Martin Baron, former editor of The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, on journalism and optimism

Martin “Marty” Baron’s career would make a great movie.

In fact, part of it already has.

As editor of The Boston Globe, Baron led his team of journalists in exposing the sexual abuse and cover-up in the Catholic church. The Globe’s investigative reporting led not only to some relief for scores of victims, but to the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and the 2015 Academy Award-winning biographical film “Spotlight.”

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Baron, the son of Israeli immigrants, became the executive editor of The Washington Post in 2013, a position he held until his retirement in 2021. His book, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post,” tells the inside story of the Post at the time Jeff Bezos bought it and Donald Trump went on attack against it. The audio version of the book is narrated by actor Liev Schreiber, who portrayed Baron in “Spotlight.”

Baron will be in Pittsburgh on Sept. 14, at the Highmark Theatre, in conversation with Next Pittsburgh columnist Tony Norman; New York Times Magazine contributing writer Maggie Jones; and Andrew Conte, director of Point Park University’s Center for Media Innovation . A Q&A with the audience will follow.

The event, presented by the International Free Expression Project in partnership with the Center for Media Innovation, is a prelude to the Center’s Sept. 26-28 celebration of storytelling and fact-based journalism, NEWSAPALOOZA.

Baron spoke with the Chronicle in advance of his appearance in Pittsburgh. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The NEWSAPALOOZA event in Pittsburgh is all about emphasizing the importance of local news. I know that’s a passion of yours. You’ve described the threat to local news as being the biggest crisis in American journalism. Could you talk a little bit about that?

I think it comes down to our commitment to democracy. Democracy begins at the local level — in towns and cities — deciding what your schools are like, deciding how your police departments are run, deciding what local environmental issues should be addressed, how the courts operate. All of that. And so when you don’t have vibrant local news coverage and no one’s covering those issues, people don’t know what’s happening in their own communities. And it doesn’t just concern the matters that may divide people, but the issues that actually bind people together. So, coverage of your local sports, coverage of your local art scene, coverage of what’s happening in the shared spaces, like parks and recreational facilities.

Social media has not proved to be an adequate substitute for that, and it certainly is not an adequate substitute in terms of keeping watch on government officials and others with authority and power who have a huge influence over the lives of ordinary people. Somebody needs to do that. If there is no local news coverage, no one is watching the city council, no one is watching a county commission, no one is watching the courts or the police department or their local environmental agency.

It’s really important that people and communities throughout this country support their local news organizations, the ones that are serious about covering their own communities.

And yet, so many local news outlets are closing. How do you get people invested in local journalism so that it doesn’t just die away?

I think we face an enormous number of challenges — technological, financial and the fact that we live in a society that’s highly polarized at the moment. So, where people don’t share a common set of facts — they can’t even agree on how to establish that something is a fact — all of the things that we’ve used in the past, like education, expertise, experience and actual evidence, are being dismissed and denigrated or denied.

But some of it is our fault. We didn’t adapt well enough to the digital environment. Not just adapt to it; we didn’t embrace it. The reality is that people prefer to receive their information by digital means. Most people are getting information off of a cell phone. We may not like that. Those of us who grew up in the traditional newspapers may prefer that people read on print, but that’s not how people live their lives today. They want to get information often, instantaneously. They want to get it whatever time they would like, to see it wherever they happen to be, and that’s not possible with the print product.

Moreover, the advertising environment has favored social media and search engines over traditional media. It has proved to be a more efficient way of reaching people who, based on their online behavior, have expressed an interest in a particular product or a service, and so that’s been a more efficient delivery vehicle for advertising.

On the positive side, we are seeing a lot of nonprofits crop up. We are seeing significant support in a number of communities across the country for those nonprofits; they are operating with lower costs. They don’t have to produce a print product, which lowers your costs. They have a strong sense of how people wish to receive information digitally. They have embraced new storytelling methods, breaking away from the traditional structures of journalism, of the way we used to write stories — or did write stories in newspapers — and recognizing that people just receive their information in different ways and on mobile devices or some other digital device. Because the whole information environment and news environment is being radically reinvented, we have to radically reinvent ourselves, and we need to think through very profoundly: How do people like to receive information? How should storytelling methods change? How can we adapt to that?

