Why Are the Media So Afraid of Trump?

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Hello, and welcome to Episode 9 of The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Today, I'll be joined by Marty Baron. formerly executive editor of the Washington Post during the first Trump term and during the transition of ownership at the Washington Post from the Graham family that had led it through so many years to new ownership under Jeff Bezos. Marty Baron is one of the most important.

Media leaders of our time and has spoken forcefully both in person and in his memoir collision of power about the threats to free press and the responsibilities of that press I'll finish the episode with some thoughts about the way the media have covered the old age and infirmity of former President Joe Biden. But let me begin by addressing this larger topic of press freedom and press responsibility in the second Trump term.

President Trump began his campaign and has spent much of his first time attacking the media, calling the media, free media, enemies of the people, enemies of the state, and huffing and puffing and complaining and generally persecuting and often inciting. dangerous threats against individual members of the press. If you covered the Trump presidency in that first term, especially if you were a woman, you suddenly found yourself being attacked

both digitally and often in person, in ways unlike anything ever seen before. Death threats, harassment, abuse, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, racist, the worst kind of garbage. Even got a little splash of it myself. I had an FBI man come to the house to warn my wife that there had been some threats against me. The Atlantic is kind of high-toned, and I think a lot of the people who make the worst threats don't read The Atlantic, and so we get spared to some degree. But it was nasty.

But it was also mostly ineffective. The press worked during the first Trump term. Institutions like The Atlantic, like The New York Times, like The Washington Post, like CNN, kept bringing to light important stories about what the Trump presidency was doing.

about corruption, about ties to Russia, about many things that people needed to know. And while their lives were much more difficult than they had been in the past, and while the pressures on them were real, it did not in the end detract from getting the job done.

for the most part, in the first Trump term. In the second Trump term, things have been different. President Trump has been much more systematic, much more deliberate, much more sustained, and much more effective in putting pressure on America's free media. He does it by squeezing the corporate parents of media institutions, making it clear that mergers won't happen unless the mergers of the upstream parent will not be allowed or will be harassed or even illegally prevented in some way.

unless those institutions change the way that the reporting arms behave themselves. And we have seen media people end up paying what look very much like inducements, material inducements to Trump. Amazon. which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, paid millions of dollars for the rights to make a Melania documentary, money it has to know it will never see back for a documentary that will probably never be produced.

ABC paid millions of dollars directly to President Trump's so-called library, but really to himself because of pressure put upon the Disney Corporation, ABC's corporate parent. CBS offered a settlement. to Trump for an even more vexatious and absurd lawsuit. Trump complained that he didn't like the way they edited an interview with Kamala Harris, which he said, so what? You don't like our editing? You have no...

claim on that. That gives you no right to do action. I mean, send us a letter if you don't like the editing. Other people don't like the editing of the interview we did with you. That's not lawsuit material. The Atlantic 2, after our Signal story, a story that reported that our editor-in-chief, Jeffrey...

Goldberg had been added to what should have been a more sensitive discussion of a military operation in Yemen, in addition to the concerns for accuracy that of course we had, we knew that there was a chance. that the federal government under President Trump would pursue some sort of baseless legal retaliatory action against us. And we had to fear that in a way that probably in another time we would not have had to fear. So there are real things to worry about.

And they're not just specific to Trump. We've seen other people in American politics do the same. When Ron DeSantis was governor of Florida, or he is governor of Florida, when he was running for president, he made one of his signature issues threatening the Disney Corporation. for exercising its free speech rights to comment on some of his social legislation by stripping them of various business privileges that they had long had.

punishing the corporate parent for exercises of corporate free speech because Disney was unhappy that DeSantis administration was penalizing. what they saw as the free expression rights of gay and lesbian people in the state of Florida. So DeSantis took the Trump path. In the end, it didn't do him any good, but Disney still took the blow.

We have seen this kind of acceleration of new kinds of threats, and they're working because media institutions of the traditional kind are more vulnerable than they ever used to be before. Look, the companies that were powerful in 1972 are a lot less powerful in 2025. But they remain the main sources of dispassionate, fact-checked, accurate information about the events of the day.

New media does not see that as its mission. But the old media do. But because they've been losing audience share, because they're less wealthy than they used to be, they are subject to various kinds of pressure. And those pressures are being imposed on them with real-world consequences for all of us.

