Famed Editor Marty Baron Finds Five Reasons for Optimism, amid Trump's Sinister Attacks on First Amendment Freedoms

The former Washington Post editor offers a grim diagnosis of the state of U.S. democracy - but maps out a pathway for the preservation of our constitutional rights of free expression.

(Editor’s note: Martin Baron, former editor of the Washington Post and Boston Globe, is deservedly one of the most eminent and admired journalists of his generation. In a recent speech, delivered at a celebration of the 1st Amendment by the St. Louis-based Gateway Journalism Review, he provided an insightful if sobering analysis of Donald Trump’s war on the rights of free expression - and what can be done to fight back. Here is a transcript of his address /jr).

Thank you for inviting me to St. Louis. Thank you for this honor and for the Gateway Journalism Review’s celebration of the First Amendment.

In arguing for that amendment, James Madison, its principal author, expressed the need for “freely examining public characters and measures.” I always fixate on the word “examining” — and recommend reading its dictionary definition: “to inspect closely,” “to inquire into carefully/investigate,” to “test by questioning in order to determine progress, fitness, or knowledge.”

I am proud that the newsrooms I’ve led have lived up to the meaning of that word — and met Madison’s expectation for how the press, in service of a strong republic, should make use of the freedom it was given.

I’ve been a journalist for nearly half a century. And for every one of those years, I have known only a free and independent press in this country.

When I began my career in the 1970s, Americans could see clearly how the press served democracy:

• With the publication of the Pentagon Papers, first by the New York Times, the public learned of the failures its government had covered up during a long war in Vietnam that cost so many lives.

• And then there was Watergate, an investigation spearheaded by the Washington Post. The public learned how its president had weaponized the government against his political adversaries. How he had abused his powers, sabotaged the Constitution and committed crimes.

The press not only served democracy. The broader public interest was a beneficiary. When there was grave wrongdoing, often no one but journalists explored the facts.

Will Free Press and rule of law prevail? That was true when we at The Boston Globe investigated a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse within the Archdiocese of Boston and, as it turned out, in the Catholic Church worldwide.

Priests, bishops and cardinals had betrayed their parishioners. The Church had betrayed its principles. A religious hierarchy had exploited its political and legal power — and a claim to spiritual authority — to shield its own reputation at the expense of children in its care. Denial and deceit were both practice and policy.

Over the years since, as that investigation’s impact has unfolded from one country to the next, nothing in my career has meant more to me than conversations with survivors. To this day, they have shared their appreciation for the journalists who listened to their stories and delivered overdue justice.

Over the decades, I took for granted that we would always have a free press in this country:

That the First Amendment would guarantee it. And that the media could – and would – fulfill its mission of holding our government to account.

I no longer take any of that for granted. I can’t be certain the rule of law will prevail. Can’t be confident that a free press will endure — or that free expression for all Americans will either.

Fragile institutions. I see a president behaving as if he were granted the kingly authority that Americans rebelled against 250 years ago. A president who cynically invokes First Amendment rights for himself and his allies while scheming to withhold them from others through baseless lawsuits, regulatory retribution, malicious investigations, sadistic vilification and unjust deportations. I watch as a servile majority in Congress and a deferential majority on the Supreme Court blithely give him permission and encouragement.

Every day, I witness him hammering away at the institutional pillars of democracy, leaving them at risk of buckling under the assault. And seemingly every day, I learn that those institutions — including the press — are more fragile than seemed possible only a year ago.

And then there is this: We now live in a time when people are unable — or unwilling — to distinguish between what is true and what is false. Today we cannot even agree on how to determine a fact.

Ever since the Age of Enlightenment, we have relied upon certain factors to establish facts: Education. Expertise. Experience. And, above all, Evidence. Now, centuries later, every one of those elements is being devalued, if not outright denied.

All of this puts democracy in peril. If democracy is in danger, so is a free press. And if a free press is at risk, so is democracy. They are inextricably linked. Never has there been a democracy without a media that is free and independent.

