B4 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020MEDIAbreach his arrangement with Mr. Kava-
naugh and to protect his old source’s
anonymity, three Post employees said.
(The three, as well as other Post jour-
nalists who spoke to me, insisted on
anonymity because The Post prefers
that its employees not talk to the me-
dia.)
Mr. Baron and other editors per-
suaded Mr. Woodward that it would be
bad for The Post and “bad for Bob” to
disclose a source, one of the journalists
told me. The piece never ran.
And the steadfast adherence to the
longstanding rules of newspaper jour-
nalism and the defense of the institu-
tion, which have defined Mr. Baron’s
tenure at The Post, prevailed.
Happy newsrooms are all alike but
every unhappy newsroom is unhappy
in its own way. And in this moment of
cultural reckoning, most American
newsrooms are unhappy places.
They’re reeling from the coronavirus
pandemic and under attack from the
president of the United States even as
they reckon with America’s racial in-
equalities in their own institutions. At
The Post, black staff members’ discon-
tent burst onto Twitter, as a set of high-
profile journalists who have left the
paper discussed how they felt pushed
aside or pushed out. Their complaints,
along with previously untold stories
recently shared with me, paint a picture
of an essential American institution
caught in fierce cultural crosscurrents.
The revival of The Post by Mr. Baron
and its owner, the Amazon founder, Jeff
Bezos, is perhaps the greatest news
business success story of the past dec-
ade. But that journalistic revival has in
some ways masked a messier story, one
of many contradictions.
The Post has published some of the
best reporting in the 20th century
American newspaper tradition that’s
ever been done like the sprawling ex-
posé of America’s war in Afghanistan —
all wrapped in a digital marketing,
advertising and publishing machine
that The Post licenses lucratively to
news organizations around the world.
It’s a faceless institution in an era of
influencers and personal brands. It’s a
place where one of the managing edi-
tors, Tracy Grant, still hands new re-
porters a copy of Katharine Graham’s
1997 memoir, though, of course, The
Post is no longer owned by the beloved
Graham family, but by the world’s
richest man. Mr. Baron’s fearless focus
on White House coverage and investi-
gations has put it at the center of the
American media’s response to Presi-
dent Trump.
But it’s also a top-down institution
whose constrained view of what jour-
nalism is today has frustrated some of
the industry’s creative young stars.
At the heart of The Post’s identity is
Mr. Baron, 65, the ultimate old school
editor. He rose through the ranks of The
Miami Herald and The Los Angeles
Times, then arrived at The New York
Times in 1996, where he took over the
powerful role of night editor, the stern
gatekeeper and final approver of any
article headed into the print newspaper.
But he frustrated reporters with his
punctiliousness, and didn’t play the
internal politics of succession. He left
The Times in 2000 to take over The
Miami Herald, leading its staff to a
Pulitzer Prize, and then The Boston
Globe, where he published a historic
investigation of sexual abuse within the
Catholic Church. That showdown be-
came the movie “Spotlight,” in which
Liev Schreiber played Mr. Baron as
introverted, irascible, and unbending —
a depiction that Post employees de-
scribe as uncannily accurate.
He arrived at The Post in 2013 “stub-
bornly retro,” according to a National
Journal profile, but when the Amazon
founder, Mr. Bezos, bought the paper
later that year, Mr. Baron proved the
perfect ballast: He wasn’t personally a
man of the internet, but he made clear
he was all for it. And his journalistic
gravitas gave the newsroom comfort
during its frantic, overdue shift to the
digital age. When other publications
seemed unnerved by the election of
President Trump, Mr. Baron’s assertion,
“We’re not at war with the administra-
tion, we’re at work,” seemed to fortify
journalists everywhere.
Mr. Baron’s opposition to Mr. Wood-
ward’s story, people who work with him
said, wasn’t about favoring Mr. Kava-
naugh, or being afraid of a fight. Pub-
lishing the article would simply violate
the traditional principle that sources
should be protected. And it would veer
into an uncomfortable and potentially
embarrassing new form of journalism,
and, in Mr. Baron’s view, imperil the
reputation of the institution.