Meanwhile, the whole way, the whole mental landscape is being altered by the rise of different kinds of media institutions. TikTok has to be regarded as the most important media company in America today. alongside Facebook and other social media platforms. These are shaping the minds and mentalities of Americans, especially Americans under 40, especially those Americans who are not...

closely involved with the political process and so whose votes are maybe more up for grabs and therefore some of the most valuable voters to politicians. We have a new kind of landscape and it's one that we all have to navigate with great care. and one in which our responsibilities as citizens are as much at stake as our rights as citizens. The information landscape is being reshaped, and Trump is abusing the powers of state in this new landscape to hasten the reshaping in ways favorable to him.

Congress passed a law putting TikTok out of business. The Supreme Court approved that law. Trump has postponed enforcing the law long past all the deadlines that were supposed to be there because he likes the way TikTok covers him. Remember, when the rules of authoritarianism is the protection for the culpable is as much a resource for the authoritarian as harassment of the innocent. The goal and end state.

of all of these evolutions of these pressures of these changes in the media landscape is to create a world or create an america in which nobody will know anything that can be relied upon and shared with neighbors instead of knowledge informing our politics Our politics will inform our knowledge. Now, there's no ready answer to this, but each of us as an individual has a power to do something about it, to be a better consumer of news, to be a wiser user, to read more carefully.

to question more of what we see, to fortify our immunities against the coming wage of AI-fed distortion that is surely on its way. It's going to be a different kind of country, different kind of way of processing information. But the task of democracy and the challenge of democracy remains eternal, even as the challenges and threats change. And we're all going to have to step up and be...

The best kind of citizens, the best informed citizens that we know how to be, even as it becomes more difficult in the face of authoritarian pressure and new technology. And now, my dialogue with Marty Baron, formerly editor of The Washington Post. But first, a quick break. Aging can feel like a weird game. A healthy diet, two points. A bad night's sleep, lose a turn. I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Yasmin Tayag, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

This season, we're going to find out if longevity culture is keeping pace with the science. And what we can learn about taking a different approach to aging. Listen to How to Age Up. New episodes of How to Age Up come out every Monday. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Marty Barron is a newspaper editor whose real-life story inspired an Academy Award-winning movie. After reporting for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, he was appointed executive editor of the Miami Herald. From Miami, he moved to Boston, where he led the Boston Globe's coverage of sex abuse cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That coverage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and inspired the 2015 movie Spotlight.

In 2013, Marty Baron moved to the Washington Post. He led the paper through its purchase by Jeff Bezos and through the first Trump term, winning more accolades and prizes for himself and his reporters along the way. He retired in 2021 and published his memoir, Collision of Power, in 2023. Marty, thank you so much for joining the program today. Thanks for inviting me, David. All right.

We've got some things to cover and we've talked about what those might be, but let me start off with a straightforward question. If you were editing the Washington Post today, do you think you'd keep your job? I think I would, actually, because I think I did a good job while I was there, and I think that was appreciated, and I was supported by the owner and the publisher at the time. Obviously, some things have changed, but I think it would be very risky. for them to fire me.

And the news department continues to maintain its independence from the owner. The owner has not interfered in the news coverage, as far as I know. And I think all of us would know because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had... interfered. So yes, I think I would keep my job. It's a major theme of your memoir, Collision of Power, that first term Trump tried to pressure.

the Washington Post new owner, Jeff Bezos, into submission, and that Bezos consistently and courageously resisted. Bezos paid a price for this. Amazon lost a $10 billion contract with the federal government because of Trump's unhappiness with the Washington Post coverage. Amazon and the Post don't have a relationship, but Bezos is the owner of both. They're the largest shareholder in Amazon and the sole owner.

owner of The Post. Second term Trump seems much more deliberate, methodical, purposeful, and effective in his pressures on The Post and other media institutions. And this time, he also seems more successful. And not just with The Post, but with many others I described in my opening monologue, some of the other cases, CBS, ABC. What are media owners so afraid of?

