Exclusive: Marty Baron on Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post, and Trump’s Crackdown on the Press

A few months after legendary journalist Marty Baron was hired as the top editor of The Washington Post in 2013, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the paper.

During his eight years leading The Post — a dramatic run that included Donald Trump’s first term in office and ten Pulitzer Prizes for the paper — Baron maintained a good relationship with Bezos and has praised the billionaire for standing up to Trump’s efforts to crack down on coverage in the years since his retirement in 2021.

In Trump’s second term, Baron fears Bezos has abandoned his resolve to maintain the independence and credibility of The Post.

The billionaire made waves last week by announcing a shift in the paper’s editorial policy. In a rare public statement, he declared that The Post’s opinion section would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets,” and not print opposing viewpoints on those subjects.

The decision led to the resignation of David Shipley, the editor of the opinion pages, and triggered significant backlash among The Post’s staff and readers.

According to Baron, the move was driven by Bezos’s fear of Trump’s power and the possibility that he might use it to punish Bezos for unfavorable coverage. “He has sought to repair his relationship with Trump,” Baron told Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club.

“He was perceived as an enemy of Trump for one reason and one reason only: the coverage by The Washington Post — not just the news coverage but also the editorials.”

Baron pointed to a pattern of moves by Bezos, including his decision not to run a presidential endorsement ahead of the 2024 election, his donation to Trump’s inauguration, and even his presence on the dais at the event as evidence that he is attempting to shield his business interests from Trump’s wrath.

“When he wrote to readers explaining why they did not do a presidential endorsement, he said that all of us need to work harder to establish our credibility,” Baron said. “Well, when you’re sitting up on the dais during the inauguration of Donald Trump, you are not working harder to establish the credibility of The Washington Post. You are signaling the dependence of Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Blue Origin on Donald Trump.”

Bezos’s decision also comes amid mounting pressure on the press from the Trump administration. Baron warned that journalists should prepare for escalating attacks in the coming years. “If they felt the pressure just in the first four weeks, can you imagine what the pressure is going to be like for the next three years and 11 months?” he said.

Pressure is also coming from Trump allies like Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and X and senior adviser to the president who has waged a crusade against the press in recent years. “Trump keeps arguing that we’re irrelevant, and his people argue that we’re irrelevant. Elon Musk argues that we’re irrelevant,” Baron pointed out. “But the truth is, we’re not irrelevant. The biggest evidence of that is they’re so obsessed with us. If we were irrelevant, they wouldn’t be talking about us all the time.”

Despite the troubles at The Post — the latest controversy sparked yet another wave of reader outrage — Baron urged readers not to cancel their subscriptions.

“They’ve been super competitive, telling me what I want to know about this administration,” he said of the paper. “I think the public should value that. I haven’t canceled my subscription. But one way to win the confidence of readers is to be honest with them, and I don’t think [Bezos] is being straightforward in this instance.”

Baron also spoke about Trump’s use of government power to try and extract settlements from the major networks, his thoughts on Will Lewis, the new publisher of The Post, and why he doesn’t oppose the rise of independent media — so long as it’s fact-based.

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 10 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

This week, Jeff Bezos issued a rare statement declaring that the Post opinion section will now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and will not publish opposing viewpoints on those subjects. He also announced that David Shipley, the editor of the opinion section, had resigned as a result of the edict. What did you think when you first heard this?

I was very disturbed. I was shocked by that. It’s not something I anticipated because my impression was that Bezos had always argued for a variety of opinions on the opinion pages — that they should reflect the range of opinions in the country. There’s always debate about policy, and a news organization like The Washington Post has a tradition of carrying a wide variety of opinions. It should make sure that continues. So I was stunned by this and deeply disturbed by it.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what motivated this. Do you have a sense of why Jeff Bezos made this decision?

I don’t know for sure. Obviously, I can’t get inside his head, and I don’t think I’m on his favorites list at the moment—he’s not calling me. So, I don’t know for sure, but I think I can speculate in an informed way. First, I think he does not want an editorial page that, day in and day out, is taking Trump to task. He has sought to repair his relationship with Trump. He was perceived as an enemy of Trump for one reason and one reason only: the coverage by The Washington Post. Not just the news coverage but also the editorials.

This shift started before the election, 11 days before, when The Post decided not to run a presidential endorsement for the first time in almost 50 years. Since then, he has taken various steps to repair his relationship with Trump, from purchasing the rights to a so-called documentary on Melania Trump to making a $1 million donation to the inauguration via Amazon to personally visiting Trump at Mar-a-Lago and then being on the dais during the inauguration. All of this is evidence that he is trying to repair that relationship, and I think this decision fits into that pattern.