“The antidemocratic storm.” The stakes go beyond safeguarding a free press, however. The freedom to do our work falls under a bigger umbrella, the right of free expression. The antidemocratic storm bearing down upon us threatens to shred that umbrella and all that it protects:

The right of musicians, authors, artists, playwrights, screenwriters, comedians and late-night entertainers to express themselves as they wish. The right of the public to listen to, watch and read what they feel they should. The right of academics, activists, political leaders and even business executives to advocate for the policies they believe in. The right of every one of us to speak freely with family, friends, neighbors and colleagues without fear of surveillance and reprisal.

We should worry about the freedom to express opinions and feelings. But we should not lose sight of what aspiring authoritarians ultimately hope to achieve: They aim to extinguish all independent arbiters of fact. The press is among them. So are judges, scientists, scholars, government statisticians and many others.

None of them is perfect. All are fallible. Because all are human. But all are also necessary to navigate the winding, pothole-filled path toward knowledge.

Who owns the truth? The methods of authoritarians go beyond intimidation and retribution against independent arbiters of fact. They also interfere in the impartial collection of information. Data is manipulated, suppressed and even erased. In that way, the public is denied access to the indispensable building blocks of truth.

Authoritarians assert sole ownership of the truth. But those who arrogantly claim a monopoly on truth and an immunity to error forfeit any claim to credibility. That applies to anyone. But politicians of that sort rank as the greatest public menace.

A feeling of infallibility signals a detachment from reality. It is accompanied by an extreme allergy to criticism. Political leaders with these delusions conceive of every reason to grant themselves more authority — while plotting to limit the freedoms of others.

Challenging questions are seen as undeserving of response, or even respect. Dissenters are treated as heretics and subversives; enemies of the people or the enemy within (even worse than foreign enemies, in their way of thinking). In short order, critics are seen as appropriate targets of military force.

When leaders with that mentality destroy any meaningful check on the power they’ve usurped, history offers a lesson on the liberties lost by the rest of us: They are not easily recovered. They may never be.

What the loss of liberty looks like. I’ve seen what the loss of liberties looks like. Every year I spend 10 days in Bogotá, Colombia as an instructor in a training program for Latin American editors. Twenty percent or more of the attendees typically have been forced to work in exile.

They are among the more than 900 journalists who have fled Latin American countries since 2018.

Every year, the participants in that program have made presentations on the conditions in their countries — outlining how, step by step, a war on the press was waged in a grab by leaders for more power.

One attendee in January 2023 was Lucía Pineda Ubau, a prominent television news director in Nicaragua who was arrested in 2018 after her station reported on the massacre of 355 citizens protesting the country’s ruler, Daniel Ortega.

Police raided the station while she was on air, taking her and a fellow top executive into custody on charges of inciting terrorism and violence.

Lucía was imprisoned for six months, most of the time in solitary confinement. When finally released under international pressure, she was forced into exile in Costa Rica. A couple of weeks after I saw her in Bogotá in 2023, Ortega’s government stripped her and 93 fellow Nicaraguans of their citizenship, also confiscating all of their property.

Today she — and all genuinely independent Nicaraguan journalists, numbering more than 270 — report on their country while compelled to live elsewhere.

This past May I had the opportunity to join Latin American and Spanish media leaders in visiting José Rubén Zamora, one of Guatemala’s most respected journalists.

His newspaper reported aggressively over decades on what he calls the narco-klepto dictatorship that governed his country. He exposed corruption at the highest levels. For that he was targeted with bogus charges of money laundering, blackmail and influence peddling.

Zamora spent 812 days in prison before being released to home detention. After only four months, his prosecutor exploited a technicality to get him thrown in jail again. He has been in prison since March 10.

Five years ago, Zamora’s publication shut down, unable to survive as he and nine colleagues were prosecuted, some merely for writing about Zamora’s case, an activity the government defined as obstruction of justice.

I am friendly with another courageous journalist, András Petho. András does his work in Hungary where for many happy years he was employed by a popular news website. He only left when his work suddenly met with the disapproval of the corporate owner, a telecommunications company.

Until then, the owner had supported the outlet’s investigative reporting. But Viktor Orbán’s return as prime minister, after eight years out of power, brought drastic change. Orbán put pressure on the telecommunications company, and it capitulated — calling on its journalists to avoid stories that would anger Orbán or his allies.