Well, I think what they're afraid of is they're afraid of being made a target by Trump, that he's going to do severe damage to their other commercial interests. I think in the case of Bezos, he's afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous... his contracts, particularly in the area of cloud computing services with the federal government. And he has a private commercial space venture called Blue Origin.

which had fallen well behind SpaceX, the Elon Musk company, but was at the point of launching a rocket into orbit and then being able to start to compete really with SpaceX. It has now launched that rocket's success. into orbit, but it's highly dependent on contracts with the federal government. And I think that's true of the other companies as well, the parent companies of CBS and ABC.

So in the case of ABC, Disney depends on the federal government for approval of mergers and things like that. It does not want to be in conflict with the president of the United States. And of course, Paramount, which owns CBS, wants to execute a merger with Skydance, and that requires...

as approval by the FCC. You've had a long and storied career through many, many different institutions. And I'm sure along the way you have observed close up and directly how angry mayors governors and presidents and members of congress can get media coverage and there's always a lot of huffing and puffing and bluster and anger this What is happening since the election 2024 seems qualitatively different from anything that I've observed. Is that your observation?

Well, absolutely. Look, I mean, Trump during his campaign promised to seek retribution on his perceived political enemies. That's what he's doing right now. You can see that, of course, in his attacks on law firms, law firms that are represented.

individuals and institutions that were opposed to him, seeking to bar them from access to federal government buildings, seeking to deny them any contracts with the federal government, basically punish them in every conceivable way, and really seeking to destroy those law firms.

applies to universities first with Columbia University and then now with Harvard, of course. You can see that he's applying all of the, not just threats, but actually use of force and denying billions of dollars in grants to Harvard.

in an effort to force them to submit to his wishes. So that's what's happening. It's qualitatively different from what we've seen before. And of course, the federal government has enormous power and Trump is exercising that power. Actually, not just exercising it, he's abusing it.

Why is it so much more effective now? One of the... semi-remembered details of the Watergate scandal was that President Richard Nixon tried to put pressure on the Washington Post at that time because the Post was then seeking permission, or the Graham family was seeking permission to acquire some radio stations, which required FCC approval. And there's a famous crude quote about it. We're going to put...

Katie Graham's tits through the wringer. And what that was referring to was that her family wanted to buy these radio stations or maybe sell them. I think about it. I can't remember which. But either way, they needed an FCC permission. And Nixon said, aha, I have the brainwave. We'll use that.

as a pressure on the post, and it spectacularly backfired. It didn't work for Nixon at all. Now, a half century later, similar kinds of threats do seem to be working, at least for now. What's the difference? Why? was the press so much more robust in the 1970s than the prestige press seems to be in the 2020s.

Well, I don't know if it was more robust. Certainly in the case of the Washington Post, they resisted, and I wish that Jeff Bezos would do the same. As I said, I think the news department continues to operate independently, and it's doing a great job, admirable job, of investigating what's happening in this administration.

administration. And yet he has sought to repair his relationship with Trump by doing all sorts of things, the first one being killing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, and then, of course, donating to the inauguration, appearing at the inauguration.

Amazon agreeing to a contract to buy the rights to a Melania Trump documentary about her own life for an extraordinary sum of money. And then Amazon agreeing to buy the rights to The Apprentice. I think what's different now is when you don't have a Congress that's doing it.

job. I mean, at the time of Watergate, you actually had some confidence that the other pillars of government would stand up, would hold up. And in the case of Watergate, you had a Congress that conducted an investigation that obtained internal tapes, and that made all the difference in the world. And now you have a president who has control of both houses of Congress, and you have a Republican Party that is completely servile.

Is there something different about the media institutions themselves? Have they changed in some way as compared to what they were half a century ago? Good question. Look, in the past, I think sometimes we romanticize what the media was like. Keep in mind, we used to have incredibly wealthy owners of media, people like Hearst, who often collaborated with government and abused.

their power. I mean, the Chandler family in Los Angeles remade Los Angeles, brought water from the Owens Valley in the north down to LA to essentially enrich themselves. So I think we romanticize what media ownership was in the past. I think that now a lot of media, big institutional media is owned by

First of all, very wealthy people who have other very substantial commercial interests. And you have also these parent companies which have other substantial commercial interests, and they're highly dependent on the federal government. And the federal government has probably more power today.