Secondly, I think he sees a potential commercial interest for The Post. He likely perceives The New York Times as having locked up the liberal audience, and he clearly believes, and I understand why, that The Post needs to differentiate itself in some way. My guess is he has in mind The Post as a kind of Wall Street Journal for a general audience rather than a business audience. In fact, the emphasis on free markets and personal liberties is very close to The Wall Street Journal’s motto. So, I think he sees this as a way to differentiate The Post and gain some commercial advantage.

The Wall Street Journal’s motto is “Free markets, free people.”

Right. Well, we’re pretty close.

Sounds awfully inspired.

They might actually accuse them of plagiarizing.

What you just laid out is the best explanation I’ve heard from a business perspective for why he would do something like this. Because when I first heard it, my thought was, okay, you’re essentially pushing the opinion pages to look more like The Wall Street Journal. But we already have The Wall Street Journal. It seemed like a great way to shrink the paper’s purview and audience while spurring another round of subscription cancellations from people who see this as appeasing Trump. I know you were editor-in-chief, not publisher, but do you see this working at all in terms of helping the paper turn around?

Well, I wouldn’t bet on it, that’s for sure. I can see why he might want to do it and why he might think it would work. But look, they’ve already lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers because they chose not to endorse. I would assume they’re going to lose maybe another few hundred thousand because of this decision—I have no idea. I don’t think this will make for a more interesting opinion section because all the opinions will be the same from one day to the next. There won’t be a wide range of opinions, and opinion has actually been a big draw for Washington Post readers and subscribers. We were able to attract subscribers with our political coverage, our investigations, and our opinion pages. If you make all the opinions the same — especially ones that neatly fit into Bezos’ own worldview — I don’t think that’s going to make the opinion pages terribly interesting. And I don’t think Trump supporters are suddenly going to start rushing to The Washington Post just because they’ve changed their editorial point of view. I could be entirely wrong. I could be surprised. Bezos built a much bigger business than I ever have. I haven’t built any business. So, he could be right. But based on what I know about Post readership and the media business, I’m very skeptical that this will work.

The L.A. Times is trying to do something similar now. This idea that if you start hiring pro-Trump voices, Trump supporters will suddenly start picking up The Washington Post strikes me as harebrained. People who have been conditioned for the last ten years to believe the media is the enemy of the people are not going to start reading The Washington Post.

I think the other thing is that the real battle these days isn’t over opinions and policy matters; it’s over facts. I mean, was the 2020 election legitimate, or was it fraudulent? The evidence shows that it was legitimate, not fraudulent. Yet, you still have a lot of Trump supporters who believe it was fraudulent simply because Donald Trump says it was. Was the mob on January 6th, 2021, just a normal tourist visit, as some Republicans describe it? Or was it a violent act meant to overturn the results of the election? Was it an insurrection? I think it was the latter, and it wasn’t a normal tourist visit. The battle these days is really over what is a fact and how you determine what a fact is—not just people’s particular policy differences and opinions. So if The Post continues to do its job—and I think it is, especially in the news department, the coverage has been stellar and revelatory about what’s happening in this Trump administration—they will find themselves in conflict with Donald Trump. He’ll call them fake news. And if Bezos hasn’t interfered in the news coverage—he didn’t when I was there, and he hasn’t from what I know—then The Post will continue doing that kind of work, and they’ll find themselves in conflict with Donald Trump. His supporters won’t be happy with The Washington Post, notwithstanding the opinions on the opinion pages.

Whatever audience they might get by handing over, let’s say, the opinion pages to Hugh Hewitt, they’re going to lose as soon as the news side reports that the 2020 election was, in fact, not stolen.

Exactly. And if we’re not willing to declare that the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America or accept some other fiction being propagated by Trump and his allies, that’s going to be the battle. Trump supporters will be deeply disappointed if The Post is doing its job—and I think it will continue to do its job. People will be disappointed that the news department hasn’t fallen into line with the MAGA crowd.

I have your book, Collision of Power, right here, which is really brilliant, and I urge everyone to go pick it up if you haven’t read it already. In the book, you praise Jeff Bezos for how he served as the owner of The Post during your tenure there. You say that he stood up to Trump, he resisted immense pressure to stop The Washington Post’s hard-hitting coverage. Also, the Post’s slogan during the first Trump term was “democracy dies in darkness,” which is something I believe—and correct me if I’m wrong—that Bezos pushed for, while you were skeptical of it because you didn’t want it to seem like the paper was the opposition to the administration. How do you explain the transition from that to what we’re seeing now from Jeff?

