Former Executive Editor of The Washington Post Marty Baron had an unusual answer when asked recently how he handled the pressures of that high-profile position during the Trump administration.
“How did you deal with the stress of your job, particularly over the past few years?” Baron was asked during a question-and-answer session with the Harvard Business Review this month.
“I guess I dealt with it by retiring,” he quipped.
Baron stepped down in February after serving as the Post’s top editor since 2013.
“Almost two years ago, I told department heads that I was committed to staying at The Post through the presidential election. I left open what might happen beyond that. Today I am letting you know that I will retire on February 28,” Baron wrote to newsroom staff. “I have worked in journalism without stop for nearly 45 years, leading magnificent news staffs in Miami, then Boston and now Washington, D.C., for 21.”
He told the Harvard Business Review he feels “liberated” in his new life outside of journalism.
“I was looking for a bit of a break, and now I’ve got it,” he said.
One of the regrets Baron said he has, especially during his final years leading the Post, is not doing more to accelerate the pace with which newsroom leadership was diversified.
“I felt very strongly committed to that,” he said. “Yet there was a view within our newsroom—particularly in 2020, with the protests for racial justice—that we had not done enough. I accept that criticism. I wish we had worked harder.”
The longtime editor also acknowledged a trend in his final years of staffers at the newspaper expressing themselves more openly on social media on issues of race, gender and politics, a phenomenon that sparked controversy and cries of partiality from critics on multiple occasions during his tenure.
“People have felt very personally affected by what’s happened over the past four years, particularly on matters of race and ethnicity. But I think it’s important that we maintain the credibility of our institution and that none of us do anything to undermine it,” Baron said. “The Post is not just a platform for people to draw attention to themselves. Our primary responsibility is to advance the interests of the institution, to protect its reputation. That means getting the facts, putting them in the proper context, and telling the public what we’ve learned in an unflinching way. What we do in our journalism is far more powerful than any tweet anybody could send out.”
And when it comes to separating truth from fact, Baron said modern-day journalists cannot and should not hesitate to call out falsehoods for fear of being accused of bias.
“Journalists can cover anyone if they approach it in the correct way,” he said. “I always try to look at things from the perspective of the people we cover and assess whether we’re doing a fair job. Fairness also means fairness to the public: telling them what’s really going on. The core principle is to tell as near to the truth as can be ascertained.”