than it had back in the previous years, previous decades. One reason it seems to me that media institutions are weaker in the 2020s was because they went through a self-imposed spasm of self-cannibalization. in the late 2010s, culminating in the events of 2020. The most famous example of this is the forced resignation of James Bennett from the New York Times op-ed page for the sin of running an op-ed that some of the staffers thought was too interesting.

they claimed that the op-ed would lead to violence which was on its face and certainly by the result a false claim but bennett was forced out and other institutions saw these kind of little staff mutinies you experienced many at the washington post and it left in the hypothesis is was there some kind of weakening of the sinew some kind of weakening of the courage some kind of weakening of the solidarity between staff and leadership at the institution that happened

between 2015, culminating in 2020? And is that in any way responsible for the weakness of institutions today? Well, I don't disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of particularly the younger generation, I think, to...

divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. I think that what that has done, I don't know that it has weakened the... Certainly, there have been rebellions within newsrooms. I did experience that due to my efforts to try to enforce.

social media guidelines, for example, and then also in reaction to the George Floyd killing, the demand for greater diversity in the newsroom and in leadership. But I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That's where I think it's done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions.

And that's a perilous place to be. You know, diversity is a complex concept with many different meanings. And I think what... and it can sometimes mean and has sometimes meant for many institutions, is that while the staff become more diverse in a series of biographical attributes, they become more monolithic in the way they think and more different from the people to whom they want to.

deliver their product. So if you've got a newsroom that is all full of, from every background, every climb, but all graduates of certain four-year institutions with certain common outlooks, and the readership doesn't meet those qualifications, I mean, they may...

you know, have different biographies, but they have similar outlooks. And it's one that puts them increasingly at odds with who their consumers are in a way that just wasn't the case when you went to a newspaper from high school, not from college.

I think that's true. I think that, you know, we do not have a certain level of diversity that we should have as people from a lot of different backgrounds, people who didn't go to all the same sorts of schools. I certainly didn't, by the way, I did not go to an Ivy League school and I grew up. in Florida and not in the Washington area. And I just ended up there because I was approached about taking on the editorship of the Washington Post.

which was a surprise to me. So I've always seen Washington as a bit of a bubble, and I think it is. And I think, look, we did work when I was at the post, we did work to increase the diversity and respects other than demographic. And that was, we tried to hire more military veterans. We thought that was important. The country had been at war for so many years.

yet we had very few military veterans in our newsroom. We needed more. We hired people who came from evangelical Christian colleges. I thought that was really important, given the importance of religion in this country and particularly evangelicalism in this country. And to try to get more people from working class backgrounds as well. We need to do more of that. There's no question. I think there are a lot of people in the newsroom who don't understand the struggles and lives of...

ordinary people in the middle of the country. And we need to work harder at that. There's no question about that. One thing I think that gets lost sight of, and I'm old enough to remember it, and maybe you are too, was that in the middle of 1970s, most of the people

who worked for a newspaper were engaged in a form of manufacturing. The paper, yes, it was written, but after it was written, it was then composed. It was composed by people who worked for the newspaper, and it was then physically printed. and then just physically distribute it. It was a giant manufacturing enterprise. And most of the staff were blue collar people who had nothing to do with the content of the paper and everything to do with the physical existence of the paper.

And this was brought home when my wife's stepfather father created a newspaper in Toronto. which was created in the early 1970s, the Toronto Sun, which was like this. And you saw it when you went to the athletic events or the picnics, the softball games, that the reporters might have had a slightly more educated background, but most people who were there were blue-collar people.

when they played softball together, when they did picnics together, when they socialized together, that the newspaper affirmed its identity as part of the culture of the city. And it was a manufacturing enterprise. Just technologies change that. Newspapers don't manufacture anymore. They deliver a non-physical product. The people who produce the product are highly educated. The production staff are probably even more technically skilled than the content staff.

