Now retired and living in New York and New England, Marty Baron is one of the nation’s foremost living newspapermen, his tenure as Managing Editor at the Washington Post from the end of 2012 to 2021 following a similar role at the Boston Globe that was depicted brilliantly in the Academy Award’s Best Picture of 2015, “Spotlight,” about his newspaper’s efforts to expose a massive coverup by the Catholic Church of systemic child abuse charges.

Baron’s book out this week, “Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post,” documents a critical juncture leading up to and following the rise of Donald Trump, centrally with Bezos’ purchase of The Post in December 2012, in the month following the re-election of Barack Obama.

The book is important because of how it reports on the collision of three of the most significant forces of our time – egregious wealth concentrated in a handful of men (namely, Bezos), a proto-fascist would be dictator who rose to become president and still pushing for a coup (namely, Trump), and a struggling nationally-influential newspaper that adopted a most telling slogan for its daily front page, “Democracy
Dies in Darkness” (namely, The Post).

The question of how well Baron has reported this in his new book is eclipsed by the question of who has or will come out on top of this titanic, ongoing struggle for the future of America and the world he writes about.

Under Bezos’ ownership, Baron was summoned to The Post in September 2013, and the book is about everything that followed including the infamous ride down that escalator by Trump in 2015 to kick off his rise to political power and The Post’s efforts to report on that in the face of enormous pressure from Trump himself to silence it and the news media in general, while refusing accept the outcome of the November 2020 election and his attempted coup in January 2021, which is still ongoing.

It is a fascinating insider look at some epochal events of that era, not the least of which was the heated and extensive debate within The Post itself over Bezos’ resolve to come up with a new motto for the paper in the weeks following Trump’s inauguration and simultaneous declaration of the press as “the enemy of the American people.”

The public’s reaction to Trump was fierce, Baron wrote. “Never before had I witnessed such an outpouring of support for journalists’ work,” he wrote, adding, “Many Americans now understand that this new president was taking aim not only at the press, but also at the very concept of verifiable fact.” He cited numerous comments the paper received, including one which said simply, “I subscribed to the Washington Post today because facts matter.” Another wrote, “Thank you for your paper’s service to this
country…I would like to suggest The Post have a donate button on its website.” Another Baron cited said,
“Just continue. We are with you! We in the streets have your backs. Don’t stop.” Paid digital-only subscriptions more than doubled in 2017.

I, as the owner-editor of the mighty Falls Church News-Press weekly just across the Potomac, experienced a similar reaction at the time.

So, Baron wrote, as “many of our new readers clearly were looking for The Post to help secure democracy,” a month into Trump’s presidency, starting on February 2017, “The Post affixed the words, ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ under its nameplate on the printed newspaper, at the top of its website
and on everything it produced.”

As Bezos envisioned it, Baron wrote, “this was not a slogan, but a mission statement.” To Baron, Bezos is clearly not a bad guy simply because he is so rich.

Actually, upon buying The Post, Bezos set in motion a process beginning in early 2015 to come up with “a phrase that would convey an idea, not a product.” He said it called for a phrase “both aspirational and disruptive,” being “‘not a paper I want to subscribe to,’ as Bezos put it, ‘rather an idea I want to belong to.’”

So Bezos, after a long search process, came up with the slogan, himself, Baron recounted.

It’s brilliant!