When I asked, for an interview with
Mr. Baron, The Post’s spokeswoman,
Kris Coratti, instead sent me 4,000
words of excerpts from his many
speeches about journalism. The
speeches reflected his sophisticated
articulation of the importance of open-
minded, rigorous and brave journalism.
But the speech excerpts didn’t include
the credo that stuck with me from a
recent memo written by Mr. Baron.
“The Post is more than a collection of
individuals who wish to express them-
selves,” Mr. Baron wrote. “The reputa-
tion of The Post must prevail over any
one individual’s desire for expression.”
This principle reflects Mr. Baron’s
frequently expressed frustration that
his reporters’ tweets could undermine
The Post’s journalism. It sometimes
seems that Mr. Baron is standing
athwart Twitter yelling, “Stop!” and
nobody’s listening.
The intensity of the debate inside The
Post over its journalists’ tweets
emerged in an internal survey of re-
porters’ attitudes, commissioned by the
national editor, Steven Ginsberg, with-
out Mr. Baron’s participation. The re-
port, which was circulated in April,
described Post management as “ill-
equipped to deal with
social media in the
modern era” and
suggested that man-
agers are more for-
giving of mistakes
“by white men and
newsroom stars than
they are of women,
minorities and less
high-profile report-
ers.”
(The Times, where
management has cultivated stars and
taken a relatively softer line on Twitter,
has its own challenges, and was forced
last week to try to purge the vitriol
from its internal conversations on
Slack. Its chief executive, Mark Thomp-
son, asked employees to avoid “saying
insulting and threatening things about
co-workers.”)
The Post survey presaged the more
intense concerns expressed this month
by current and former black journalists
about the news industry, in general, and
The Post, in particular. Such concerns
are not new.
But many Posties (which is how
some on the staff refer to themselves)
date the current gap between black
staff members and leaders of The Post
— Mr. Baron and his three managing
editors, Cameron Barr, Ms. Grant and
Emilio Garcia-Ruiz — to the departure
in 2015 of Kevin Merida, then The
Post’s managing editor, to lead the
ESPN sports and culture site The Un-
defeated. A handful of black journalists
followed him.
The union that represents newsroom
employees, The Washington Post Guild,
now says it has assembled 32 pages of
concerns from current and former
black journalists. Black staff members
active with the union are pushing for a
Twitter campaign to highlight the is-
sues, modeled after a similar recentdemonstration at The Los Angeles
Times. But such a step would be more
provocative at The Post, given the
paper’s institutional unease about
expressing opinions on Twitter.
Some have already surfaced. Kim-
briell Kelly, who left The Post last year
for The Los Angeles Times after being
passed over for an editing job, tweeted
that she was the “only black investiga-
tive reporter on WaPo’s Investigative
Unit for most of my 7 years there.”
“The notion that only you had to
prove yourself as an editor, while sooo
many others who didn’t look like you,
never did, steamed many of us,” replied
Dana Priest, a white veteran national
security reporter.
Questions have also arisen within
The Post’s video operation which, like
other areas outside Mr. Baron’s core
obsessions, has suffered from a lack of
clear strategy. Employees said in a
meeting earlier this month that person-
al favoritism has substituted for clear
goals, according to detailed notes of the
meeting by a participant. One employee
said black video editors felt they had to
ask permission to get up even to go to
the bathroom, when white producers
didn’t. Two black editors, who spoke on
the condition they not be named, said
they’d felt that difference in treatment.
“Staff are always free to take breaks,”
Ms. Coratti said. “They are just asked
to give others a heads-up that they will
be away to ensure that the video hub is
not unoccupied in the event of unantici-
pated news developments.”
A particularly striking issue arose
from the coverage of the 2018 killing of
a Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, by
Saudi agents. Karen Attiah, Mr.