Today, as András recounted in The Atlantic magazine, his previous employer is “unrecognizable” as “the flagship news site of the pro-government propaganda machine, publishing articles praising Orbán and viciously attacking his critics.”

Orbán is Trump’s model. From all that I can tell, Orbán serves as our president’s model for how to marginalize, delegitimize, demonize and economically debilitate an independent press.

Orbán set up a new media oversight agency, appointing loyalists to run it. The agency blocked mergers by independent media companies and favored those that were pro-government.

Although Trump didn’t set up a new agency, he named a die-hard loyalist to lead the Federal Communications Commission, which previously operated with independence.

Almost immediately after becoming FCC chairman, Brendan Carr launched investigations of CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR and PBS over matters like supposed news distortion.

Separately, Carr held up the proposed merger of CBS owner Paramount with Skydance, a deal financed by Larry Ellison, a megadonor to the Republican party who has been a strong supporter of Trump’s.

Trump had sued CBS under a Texas law normally applied to false advertising, seeking an absurd $20 billion over how “60 Minutes” edited a campaign interview with Kamala Harris. At about the same time, a conservative group filed a complaint with the FCC alleging news distortion along the same lines as Trump. And Carr said he’d take that complaint into account in deciding whether to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.

Fearful Paramount directors this summer decided to settle, agreeing to pay Trump $16 million that would be earmarked for his presidential library. And there was a side deal between Trump and Skydance, the president himself confirmed:

Skydance — led by Ellison’s son, David — promised that once the merger was completed, it would provide $15-20 million in so-called public service advertising on CBS for causes supported by the president. Within mere weeks of those concessions, the merger was approved — obviously not a coincidence.

“Brutish harassment.” The horror show has continued nonstop.

Disney-owned ABC in September cancelled Jimmy Kimmel only hours after the FCC chairman — reacting to a remark by the late-night host related to Charlie Kirk’s assassination — threatened the licenses of its affiliate stations for carrying his show. Two big owners of affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair — both under FCC jurisdiction — moved even faster than Disney in yanking his show off their stations.

The government-orchestrated silencing of Kimmel thankfully ended up being brief. But it fit into a pattern of brutish administration harassment. Only days before, Trump had filed a libel suit against The New York Times and its reporters for $15 billion, litigation as silly as it was reprehensible. On page 10, Trump’s lawyers asserted his “sui generis charisma,” “singular brilliance” and “unique business acumen.”

Anyone who marvels at himself that way would naturally view anything less flattering as defamation. Appropriately, a federal judge dismissed the suit as mostly “vituperation and invective.” Trump’s lawyers refiled a couple of weeks ago, after being scolded by the judge to comply with professional standards.

The public media attack. Now to public media — and back to Hungary’s Orbán.

As my friend András noted, the prime minister also “transformed public broadcasting – which had previously carried news programs challenging politicians from all parties – into a mouthpiece of the state.” And what has Trump done? He cut public media off at the knees, ending all its federal funding. Expect public radio and TV stations to collapse, perhaps as many as 100. Trump has dismantled the historically independent Voice of America even as he set up a propaganda site called “White House Wire.”

Hungary’s Orbán has given a boost to pro-government influencers with a large social-media following. Trump has done the same here: MAGA influencers are now welcomed to White House press conferences, and even get private briefings. The questions (or statements) many of these folks pose are eye-rolling in their sycophancy.

Just as Orbán barred legitimate news outlets from briefings, Trump banned the Associated Press from the pool of journalists admitted to events in the Oval Office and that accompanies him on Air Force One.

He did this because the Associated Press wouldn’t yield to Trump’s insistence that the Gulf of Mexico be called only the Gulf of America. In July, the White House meted out the same punishment to the Wall Street Journal as reprisal for what it reported about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. And then he sued the Journal, including its most senior executives, for $10 billion.

The Department of Defense in September required press working from the Pentagon to sign a pledge not to disseminate any information — including unclassified information — that hasn’t been officially released. The rules prohibited even asking questions about unauthorized subjects, at risk of being identified as a national security risk.