Sure. Well, first of all, my concern about “democracy dies in darkness” didn’t have to do with being perceived as the opposition to Trump. It had to do with—hardly any marketing person would tell you that you should have death and darkness in your motto. So I was a little nervous about having death and darkness out there, and we tried using light, but it sounded like we were part of a cult, so it didn’t work.

Yeah, I see that problem.

Yeah, exactly. So just to clarify on that point: Look, I think that what’s happened is that over time, it’s become quite clear that Trump was going to be more vengeful during his second term than during the first term. And you could see signs of that at the end of his first term, where he was incredibly vengeful in that final year, particularly after he was acquitted during the impeachment proceedings. He was firing people right and left, and so I think there was a sense, a correct one, that Trump was going to go punish his enemies, reward his friends, and punish his enemies very severely. And you can see that today. Trump just the other day declared that this law firm, Covington and Burling, that represents Jack Smith, the former special counsel, should have no government contracts whatsoever. And so, whatever government contracts they have, they’re going to lose, and then their lawyers were denied security clearance as well. So that’s what’s happening. Fearful of that.

There are two theories that I could possibly have about this, aside from him thinking that it’s a good business decision. One is that, in the first Trump term, Trump did try in certain ways to crack down on the press. The Washington Post is a prime example. And Amazon was targeted as well, I believe, because of Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post. But Trump was limited in what he could do and there were people in the administration who pushed back on his attempts to crack down on Amazon. Now, in the current administration, there’s nothing stopping Trump from using the federal government to punish Jeff Bezos and his various business interests. And then there’s the third option, which is simply that, like a lot of people in America, Jeff’s politics have changed and he’s warmed up to Trump and doesn’t see him as the threat he once thought he was. Of those options, do you get the sense that his politics have changed, or do you think it’s purely that he sees Trump as a bigger threat to his business interests this time around?

I think he sees Trump as a bigger threat to his business interests. I don’t think his politics have changed. He’s always been a libertarian, really, in a variety of ways. He supports gay rights. I think he supports abortion rights, all of that. But on economics, he’s very libertarian. And in that way, he supports a lot less regulation. He thinks the tax code could be reduced to 20 pages or something like that. So that’s what his politics are. And I don’t think that he ever thought that Trump was really qualified to be president, but he’s stuck with Donald Trump, and I think he realized he was going to be stuck with Donald Trump. Trump could deny Amazon contracts for cloud computing in the same way that he’s denying government business to Covington and Burling; he could deny government contracts for Bezos’ commercial space venture, Blue Origin, just at a moment when it’s looking for government business. It just launched a rocket into orbit successfully for the first time. It hopes to be competing with Elon Musk for satellites and all sorts of business like that.

And by the way, he’s got Elon Musk as a long-time rival of Jeff Bezos, particularly in the area of commercial space, but also now in things like AI and all of that. And Elon Musk was sleeping at Mar-A-Lago, and now he’s at the center of everything in this White House. And if you’re Jeff Bezos, you’ve got to be looking at that saying that’s danger. And he’s got to find a way to deal with that. And I think that right now, he’s decided to prioritize his other commercial interests over The Washington Post. The Washington Post is a much smaller asset for him than Amazon is, of course, and even smaller, I think, significantly smaller than Blue Origin, in which he’s invested $10 billion, or something like that. So he’s decided, look, that has to be my priority. And that’s just the decision that he’s made.

The Washington Post looms so large in our world, it’s easy to forget that it is a small fraction of the balance sheet at Jeff Bezos Enterprises.

He did an interview relatively recently with The New York Times for their Dealbook conference. I was deeply disturbed by that interview in a variety of ways. First of all, he said that Trump had become calmer and more settled. I cannot believe that he believed that because all of the evidence showed otherwise. Unfortunately, the New York Times interviewer didn’t say, “Really? How so? What’s the evidence for that?” and let Jeff get away with just saying that Trump appeared to be calmer. One of the other things that he said at the time was that the Post was punching above its weight in terms of controversy. I took umbrage at that because I guess it depends on how you measure the weight. So, if you measure the weight only in terms of financial size, of course, it’s punching above its weight. But if you measure its weight in terms of its consequence for American democracy, it has more weight in American democracy than Amazon does. I think he needs to start weighing things a little differently.