And all of them are more and more unlike the rest of the people of the city or country in which they serve. Well, I agree with you on that. I think, look, this was evident prior to Trump being elected. People have asked me what our failures were prior to Trump being elected. And I always say it wasn't the coverage of the campaign. It was what occurred prior to that, years prior to that.

is that we didn't understand the country well enough. We just did not understand people's struggles, their expectations, their aspirations, and we needed to do that better. And there's no question that... Look, everybody, people talk about their life experiences these days, but everybody's life experience is by definition narrow. It's just them. Our job as journalists is to get outside of our life experience and understand the life, the experiences of other people.

more people in our newsrooms who come from a variety of different backgrounds. And I think we should get to work doing that. A point I made in my first Trump book about this as a way of driving it home. So the great opioid toll begins in 2014. By 2016, it's killing more Americans than Vietnam. I went to the New York Times search engine and typed in for the year from January 1st of 2016 to the end of 2016, the two words opioid and transgender.

And I don't want to derogate from the importance of any issue. But if I remember right, there were like 80 or 100 times more stories about transgender issues in the New York Times in 2016 than there were about the opioid epidemic. Now, that would change the following year. But it just marked that something could be happening in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire in 2014, 2015, and 2016, and it was invisible to the people who produced the country's most elite newspapers.

And one of Trump's secret weapons in the campaign of 2016 was he would campaign in these places and just say the word opioid. He had no plan. He had no concept. And indeed, the problem would continue to get dramatically worse under his presidency. But at least he knew it was there, which other people seem not to know.

That's a very interesting data point, that research that you did. And I think it does highlight just how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country. And I think that's something that definitely needs to be corrected and corrected quickly. It's cause for a lot of... self-reflection on the part of all of us in the media. And we need to make sure that that doesn't continue. Well, as we talk about media, of course,

People of a certain generation have an idea of what media is. And we often have a way of using that phrase to mean institutions that were important in 1972. The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS News. And it's a little hard to absorb that. Everybody who has one of these devices, which everybody has, can communicate instantly any image or any language to anybody on the planet on a scale that would have staggered the editors of the Washington Post in 1972 or even the CBS Evening News.

And I suppose one of the questions we have to think more philosophically about is what is media in the 2020s? I mean, TikTok shapes more minds than the New York Times. And Joe Rogan has a bigger audience than 60 Minutes.

We have a kind of anti-media that creates relationships with its consumers by presenting itself as non-media, by attacking the institutions that were important in 1972. But that are themselves also forms of media, obviously. And that... are different from the traditional institutions only that they seem to have no code of conduct, no code of ethics whatsoever.

Well, clearly the definition of media has expanded tremendously. We've seen a radical change in the kind of media there is and a radical change in the way that media is consumed. And a lot of the new media is communicating with the... a level of authenticity or at least perceived authenticity.

that institutional media has been unable to deliver. We and traditional media have always focused on our authority, the reporting that we do, the verification process, all of which, of course, is essential and core to who we are and what we ought to be doing, what our mission is.

is at the same time we are not communicating the same level of authenticity that a lot of the new media are and because we don't do that because we don't communicate authenticity we're not getting credit for the authority that we have and people who do communicate authentically or perceived authentically a lot of the new media they're being given credit for authority

that frequently they don't deserve. Not always. There are people who are quite capable who are doing that. But a lot of them don't deserve the authority. And look, this is a huge challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity, of course, to reach more people, but it's a huge challenge to traditional news institutions. And that's one that we clearly have to confront and we have to change. Well, you're very polite about it when you talk about call it.

authenticity. I think one of the lessons, I think, from a media business point of view, the media of the 1970s ignored large parts of demand. It turns out there's a much bigger demand for virulent antisemitism in America.

than anyone in 1975 thought there was there's much more demand for crackpot medical advice than people used to think and in 1975 if you'd said to the new york times or the washington post or cbs you know you could make more money by serving the anti-semitic market or the medical crackpot market they would say you know what we're making enough money thanks but no thanks we don't need to tell people the polio vaccine is no good but

People have, entrepreneurs have discovered there is a big market for anti-Semitism. There is a big market for the polio vaccine is no good. And you can get very rich, or at least selected individuals can, meeting that demand, which is not infinite, but large. and we are in a world that is you know the price of the internet may be the return of infectious diseases that had been banished in 1998.

Yeah, look, there are an enormous number of bad actors. I mean, by using the word authenticity, I don't suggest that many of them aren't bad actors. There are good actors, too. There are people who are doing really good work.