Khashoggi’s editor, who rallied support
for him on Twitter, on television and on
The Post’s op-ed pages. But when it
came time to apply for a Pulitzer Prize
— an unscientific process that often
serves as an X-ray of newsroom politics
and power — Ms. Attiah’s work wasn’t
among the 20 pieces submitted. The
exclusion, she told me, “stung,” and
surprised people who had been follow-
ing The Post’s work closely.
“I was appalled,” said Mohamed
Soltan, a former Egyptian political
prisoner and friend of Mr. Khashoggi,
who described Ms. Attiah as one of the
key journalists on the story.
The Post’s editorial page editor, Fred
Hiatt, defended the decision in an email
to me: “What you have to leave out in
such situations, in this case including
excellent work by Jackson Diehl, Karen
Attiah and several others, is never
easy.”
One thing that is clear is that The
Post — which prides itself on providingnot just jobs for its staff but long enrich-
ing careers — has lost some people any
newsroom would want to keep, includ-
ing Ms. Kelly and Wesley Lowery, who
left to become a correspondent for a
new “60 Minutes” project on the
streaming service Quibi. Another is
Soraya Nadia McDonald, who said she
had hoped to stretch beyond blogging
twice a day on pop culture, which she
did at The Post, and wanted “permis-
sion and support to be ambitious.” She
followed Mr. Merida to The Undefeated,
where she was a Pulitzer finalist this
year for “essays on theater and film
that bring a fresh, delightful intelli-
gence to the intersections of race and
art.”
”I don’t think any of that would have
been published there,” she said of The
Post. “This place just
seems to run off its
best people.”
The last time Mr.
Baron faced sus-
tained complaints
from his black staff
was in 2016, after Mr.
Merida left. Then, a
group of black Posties
sent Mr. Baron a
memo making the
case for a new deputy
managing editor for diversity. Mr. Bar-
on responded that The Post was rela-
tively diverse compared with other
newsrooms and that Ms. Grant had
diversity issues in hand. “They repre-
sent the bulk of her work and the most
rewarding aspects of her job.’' Mr.
Baron wrote in the memo. “I can’t
imagine taking them away from her.”
This time, as The Post rushed to quell
the kind of staff uprising that broke out
at The New York Times and The Los
Angeles Times, that role suddenly held
appeal to Mr. Baron. The Post an-
nounced on June 18 that it would hire
for the role, and an internal email says
the deadline for applying is July 3. Mr.
Baron would vet applications himself,
and he reached out to Shani O. Hilton,
my former colleague who is now a
deputy managing editor at The Los
Angeles Times overseeing The Times’s
Washington bureau, its national cover-
age and its foreign desk, suggesting she
apply.
“You may have seen the announce-
ment of our new initiatives focused on
race, ethnicity and identity,” Mr. Baron
wrote to Ms. Hilton.
Ms. Hilton was not interested.
"I have seen over the years that
diversity roles, particularly for black
women, are the fastest way to be side-
lined out of the most important conver-
sations about coverage and hiring,” shewrote back. “The moniker lets other
managers think the work of improving
representation and newsroom culture
doesn’t fall on them."
Mr. Barr, one of the managing edi-
tors, said the job would, in fact, focus on
coverage, even if it may not involve
directly managing reporters. “This is a
job that brings together the journalism
and the leadership of the room,” he
said.
That new editor will face questions
about identity and journalism that
extend beyond race. Two Post employ-
ees said editors have barred a Post
reporter who publicly accused another
journalist of sexual assault, Felicia
Sonmez, from writing about the subject,
citing the appearance of conflict of
interest in her public comments. But it’s
hard to imagine reporters are expected
to be neutral on the issue of sexual
assault — and the decision seems al-
most a caricature of the old idea that
only people imagined to have no stake
in an issue, often white men, can cover
it.
It can, in this fraught moment, be
difficult to untangle the forces driving
the arguments about newsroom cul-
ture, objectivity and fairness. There
are, no doubt, real disagreements
around the issue of how much journal-
ists’ opinions, identities and experi-
ences should shape coverage and be
shared with their audience, and when
“objectivity” simply means a dominant
point of view.