All but small, marginal or conspiracy-minded U.S. media outlets refused to sign.

Good.

Because any journalist who signs a pledge like that falls more neatly into the categories of stenographer or propagandist.

Orbán had a telling piece of advice for a conservative American political organization several years ago: “Have your own media,” he said. That’s exactly what Trump wants. And, in large part, that is what he is building piece by piece.

Imprisoning journalists. Here’s something else you can anticipate: Trump will almost certainly try to incarcerate journalists. He has been salivating to do so for some time.

During rallies a few years ago, Trump promised to send journalists to prison so that he could ascertain their sources. As he put it, “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.’ ”

Reaction from the crowd to his loathsome vision of prison rape was laughter, applause and cheers.

The Trump administration has been laying the groundwork for prosecutions. In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi tossed out many of her department’s previous constraints on the government’s use of subpoenas and search warrants to obtain testimony and records of journalists relying on anonymous sources.

You can now expect the Justice Department to regularly pursue reporters’ phone records and emails, and to petition courts to order reporters to divulge their sources. Since journalists are unlikely to do that, expect the DOJ to request that they be locked up.

Holding the powerful to account. The purpose of journalism in a democracy, in my estimation, is to provide the public with the information it needs and deserves to know so that people might govern themselves. Within that mission is what I consider our profession’s highest calling: Holding powerful individuals and institutions to account.

Those with power have the capacity to do enormous good. When they do, and when ordinary individuals do, we in the press should make that known. Praiseworthy efforts to improve our towns, cities and country deserve to be shared with others. Strengthening the ties that bind us is a noble task.

At the same time, we know that some wrongs can be committed at extraordinary scale. Often the fault lies with those who possess disproportionate power, including the power to cover up their misdeeds. Immoral or unlawful conduct can go undetected for years, or decades. Ordinary people can suffer severe harm. The voices of victims are often ignored or muzzled.

If we as journalists do not hold the powerful to account — regardless of their political, ideological, theological or any other affiliation — often no one will. If we do not investigate when evidence demonstrates grave wrongdoing, we fail in our responsibilities to the public.

Our ability to pursue that mission today faces immense, even existential, challenges. Our vulnerabilities are many. Those who wish to harm our profession know that now is a perfect time to try.

Cowardice and capitulation. One vulnerability that has stood out recently is ownership.

Many of the biggest media outlets have corporate or individual owners who are ripe targets for intimidation. They may be subject to regulatory oversight. Or they may be heavily reliant on government contracts. Or they may hope for favors for their companies or themselves. One by one, they’ve cowered before Trump, capitulated to him or cozied up, neglecting to defend the rights that gave rise to their businesses and sustained our democracy.

Another huge vulnerability for an independent press is familiar to all of you: Economic insecurity.

The truth is that business strategies and tactics will have to be reassessed every few years, amid sudden, seismic shifts in technology, advertising and news consumption habits. Inertia is a decision, and a fatal one at that. Experimentation is imperative, with a clear-eyed focus on information the public values most.

News outlets must navigate away from a dependence on traffic from search engines and social media. That means cultivating a genuinely loyal, trusting base of readers, listeners and viewers who show support with subscriptions or memberships.

All who work in our business will have to get comfortable with discomfort. Instability will be with us forever. This will require everyone — from chief executives to union chiefs — to work collaboratively for long-term financial success. On that front, we have a very long way to go.

Declining trust. Compounding our problems is declining trust in mainstream media. Trust is at its lowest point in five decades. Seventy percent of American adults say they have little confidence in the media or none at all — the inverse of the 1970s when 70% expressed trust.

The press, by the way, isn’t alone in scoring poorly. Trust in institutions overall has tumbled. But the decline for the press has been fastest.

This issue of trust is complex. You often hear the crisis of trust in media attributed to bias among journalists, and there may well be bias. But it’s worth acknowledging that often one person sees bias where another sees truth. We are navigating a highly polarized political landscape.

That people can easily find a site that tells them what they want to hear undermines trust, too. And, of course, a president who day in and day out attacks the press has an impact.