I think there's a reason you have a podcast, that you developed a podcast because you saw it as a better way of communicating with people or at least potentially a more effective way of communicating with people. And there are a lot of other people who are doing that as well. So I don't want to discredit everybody who's in new media.

because they don't deserve to be discredited because many of them are quite good. But there are a lot of bad actors and spreading crazy conspiracy theories and a lot of hate. And that is the nature of the internet these days. is that it allows for that because it's a highly fragmented market and people are going to exploit that fragmented market for their own personal, professional, political, or commercial gain.

And that's exactly what's happening. I would say, however, that traditional media is not irrelevant, as is often claimed by people in that new media field, by a lot of our politicians today, including, you know, Trump. and Musk and whoever.

And the reality is that we remain relevant. There is a reason why Trump is completely obsessed with traditional media. He would not be obsessed with traditional media if it were irrelevant. That would be insane. And by the way, when Elon Musk stepped out of it. has just recently stepped away from the White House. Who did he give interviews to, amazingly? Traditional media, the very media that he had denigrated all along. How should we think about what is and what isn't media?

a person offering makeup advice on tick tock to a million viewers is that media i don't know anymore yeah it's media i mean i think it is media media writ writ large absolutely People who are on TikTok are having an enormous impact. I mean, people are forming their opinions of what's happening.

let's say in the Middle East, based on a 15-second TikTok. They think they know everything based on the 15 seconds that they saw on TikTok. Now, that is appalling, of course, anytime you're dealing with a complex... subject like the Middle East, which has centuries of history behind it. You don't want to think that you've absorbed everything you need to know based on something you saw in 15 seconds on TikTok. But there's no question that's media. That is how people...

receiving their information like it or not. Let me offer you a last question, some advice for the viewers. How does one become a better consumer? of media content in this day and age. Are there any guidelines or advice you can offer to the viewer who is not selling makeup tips to a million people, but who has a phone, uses it, looks at it? How do we use this?

incredible new device, this incredible new power, responsibly and effectively to live better and more informed lives of citizens and individuals. Well, look, I mean, one of the biggest challenges today, a huge challenge and problem for us is that we can't agree on a common set of facts. We can't even agree on how to determine what a fact is. All of the things that we've used in the past, education, experience, expertise, and...

actual evidence, have all been discredited and not discredited, but denied and dismissed and denigrated. I think that consumers should be looking at that. They ought to be looking, does this person actually have an education in the field? Does this person have an experience? in the field? Does this person have expertise? Is there actual evidence? Can I see the evidence? Who is behind this?

Use your critical faculties to judge the quality of information and the quality of the people who are disseminating that information and determine whether in the past you've relied on them. I mean, one of the interesting things about traditional media is that when there's a natural disaster.

Guess where people turn? They turn to traditional media. They don't turn to some of these fringe outfits to tell them where the hurricane is going to hit and what they ought to be doing or where the tornado is or anything like that or the flooding is going to be. They turn typically to traditional media.

because, look, there's a reserve of confidence in them because they know that they're going to get accurate information. And so I think consumers of information need to look for that education, expertise, experience. What is the evidence that they are providing? Are you just relying on your beliefs or are you confusing your beliefs with actual facts? Maybe the good news and the bad news are the same, which is we all have many more opportunities, but we're all going to have to work a lot harder.

to make sure that we are accurately and truthfully informed. And while it's never been easier, if you have some medical symptom, never been easier to find out for yourself. what that probably is. It's also never been easier to be deceived by people who, for reasons of gain or sociopathy, want to make you sicker or want to deny you the medicine you really need.

and so we have seen this the decline in vaccination is still more than 90 percent of american children are properly vaccinated so nine out of ten people are doing the right thing but five or eight out of 100. are doing the wrong thing and they pose risks not only to their own children but to everybody's children yeah and i think the consumers of information have to work harder but also those of us who are delivering information have to work harder to show people our work

to show people why they should believe us, not just to tell them what's happening, but to show them the work that we've done, the evidence that we're relying upon, be as transparent as possible, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we're... covering the entirety of our communities and our society and our country.