Those organizations that are willing to do that have a greater likelihood of success. And I think we’re seeing that with a number of news organizations around the country that are having substantial success, both profit-oriented and nonprofit-oriented. The New York Times just had a story about the large number of media outlets in San Francisco, for example, and I’m actually on the board of a small San Francisco, hyper-local site. And, you know, they don’t have it easy, but they’re competing. They’re fully digital. They’re serving their community in every way possible. And now they’re very energetically seeking to raise funds. So I think we see some evidence that the news will survive. And I think as long as we have a democracy, there will be a need for news organizations. I mean, the purpose of journalism, in my view, is to give the public the information it needs and deserves to know so that they can govern themselves, and I think there will be a need for that, a demand for that, as long as we have a democracy.

You sound a little skeptical that we will have a democracy.

I think there are numerous threats to our democracy at the moment, and I’m very concerned about that. I am an optimist because I think it’s important that we succeed and I don’t know anybody who’s ever succeeded by expecting to fail. So I’m an optimist about journalism, and I’m an optimist about our democracy as well, but that does not mean that it doesn’t face some significant challenges and threats. And one of the greatest threats, frankly, is the reality that we don’t share a common set of facts, and that we can’t even agree on how to establish what a fact is, and that we’ve dismissed all the elements that we’ve used in the past. Education has been denigrated, expertise has been denigrated, experience has been sort of dismissed, and evidence is being ignored. What we see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. So that’s concerning. It’s a concern for journalism. It’s a concern for the press. But bigger than that, it’s very hard to have human progress when we can’t agree on a shared set of facts.

So what do we do about that? I mean, it seems almost insurmountable.

Well, I don’t know that it’s insurmountable. I mean, I think that we live in a highly polarized, bipartisan environment right now, and people are drawn to information sources that affirm their preexisting point of view. That’s true of the right, but it’s also true of the left, and I think our role in the press is to make sure that we do our jobs in an honest, honorable, straightforward, fair and objective way, that we not become partisans. It’s very important that we remain independent, that we demonstrate over time that the information we’ve gathered has been verified, and I think over time, people will come to recognize that there are sources of information they can rely upon, and sources of information, or so-called information — sometimes it’s misinformation, and sometimes it’s actually disinformation — that they cannot rely upon, but they may like it. They may be drawn to it, but it’s not where they go in order to get information that is truly verified.

Our job in journalism, in mainstream journalism at least, is to engage in the process of verification, make sure that what we’re reporting is accurate, make sure that it is put in the proper context, make sure that it’s fairly presented. That doesn’t mean bothsidesism. It doesn’t mean false equivalence. It doesn’t mean any of that. It means that we keep an open mind when we embark on our journalism. It means that we talk to all the appropriate people, we look at all of the available evidence, and then we tell people what that reporting shows. And if that’s not what reporting is, then I don’t know what reporting is, because if you’re approaching your stories already knowing in advance what you’re going to say, then it’s an exercise in confirmation bias.

So I think we need to do our jobs objectively, fairly, honorably, honestly, make sure we’re accurate, correct our mistakes. I do think there’s a market for that in this country, and I think over time people will come to recognize that there are reliable sources of information, and then there are sources of information, or so-called information, that are not, in fact, reliable.

I’d like to move to the war in Israel and Gaza. Do you feel that the mainstream press has been objective and accurate in its reporting?

I don’t like to generalize about the media. The media is a lot of different things. It’s a lot of different players and a lot of different circumstances and individual stories. Each one operates independently. They do their own stories. Some are better than others. Some are more complete than others. Some are premature and some come too late. All I will say is that this is a very, very difficult subject to cover. Having been in the middle of this myself, I can guarantee you that there is absolutely no way to satisfy all individuals here, all sides. It’s a highly complex subject. The history is incredibly complex. And when you’re in the middle of trying to cover that, readers have their own strong views.

I think it’s important that we cover all sides here, that we cover what’s happening in Israel, the perspective from Israel, the perspective of being under assault, of facing an enemy who wishes to destroy the country and would undoubtedly engage in genocide itself if it had the opportunity to do that — and it says that quite openly. It’s made clear that is its objective. That’s the objective of Hamas, Hezbollah and others.