You’ve warned for a while that a second Trump term would pose serious threats to the press. When you look at the first couple of weeks of this administration from that perspective, is it better or worse than you expected?

Well, I expected the worst, but now I realize that my concept of the worst was not the worst. It’s worse than what I thought would be the worst. I did expect an all-out attack on the press. I didn’t expect some of the things that he was doing. I didn’t think that he would decide who to name to the White House pool, for example. I did expect aggressive behavior on the part of the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, but to threaten the licenses of stations affiliated with the major networks, most of the major networks — excluding, of course, Fox News, that’s not being threatened whatsoever.

I’m stunned by the degree to which he has essentially used his government power to try to extract settlements in the private litigation that he brought against ABC and CBS. ABC’s, of course, settled, I think largely because its parent company, Disney, did not want to be in conflict with the new president of the United States. But now, clearly, the signal to Paramount and the company with which it hopes to merge, Skydance, is that we may not approve that merger if you don’t settle this litigation. A settlement in that litigation means money for Donald Trump, and he wants a lot of money.

It’s really extraordinary to use the power of government to extract substantial settlements in private litigation. By any measure, that would be considered an abuse of power, a corrupt abuse of power. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. That’s what we’re seeing today. So I think we’re seeing worse than what I imagined. And we’ll see a lot more, too. There will be a lot more lawsuits. There will be lawsuits by his friends and his allies, very wealthy friends who can underwrite lawsuits for a long period of time and ask for an exorbitant amount of money. The pressure will be on the press. If they felt the pressure just in the first four weeks, can you imagine what the pressure is going to be like for the next three years and 11 months?

Putting aside the ABC News settlement because George Stephanopoulos was a little bit sloppy with his wording.

He should have corrected that. There’s no question about that.

And that doesn’t mean that ABC News is necessarily liable for either reckless disregard for the truth or defamation. But there was a mistake made there. CBS News didn’t do anything, and the fact that CBS News is even considering settling for no reason other than they want a merger to get approved, and the federal government is wielding a defamation suit as a cudgel against them, it’s terrifying for the next few years.

Yeah, well, that’s it. He controls government power. Government power is more powerful than any other power out there, and there are a lot of powerful people. But he has power over the biggest companies in this country, and they’re feeling it. As a result, they’re yielding to the pressure. And I think that’s what’s happening with Jeff Bezos as well.

There has been an almost daily onslaught against the press from this White House. Are you resigned to a — I don’t want to say a deep state of depression — obviously the media is going to survive the next four years. But are you seriously alarmed and concerned about the powerlessness of, let’s call it, the traditional media against these threats, given the business challenges and the threats from the Trump administration and his allies? Or do you think everything’s going to be all right, and it’s just going to be a bumpy road for the next couple of years?

Well, bumpy wouldn’t begin to describe it. So, I try to be an optimist, and I think I still am an optimist. So, I’m not suffering from the deep depression that you described. But I am deeply concerned. I think that Trump’s model is really Viktor Orban in Hungary, who was able essentially to marginalize the traditional press and have his allies take over the biggest outlets. While there are some remnants of an independent press in Hungary, they’re very small. They’ve been marginalized. They don’t have the large audience that they had before. I think that’s what Trump would want to do.

I think we’re not powerless. Our biggest power is real reporting—good, aggressive regulatory reporting. I think already the reporting that’s been done on this administration in the first four weeks or so has had an impact. Telling the world about where DOGE is, the 19-year-olds and the 20-somethings, and the access to the information they’re getting—information about treasury payments, information about Social Security records, information on your tax returns—and all of which basically means they know everything about you. Well, a lot about you, that’s for sure. Things you never expected would be in the hands of people who’ve never really been vetted before, and whom you have very little confidence, little confidence that they will be discreet with that information. Particularly given the backgrounds of some of the people who are in the DOGE group, which for some of them at least leans to the extreme right, one of whom proudly boasted that he was a racist, claiming he was a racist before racism was popular.

So, that kind of reporting, and the other sort of reporting that’s being done on the impact that these cuts will have on ordinary people. When you realize that there are so many federal employees and beneficiaries of federal benefits in red states—including Medicaid, for example—that kind of reporting will have a real impact. I think we’re already beginning to see some of that. So that’s our power. Our power is the ability to report. And that’s why we need to exercise that power as energetically as we possibly can.