But one clear strain in the tensions at
The Post is simply, and sometimes
hilariously, generational. In the happier
times of early January 2020, the writer
Maura Judkis blew up the internet with
the article, “People are seeing ‘Cats’
while high out of their minds.” It fea-
tured irresistible testimonials from
people who described watching the
Andrew Lloyd Webber film while on
marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms or
other substances, such as: “The most
terrifying experience of my life. I swear
to God my soul escaped me.”
Mr. Baron, who had not seen the
piece before it was published, erupted,
two Post employees said, furious that
the story was “glorifying recreational
drug use,” one of them said.
Ms. Coratti said that Mr. Baron was
not “upset” but did “advise that we
should be careful not to be seen as
celebrating or championing recrea-
tional use of drugs.” So the dispute
seems to be less about journalistic
principle than about whether you like
edibles.
Even those frustrated by Mr. Baron’s
strong-willed style of management
speak with reverence of his obsessive
commitment to reporting. Still, some of
The Post’s challenges will probably be
left to his successor. Mr. Baron has told
colleagues he will be around through
next year’s presidential inauguration,
but perhaps not much longer. “Marty
will give us a great deal of notice before
he retires, and that notice has not been
given,” Ms. Coratti said.
But what separates today’s cultural
conflicts inside newsrooms from previ-
ous generations’ is that they now play
out, in real time, in public on social
media. And they offer a window into an
industry, and society, struggling to find
its moral footing around racism issues.
That seemed a painful takeaway from
the recent Post article about a white
woman who came as Megyn Kelly-in-
blackface to a 2018 Halloween party at
the home of a Washington Post cartoon-
ist. The woman lost her job when she
told her employer about the coming
article, which readers reacted to with
outrage and questions about its news
value.
“Was this story intended to be a
spoof of our culture?” Patrick Gaspard,
who served as ambassador to South
Africa during the Obama administra-
tion and is now the president of the
grant-making Open Society Founda-
tions, asked on Twitter. “Did they really
invest all this Investigatory resource on
this piece to shame this average person
who holds no discernible power?”
The story’s handling inside The Post
underscores some of the paper’s under-
lying tensions.
After a guest at the party who be-
lieved the woman was a Post employee
complained to the paper, editors as-
signed it to two trusted veterans: Syd-
ney Trent, an experienced former edi-
tor, and Marc Fisher, a reporter whom
The Post also turned to when someone
had to write about Mr. Bezos’s explicit
text messages. Mr. Fisher, who is white,
reportedly told people he had doubts
about the news value of the costume
party story, though he led the reporting
and writing. Ms. Trent, who is black,
saw it as worth doing, three Post jour-
nalists said.
White senior editors, including Mr.
Baron and Mr. Barr, signed off on the
story and sided with Ms. Trent on some
questions of tone. That played to old
reflexes and new ones: They chose to
address a complex moment with the
most traditional reportorial form, and
they trusted the judgment of a black
reporter with a long history of writing
and reporting about race. And while
many Posties were conspicuously silent
about the story on social media, Ms.
Trent stood by it, and posted it to her
Facebook page to a positive reception.
But black reporters are, of course,
not monolithic, and many reporters of
all backgrounds at The Post found the
3,000-word investigation puzzling. A
random person “dressing like a famous
lady in blackface at a party 2 years ago
seems the least of our concerns right
now,” Ms. Attiah tweeted.He Made The Post Great. Now the News Is Changing.
FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESJUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAt the heart of The Washington Post’s identity is Martin Baron, top, the paper’s executive editor since 2013. The Washington Post
newsroom in 2017, above. Simmering unhappiness from black staff members at The Post burst into public on Twitter last week.‘The Post is more than a
collection of individuals
who wish to express
themselves.’
Martin Baron, editor of The Post, in a
recent memo.
Bob Woodward
of The Post.Soraya Nadia
McDonald left.