On the other hand, it’s very important that the press cover what’s actually happening in Gaza. Regardless of whatever the numbers are, there can be no doubt that there’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The evidence is immense that you can’t be moving millions of people out of their homes and engaging in constant bombing attacks and seeing food supplies dry up without knowing that there’s an enormous humanitarian crisis, and that undoubtedly large numbers of people have died. And so I think it’s very important that the press cover that too. That’s our job, to be on the ground as much as we possibly can, talking to all people, reflecting their different perspectives on this and shedding some light on the true complexity of what’s happening now in that region, and what the roots of that conflict are, and how badly it’s gone on for a very long period of time.

You know, my parents are from Israel, so it’s something that I followed for my entire life. But it’s a very complex story, and I think the press needs to reflect those complexities, and sometimes they do better at it, and sometimes they do worse at it. It’s a very difficult environment in which to operate.

Let’s talk about your book. You were living through this very unique time in history with Bezos taking over the Post and Trump rising to power and declaring a war on the media. At the time, did you know that you would be putting it all into a book at some point?

At some point, I realized that I might want to write a book because it was extraordinary what was happening. The family that had owned the Post for 80 years, the Graham family, decided to sell it. They sold it to one of the richest people in the world, and his goal was to try to transform the Post for a digital era and to make it a national and global media outlet. And then along comes Donald Trump, a candidate for president unlike any we’d ever seen before, and a president unlike any we’d ever seen before. And then, of course, during the campaign and during Trump’s presidency, there were huge conflicts between Trump and the Post, and as a result, Trump and Bezos. Thus the title, “Collision of Power.”

I thought it was pretty clear that this was historic for the country, historic for the Post, and historic for the press overall. And I was in the middle of it. I could offer a perspective from within a newsroom of trying to cover Donald Trump, trying to transform this newsroom, having my news organization owned by one of the wealthiest people in the world. You know, we were being covered on a regular basis, but I didn’t feel that the coverage fully or always accurately reflected what was happening inside and why it was happening. So I think, for the sake of history, it was a story worth telling, and that there was really only one person who could or would tell that story, and that was me. It wasn’t going to be written by Jeff Bezos. It wasn’t likely to be written by our publisher, who wasn’t involved in the day-to-day news coverage. And so the only person who could write it was myself. I felt that, for the sake of history, it should be written. And so that’s why I kept track of what was going on, and why ultimately I decided, yeah, this is a book that should be written.

You’ve had such a storied career. Can you tell me what you’re most proud of?

The story that I’m most proud of is what we did in Boston with disclosing the cover-up of decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests. And the reason I’m the most proud of that is because it affected the lives of ordinary people. It wasn’t about politicians. It was about ordinary people who had been abused, whose voices were not being heard — they weren’t being heard by politicians, they weren’t being heard by law enforcement, and they weren’t being heard by the press. We did the investigation that was required, that was needed. We held the church accountable for a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse by clergy, and that story has had an enormous impact, not just within the Boston archdiocese, but within the Catholic Church in the United States, which has implemented a series of reforms at long last, and also had an enormous impact throughout the world. And it motivated the press, both within this country and in other countries, to investigate more thoroughly abuse within the church and the cover-up of that abuse, and also abuse in other institutions. It’s had an enormous impact on the way that institutions have responded to allegations of abuse. They know that they can’t engage in a cover-up the way that the Catholic Church did, and so many institutions have now been much more responsive.

I think that the investigation of the Catholic Church was clearly the precursor to other investigations that have been conducted by the press, whether they be investigations of the Boy Scouts or the Southern Baptist Convention, and frankly, a precursor to the whole MeToo movement. Other people have said that, so I’m proud of that, because it had an enormous impact on how institutions deal with abuse and it motivated a lot of news organizations — particularly when the movie came out quite a few years later, in 2015. It reminded publishers, owners and editors that they need to have investigative reporting, that it is core to what we do, that the public expects that of us, wants that of us. They do want us to hold powerful institutions accountable when they engage in wrongdoing. And the more powerful the institution, the greater the capacity to commit wrongdoing on a large scale and to cover it up. So I think it’s had an enormous impact on the field of journalism, and it revived a lot of interest in investigative reporting, which had really atrophied before that. It surged after Watergate, but then it atrophied in more recent years because it takes a lot of time, takes a lot of money, doesn’t guarantee a result and doesn’t always end up with producing a lot of digital traffic. And so many of these organizations had really de-emphasized their investigative reporting, but I think they’ve come to realize that this work, if properly done, will be supported by the public. PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.