One of the big challenges facing the media right now is this idea, which is being pushed by people like Elon Musk, that the legacy media is dead, and that X is where you can get reliable information. What do you make of that? Does it concern you that more and more Americans are turning to these independent voices over institutions like The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald?

I don’t mind independent voices as long as they’re based on fact. The way that people communicate is changing. You yourself are evidence of that. And that’s fine. That’s good. As long as people are responsible, as long as it’s fact-based, as long as people are informed. If they have a better way of communicating, hey, more power to them. Traditional media should learn from that, and I hope they do learn from that. The reality is that about a third of the American public doesn’t even get their news from any media outlet. They get it from friends and family. They get it over the transom and through their tribe, their family tribe, or their friends’ tribe, or their ideological tribe, or whatever it might be. Another good portion of them just get it over social media, and not everybody’s getting it off of X.

I am concerned that people are getting what they think is information, and it’s not fact-based. I’m deeply concerned about that because we’re in a dangerous situation right now. People don’t share a common set of facts, and it’s even worse than that. People can’t even agree on how to establish what a fact is because all of the elements that we have used to establish facts in the past—education, expertise, experience, factual evidence—have all been denigrated, denied, and dismissed. That’s really dangerous territory to be in. So I am very concerned about that. But I will say this about the press: Trump keeps arguing that we’re irrelevant, and his people argue that we’re irrelevant. Elon Musk argues that we’re irrelevant. But the truth is, we’re not irrelevant. The biggest evidence of that is they’re so obsessed with us. If we were irrelevant, they wouldn’t be so obsessed with us. They wouldn’t give a damn about us. In fact, that’s all they seem to be able to talk about. Trump is unbelievably obsessed with the traditional press. So how can you both argue that we’re irrelevant and at the same time talk about us all the time? It makes no sense.

The truth is, he knows that we’re not irrelevant. We’re not as influential as we once were, but we have a powerful effect on public discussion. Anyway, yeah, am I concerned that people are getting their information from outfits that are not fact-based? Yes. Do I care if it’s coming from traditional news? I mostly care that people are getting it from a reliable supplier of information, one that is fact-based. And if people have new, innovative ways of communicating, hey, great. I admire that. They’re being entrepreneurial, recognizing that technology has simply changed the way we communicate information, that we should communicate information. Organizations like the ones I’ve worked for should start thinking seriously about whether we change the way we communicate information and start making some rapid adjustments. Anyway, that’s where I come down on that.

Those are the two great ironies of media critics right now. One is that they obsess over whether a story is on page one of the Times, and also use reporting from places like The New York Times and The Washington Post and then talk about how they’re irrelevant and fake.

The Trump administration just did that. They were talking about an AP story, even as they’re talking about how it’s all just fake news. This happened all the time during the first term of the Trump administration. They would call us fake news, and then when they saw a story that they liked, that was supportive of whatever they wanted to talk about, they would cite traditional media. They would always say, “Well, it’s really remarkable that this comes out of The Washington Post or The New York Times.” But, it wasn’t so remarkable. They were constantly quoting us when it served their purposes.

Look, that is Trump’s goal: to try to undermine the role of the press. He said that to Lesley Stahl right at the beginning. She asked him why he continued to attack the press, and as is often the case, he was quite open. He said, “I do it so that when you publish something negative about me, people won’t believe it.” He has called one of his greatest triumphs in his first term undermining the public confidence in the press. And he’s right about that. He has had a big impact on that. He considers that to be a great victory, and it remains one of his goals. The reason that remains one of his goals is because we are still relevant. If we weren’t still relevant, he would shift his goal to something else.

Are you concerned about the independence of The Post now and that these interventions from Jeff Bezos might continue over the next couple of years?

As I said before, I have seen no evidence that he interfered in the news coverage. If he had interfered, I can guarantee you would have learned about it because the newsrooms are the leakiest places on earth, and news reporters and editors would have told you and everybody else. It would have circulated immediately. And no, there has not been one story of that sort, not one story that provides any evidence of interference on the part of Bezos in the news coverage. So I give him credit for that because I know a lot of business executives who are owners of media outlets, like The Post, would not give that kind of independence to their news departments. So I give him total credit for that. I remain enormously grateful for the independence that he gave the news staff and me during my tenure there. I repeatedly say that. I am still concerned about some of the decisions he’s made.

