NYT’s Michael Barbaro Pulls No Punches in Interview With Boss Dean Baquet

Dean Baquet

It isn’t every day that you get the chance to cross-examine your boss for an audience of millions of listeners.

But Michael Barbaro, the host of the New York Times’ immensely popular podcast, The Daily, did just that when spoke with Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, in a tough interview that went live Friday morning.

In the nearly hour-long discussion, Barbaro grilled his boss about the Times’ coverage of the 2016 election, which has, like most of the media coverage from the time, been criticized for wildly underestimating Donald Trump’s chances of winning.

Barbaro begins the interview by going back to July 2, 2013, when the Times announced the creation of an exclusively Clinton-focused beat two years before Hillary Clinton would announce her bid for the presidency. Barbaro asks Baquet if, given Clinton’s stunning loss, he thought it was a mistake to establish this beat with so much fanfare, a decision that was criticized at the time.

Baquet says no.

Barbaro then reads the lede of the news story on Clinton’s announcement that she would be running, “immediately establishing herself as the likely 2016 Democratic nominee,” reporter Amy Chozick wrote.

Was that language too strong?, Barbaro asks.

In retrospect, Baquet admits, he would have toned it down. “It jumped right to horse race,” he says, making pains not to blame Chozick for the tone of the piece. “If it had to edit that story all over again, I would have toned down the inevitability of it.”

Barbaro goes on to examine the first few paragraphs of the story on Bernie Sanders’ presidential announcement, in which Sanders is described as a “long shot,” which Barbaro takes issue with.

Baquet defends the story, but makes a concession. “Journalism is by its very nature flawed,” he says in one of many candid moments, going on to say that this framing made sense at the time because most Americans had not heard of Sanders while they were undoubtedly familiar with Clinton as an established political figure.

Barbaro, who is for the most part tough but respectful, covers a lot more, including the Times’ coverage of Trump voters around the country.

“I think that’s my biggest self-criticism, which is that, of course we covered the country, you’ll see voter stories, but I don’t think we quite—we did not dig in and say, ‘Why is this country pushing ahead with these two very unusual candidates, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders,’” Baquet tells his interlocutor. “I don’t think we quite understood that.”

For his part, Barbaro is self-critical at points, pointing out that he took part in forwarding the wrong narrative as well. “Mea culpa from this side of the table,” he says.

Barbaro learned this the hard way when he was tasked with writing the story on Donald Trump’s victory on deadline with Matt Flegenheimer. Because the Times did not expect Trump to win, the story was not as substantive as it should have been when Trump began taking the lead on the night of the election.

Barbaro mentions, somewhat ruefully, that a copy-editing mistake omitted his and Flegenheimer’s bylines when the story was published in print on the front page of the Times — including Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin’s names instead.

“Oh, wow,” Baquet says. “I didn’t know that.”

“It’s OK,” Barbaro says.

To which Baquet responds: “I said newspapers are flawed.”