And do a better job of that Marty, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your your candid memoir It's going to be an important resource for anyone who wants to understand the Trump era And also the transformation of media under new kinds of ownership and above all

your extraordinarily important institution, The Washington Post, which you led to such heights and which we hope is able to retain at least most of the glory that you delivered for it. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thanks so much to Marty Baron for joining me today. If you appreciate this dialogue and the others like it, I hope you will subscribe to this podcast on whatever platform you use. I hope you also consider subscribing to The Atlantic in print or in text form. That is how... We support all the work of this podcast, of myself and of all my Atlantic colleagues. As we wrap up this all media day today, I want to delve into one.

final topic. And that is the way, the scandal, this outrage, this outcry that has been whomped up about the age of former President Joe Biden. Everyone saw the debate. President Biden had obviously become infirm. And now there is a lot of accusation.

that this was somehow covered up or neglected, and that not only were the people around President Biden culpable, but that somehow the press was implicated too in its failure to address the question sufficiently and in time. This strikes me as something with a kernel of truth to it. but more distraction and misleading than truth. And let me explain what I mean. Now, I'm proud to say that the Atlantic was early and direct on the Biden age story. We ran a piece in...

June of 2022 by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovitch saying Biden was too old and should not run again. Had Leibovitch's advice been followed, history would have taken a very different course. And I think... You will find many other examples in many other places. Olivia Newsy at New York Magazine of people who brought attention to President Biden's gathering infirmity. Obviously, there were people around him who tried to put the best face on the president's health. That's always true.

President Kennedy was much sicker than anybody knew at the time when he was president in the early 60s, when he seemed to be a model of physical fitness. President Eisenhower, the severity of his heart attacks, again, that was not known to people at the time.

The full seriousness of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan in 1981, his recovery, it was much more touch and go than people were allowed to think at the time. People are invited to think of the president as healthier than the president often is. It is a...

body-killing job, and nobody comes out of it in the same shape that they went into it. And surely the people around President Biden tried to represent him as healthier than perhaps he was, especially toward the end. And it is an important news story.

to cover the capability of the president. Kudos to those who dig into that topic, who separate what is true from what is rumored, and who alert people when the president isn't as capable as the president should be or as those around him want to be. And that's a job. that continues even after the presidency. As I said, with these previous presidents, the full degree of their infirmity was often not known until sometime afterwards. Wildrow Wilson was struck down by a stroke in October of 1919.

Now, people understood that he was ill and was invalided. But how radically invalided he was, that was something, and he was invalided from October of 1919 until he left the presidency in March of 2020. 1921 almost a year and a half that was covered up by his wife and his doctor and the full truth was not known for a long time and that really did change the course of history many of the

worst acts of the Wilson presidency happened after the stroke of October 1919. And it's not clear whether Wilson approved of them, authorized them, or even was aware of them. The Palmer Raids, for example, where the immigrants were rounded up and deported without much of a hearing, if any, those started in November of 1919 and were at their peak in January of 1920. Not clear that Wilson even ever knew about it.

Bringing the truth retrospectively, also an important task. And I understand that journalists, when they follow these stories, can sometimes lose perspective. You know, if the school superintendent is stealing pencils from the supply cabinet. That's probably not the most important story in the world. But the only way you're ever going to find out about it is if one person...

in the local paper, decides that for him or for her, that story will be the most important story in the world for however long it takes to get to the bottom of it. And only a person who acts as if the superintendent stealing the pencils is the most important story in the world will bring the story to light. at all, and give it whatever attention it deserves. Tunnel vision is kind of a bona fide job qualification for being a reporter. But when you consume and read and react to news,

That's where the perspective comes in. You need to say, okay, maybe... The people around Biden did try to hush out how sick he was. And maybe not every journalist worked as hard as Mark Leibovitch to get the truth. Not every journalist worked as hard as Olivia Nussi to get the truth. Not every journalist was willing to brave the blowback that Mark Leibovitch and Olivia Nussi got for their report.

of the truth. But how important was this story really? And today, when there is an effort to make it seem like this is the biggest scandal in American history, or at least the biggest scandal going today, at a time when the present president is pillaging. billions of dollars. The story now that is the overwhelming story here in Washington is corruption on a post-Soviet, post-colonial Africa scale.

billions of dollars going and affecting everything, every decision that this administration makes from pardons to foreign policy. That's the story. Everything else also interesting, but don't oversell it and don't overbuy it. Thanks very much. I hope to see you next week here on The David Frum Show. This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grine. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards.

Claudine Abeed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening.