when she learned that I had once scored an interview with Gladstone. But that was when Obama was president, and the wind was blowing differently.
Let’s also note here that the CEO’s job is not to micro-manage news coverage. Actually, the CEO or president or station manager is not to involve oneself in news coverage at all. But no one at KNPR would stand up to her.
This is all to say that Marty Baron and I work in different worlds, even though both of them are called “journalism.” Baron, as the leader of the Post, did not define objectivity as not talking about guns and mass shootings. He gave his editors free rein to create the School Shooting Database, and a separate Police Shooting Database, and do series after series on the prevalence of guns, how that has affected parenting, and the power of AR-15. The Post has become the go-to news source on gun violence. Just google their name and that phrase and you will get pages of results.
Clearly, as Baron elucidated in his op-ed, objectivity “is not giving equal weight to opposing arguments when the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction. It does not suggest that we as journalists should engage in meticulous, thorough research only to surrender to cowardice by failing to report the facts we’ve worked so hard to discover.”
In the last decade, I have worked in two public radio stations (running my own newspaper previous to that). I can tell you that “thorough, meticulous research” was, in each of those shows I hosted, up to the individual producer, who had to push against editors in order to do good work. For KNPR, it was just filling the calendar. It was painfully obvious that our editor didn’t even know what was on the calendar until it had aired - and then only if Flo didn’t like it. Whether the segment was good or bad, well-researched or fact-free didn’t matter. As long as it was on the calendar and the editor didn’t get blowback.
At WPR, we were so slammed and so understaffed - and saddled with such a cumbersome system - that we barely had time to get people booked much less check facts. There were people who wanted to do meticulous research - or even adequate research - and were told they were taking too much time. And WPR exalted callers above all else. It’s Wisconsin - America’s newest red state. You can imagine how many unfactual - and outright racist - bits of information we were dealing with day to day.
As to the first part of Baron’s quote, my experience is that there are more journalists than he might be comfortable with who DO give equal weight to opposing arguments when evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction. Or they make decisions based on gut and past experience. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, shared an anecdote in a 2022 column about a journalist who looked at the numbers and the research and wrote a story on the fact that pandemic economic policies reduced poverty. According to Bunch, “his editor insisted on changing his copy when he wrote — accurately — that poverty in the United States actually declined during 2021.”
It may be that this editor is lazy. It may be that they have fallen into a cynical rut about how the world works. It may be because they are overworked. Or because they work for an individual or corporate boss who does have an agenda, or who thinks journalism should support, not question, the ruling party. I don’t know. But too often in the journalism organizations I’ve worked in - and read - the “objectivity” that is practiced is a perverted one from what Baron is talking about.
That is what critics of journalism are pointing out. The late Eric Boehlert, James Fallows, Dan Froomkin and countless other journalists are uncovering the questions not asked in developing stories and doing interviews. They’re looking at the assumptions journalists bring. So am I. If we all lived in the world Marty Baron speaks of, we wouldn’t need to. But we live in the real world, where too many of us have left journalism because we weren’t allowed to do good work. And too many who are left, are just trying to stay above water.