When he wrote to readers explaining why they did not do a presidential endorsement, he said that all of us need to work harder to establish our credibility. He also argued in that piece for the Post’s independence. Well, when you’re sitting up on the dais during the inauguration of Donald Trump, you are not working harder to establish the credibility of The Washington Post. You are not signaling the independence of The Washington Post. You are signaling the dependence of Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and Blue Origin on Donald Trump. It’s a sign of dependence, not independence. So it disturbs me that he writes to the Post’s readers, saying that all of us need to work harder to establish our credibility and our independence, and then he himself engages in an activity that actually sends the opposite signal—a signal that hurts the credibility of The Post and signals dependence rather than independence.

It does a lot of damage to the hardworking staff, the news staff, and the independent opinion writers as well. It causes enormous disruption and hurts their credibility. I know a lot of people are very disturbed about that, as they should be. It would serve him well if he would spend more time talking to the people in the newsroom about why they are so deeply concerned. But he doesn’t do that.

Do you have any thoughts on Will Lewis’s role in all of this?

He seems to be doing what Bezos wants, I guess. Or he’s proposing things that Bezos has accepted. So they seem essentially as one and the same in this regard. Right after Bezos tweeted that he was going to establish this new policy for the opinion pages, Will Lewis, the publisher, put his own email out to the staff, embracing it. Will Lewis is the one who first communicated to the staff and communicated to the public that they weren’t going to be publishing a presidential endorsement.

Initially, they issued two statements suggesting that Bezos wasn’t involved in that decision. Those statements were deceptive. The first one said that Bezos had not been sent, had not read, and had not opined on an editorial endorsement. I remember one reporter calling me and saying, “Well, the Post said that he wasn’t involved,” and I said, “You should actually read that statement much more closely because it doesn’t say that he wasn’t involved in the decision not to endorse. It only says that he was not sent an editorial. He did not read an editorial, he did not opine on any editorial.” That’s different from saying that he wasn’t involved in the decision to not run a presidential endorsement.

The second statement, which I guess was designed to reinforce the idea that he wasn’t involved, said that it was a Washington Post decision, which is an interesting statement because the 100% owner of the Washington Post is Jeff Bezos. So any decision of his regarding The Washington Post would be a Washington Post decision by definition. That became clear when Bezos wrote his piece in the Post for readers that he was deeply involved in that and that it was his idea. One way to win the confidence of readers is to be honest with them, and I don’t think they were being straightforward with their readers in that instance.

What do you say to people who want to cancel their subscriptions or have canceled their subscriptions to The Post as a result of this decision?

I haven’t canceled my subscription, and the reason I haven’t is because I really admire the news reporting at The Post. I’ve been thrilled by it. I’ve been delighted with what I’ve seen. I think it’s been stellar. They’ve been super competitive, telling me what I want to know about this administration, and I really value that. I think the public should value that as well. So, I don’t encourage people to cancel. I understand why people want to protest in some fashion. I’ve heard some people say, “Well, maybe you should cancel your Amazon subscription.” Then they go, “Oh, I can’t do that. God forbid I cancel my Amazon Prime membership, but I’ll cancel The Post instead.”

But The Post is actually doing the work, holding Trump accountable, telling people what’s happening in their government, despite all this stuff happening on the opinion pages. I’ve been gone four years, but I know the staff, and it’s a great staff. They’re honorable people. They work really hard to gather the information. It’s unfortunate that they’re being victimized by everything happening around them. I wish Bezos and Will Lewis would publicly thank them for the work they’re doing because that’s exactly why we have a free press in this country and why we need a free press. It would be nice if, instead of causing so much disruption, they expressed their gratitude to the staff for their hard work and the revelatory reporting they’re doing. They deserve that gratitude. I think the public should be grateful as well for the work they’re doing and should support it.

How are you enjoying retirement?

Good. I spent two years writing the book, a year promoting it, and now I go around talking about the kinds of things we’re discussing here: journalism, politics, our role in the country, and what I think the standards for journalism should be. I don’t have to get up at 5:15 in the morning, and I don’t have to work 24/7, so that’s good.

Do you miss it, though?

I was a top editor for 20 years at three different news organizations. I worked in the business for 45 years. I was 66 years old at the time that I retired. I was exhausted after 2020. It was a really difficult time for a variety of reasons. I thought a lot about it and was really ready. I felt like I’d done what I needed to do. I was proud of what we had done at The Post, at the Boston Globe, and at the Miami Herald, where I was also editor. I felt I had achieved what I wanted, and I needed more freedom and flexibility in my own life. I needed to take care of some health issues at the time. It was also a good opportunity to write a book, and with Trump out of office, it felt like the right time. I still feel engaged, but I don’t have to work 24/7 every minute.