In the 10 years since he became a presidential candidate, Trump has assailed the press more than 3,500 times.

Yet we in the press can’t just shift blame to others. Low levels of trust in traditional media call for journalists to look inward, to reflect on whether we are going about our work as we should.

I believe journalists can best achieve our goals by adhering to traditional journalistic principles. We do ourselves and our democracy no favors if we abandon what have long been our profession’s bedrock standards.

Too many journalists, largely in response to Trump, have repudiated the old standards: He has declared war on us, the thinking goes; so we must engage in war against him. Their stories and their performative behavior on social media reflect a warrior ethos. That is neither a good look nor good practice for any journalist who hopes to be, or expects to be considered, an honest broker of fact.

Not at war, at work. I am known for saying, “We are not at war. We are at work.”

So, what do I mean by that? Early in my remarks, I mentioned James Madison’s expectation that we in the press — and all citizens, for that matter — would examine “public characters and measures.” That is our work. And when we’re “at work,” our behavior should be that of a professional, not a combatant.

At all times, we must practice our craft with true independence and a reverence for evidence over our preconceptions. Getting at the truth requires an open mind, rigorous method and a heavy dose of humility. We must be more impressed with what we don’t know than with what we know or think we know.

We should not start our work by imagining we have the answers. We will better serve the public — and our professional reputations, for that matter — by making sure we ask the right questions.

Honorable journalism calls for us to listen generously — with empathy and respect — to those we cover. There is no place for condescension, contempt or incivility. People throughout our communities and country should see their struggles and aspirations reflected fully and fairly. We should assess what information they most need, and do our best to provide it. And when we commit errors of fact or judgment, we should acknowledge and correct them.

But honorable journalism also requires being fair to the public. That means being straight with them. We have a duty to tell readers, viewers and listeners directly, fearlessly and often courageously what we — through honest and conscientious reporting — find to be fact.

I’ll mention a few other steps that might help earn the public’s confidence: We need to be fully transparent about how we go about our reporting: If we refer to court documents, we should publish them in full. Same with a video or audio recording; publish it in full. The message to the public should be: You have the right to check our work. And we’re giving you the opportunity.

Established communications companies also need to face up to this nasty fact: We are largely failing as communicators.

We will have to learn from influencers and podcasters about how to convey authenticity. The authority of our reporting matters most — verification is our first priority — but how we communicate with the public matters a lot as well.

The threat of disinformation. Hovering over all of us is the threat of disinformation, which will accelerate with generative artificial intelligence.

Fabricated images and audio will be disseminated everywhere instantaneously. They will become harder to detect and refute.

The public may be unable to distinguish between what is true and what is false. And they may give up trying, concluding that it is impossible to ever really know.

Established media, working with experts in AI, must develop an infrastructure to counteract this threat. Not just because of what it portends for the press but rather because it imperils democracy and human progress.

The hazards can seem overwhelming. But I am no defeatist. I was reminded recently of what former secretary of state Madeleine Albright once said of herself. “I am often asked whether I am an optimist or a pessimist,” she wrote. “My reply is, ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’ ” Put me in the same category.

Reasons for optimism. You heard plenty about my worries. Here’s why I remain an optimist:

• First, there is still an abundance of strong news coverage, revealing what Americans are entitled to know about their government. Each of those stories is a victory. A victory for the press but, more importantly, a victory for the public. A victory for anyone who believes in government of, by and for the people.

• Second, I believe we, as individuals and as a society, are capable of more than we imagine. A favorite quote of mine is from Bernard Lown, a cardiologist who, along with colleagues, won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to prevent nuclear war. Upon accepting that award, he said: “Only those who see the invisible can do the impossible.” In other words, what we can’t see can be envisioned. What seems impossible can be achieved.

  And I should add, I’ve never seen anyone succeed by expecting to fail. Optimism is a necessary ingredient for success. And we must succeed.

• Third, the real world has a habit of wreaking havoc with lies and delusions. You can deny facts for a long while — too long, tragically — but not forever. As Jonathan Rauch, the author of an excellent book, “The Constitution of Knowledge,” recently said, “If you stop vaccinating people for measles, guess what happens? You get measles. Then kids start to die. Then people look around and say, WTF. You can only suspend reality for so long before it hits you in the face.”

