News/Commentary

‘He controls the conversation’: Former WaPo editor warns interviewing Trump a ‘big mistake’

October 8, 2023 | | Print Article

The Washington Post’s former executive editor thinks it’s wrong to interview the leading 2024 presidential candidate, and critics aren’t remotely surprised. After all, Martin Baron used to work for the most liberal paper in America.

Indeed, it was on the Post’s “Washington Post Live” video channel in which he stated his completely expected, predictable opinion this Friday that the media interviewing former President Donald Trump is somehow a bad thing.

“So I do think people are still struggling with how to cover him [Trump]. I think there have been some recent really big mistakes — the interview on CNN, a terrible mistake. I think the more recent one — Meet the Press — I think that was a mistake. It’s just, doing an interview with him like that is just giving him a platform; he controls the conversation,” Baron said.

Listen:

He continued by claiming a second Trump presidency would be a “vengeance tour.”

“More and more, what we oughta be doing is saying, what would a second Trump administration look like? Who would he appoint to be members of his Cabinet? What kinds of policies would he implement at the beginning,” Baron said.

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“Clearly, it would be a vengeance tour. He’d be targeting the Department of Justice, the FBI, the press, the courts, you name it. The Post has done some of that work. I would like to see more of that, and I hope there’s more of that in the works,” he added.

FYI, current President Joe Biden, a flaming Democrat, has also targeted the press and the courts, not that the Post, a flaming Democrat paper, has ever cried foul about it.

Later during the discussion, Baron to his credit expressed some regret over the Post’s coverage of the discredited Steele dossier, though he refused to admit that it’s been completely debunked from top to bottom.

Listen:

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“We had to investigate it. We had to chase down every conceivable clue. All of that. And that was totally the appropriate thing to do. So the staff did that. They just forgot to tell me about the Steele dossier. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Steele dossier until much later. But they were chasing down all these clues, and they couldn’t find evidence to support what was in the Steele dossier,” he said.

“So my regret is that once we’d done all that work and been thorough about it and exhausted al of the investigative avenues that we could, that we didn’t step back and say, ‘OK, well maybe this thing is not true.’ And then really take a hard look at Steele himself and how this gained so much currency in certain segments of the American government, and do a hard-hitting piece about the problems with the Steele dossier. I can’t say it’s been discredited; it just hasn’t been proven,” he added.

Lastly, Baron expressed support for all kinds of diversity in the newsroom — except of course for diversity of thought.

Listen:

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“The fact that the Post has a diverse staff, that we were endeavoring to have an even more diverse staff, that’s really helpful. I mean, the reality is, based on my life experience, I can’t possibly know of certain stories — I can’t see things from a perspective that somebody else with a very different background can see,” he said.

“So I think that’s really necessary to have racial diversity, ethnic diversity, diversity of life experience, diversity of where people grew up, what kind of colleges they went too, geographic diversity, whether people served in the military would be helpful given how long the United States’ been at war. So there’s a variety of things that I think would be incredibly helpful to us and should be an essential part of every newsroom,” he added.

The remarks have prompted criticism on X.

Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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