• Fourth reason I remain an optimist: As an industry, we’ve already survived a lot, overcoming travails that might have felled other industries. Some traditional news organizations have made dramatic turnarounds. New, innovative media outlets have emerged and succeeded. Many newsrooms now can boast of talented technologists on staff, and we are far more likely to accept changes in our work that disruptive new technologies demand.

• Fifth reason: Today, there are promising signs of some rebellion against encroachments on free expression. Jimmy Kimmel’s program was reinstated by Disney and ABC as millions of Americans made clear their fury, many canceling subscriptions to Disney’s streaming services. Then Nexstar and Sinclair restored Kimmel to their stations. The whole episode propelled him to sky-high views on TV and YouTube.

Also, a recent New York Times poll showed that more than 60% of Americans felt Trump had gone too far in bringing pressure on the press, with the number rising to 70% among independents and voters under 45. Seventy percent of voters, and even 57% of Republicans, opposed revoking licenses for television stations that criticize Trump.

Lessons of history. Of course, it’s concerning that tens of millions of Americans either don’t understand the First Amendment or would just as soon do without it. But it’s heartening that a solid majority appreciates that free expression is an essential right that belongs not to any one party or group but to every one of us.

Ideally, over time, more Americans will recognize that the rights the press seeks to safeguard are no different from the simple, basic rights most people want and deserve for themselves: The freedom to inquire into facts. The freedom to share what they’ve learned. The freedom to communicate what they believe.

A final reason I’m optimistic is history. Efforts to silence the press date to the earliest days of American journalism.

The inaugural edition of the first American newspaper was published in Boston on September 25, 1690. The next day, it was shut down by the governor and council of Massachusetts.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the Sedition Act. Prosecutions ensued. Newspapers were shuttered, editors jailed. The American people themselves rose up in protest.

As the law expired at the end of John Adams’s term, journalists were freed. And upon assuming the presidency, Thomas Jefferson declared that “the essential principles of government” include “the diffusion of information” and “freedom of the press.”

Those freedoms would be challenged again under President, Woodrow Wilson, in 1917 as we entered World War I. The Espionage Act, amended the next year with a Sedition Act, brought extraordinary repression. The public and the press were subjected to vast prohibitions on criticism of government.

Wilson’s predecessor Teddy Roosevelt was aghast. Though no stranger to executive power, he understood the boundaries. He condemned those who would “make it a crime to tell the truth,” reminding President Wilson that the people of this country were his “fellow citizens,” not “his subjects.”

The Sedition Act was repealed within a couple of years. The Espionage Act, imprudently expansive and loosely written, remains on the shelf for our current government to weaponize, as it probably will.

Not until the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and war with Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany did this country begin to fully embrace the rights of free expression and an independent press. The horror of the Third Reich drove home what the alternative might look like.

FDR declared that “Representative democracy will never tolerate suppression of true news at the behest of government.” Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote this in 1945 on behalf of the First Amendment: “Every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.”

That admonition has been repeatedly tested. Scrutinizing the lies emanating from the Nixon White House landed 50 journalists — and three newspapers — on an actual enemies list. The purpose, as the memo of Nixon counsel John Dean put it, was to “use the available Federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

As disturbingly familiar as such malevolence may be, the words of the Senate Select Committee that investigated Nixon should echo today as well:

“The American people,” the committee’s report declared in 1974, “have been re-awakened to the task democracy imposes upon them – steadfast vigilance of the conduct of the public officials they choose to lead them.”

Bottom line. Vigilance of public officials is, above all, the task democracy imposes on every journalist. However severe the pressures we face, holding our public officials to account is a mission we can never forsake.

That is the mission envisioned for us by the nation’s founders when they signed off on the First Amendment. That was the original assignment for the press in this country.

We have no greater responsibility than to accept that assignment and execute it with the full measure of our energy, strength and courage.

Thank you again for the honor of joining you here today.

Image: Marty Baron, St. Louis Public Radio.