No boss is perfect, but if Ben Smith’s latest column digging deep into reporters’ grievances with Marty Baron represents the very worst of it, the Washington Post executive editor seems like a pretty great boss.
Although Smith’s piece in its entirety is about the escalating war of the wokes within newsrooms across the industry, Baron is cast as a central villain in the story of Wesley Lowery, the Pulitzer-winning journalist who recently left the Washington Post to join CBS News. Smith doesn’t focus in detail on the social media fracas that erupted from his colleagues at the New York Times but rather on Lowery’s tiff with Baron. Central to Lowery’s claims is that Baron repeatedly chastised him for his conduct on Twitter. In Smith’s framing, it’s because Baron wanted Lowery to dial down his commentary on Black Lives Matter and race. But there’s another read of his report that seems a little more likely and a lot more generous.
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“By 2016, the executive editor had gathered examples of what he saw as misconduct, from Mr. Lowery’s tweet mocking attendees at a Washington book party as ‘decadent aristocrats’ to one tweet criticizing a New York Times report on the Tea Party,” Smith wrote. But in the complete complaint obtained by Smith, it’s clear that Baron objected to three infractions: first, overtly political comments that could compromise Lowery’s reputation as an objective news reporter, then a highly political attack on a direct competitor at the New York Times, and, most importantly, a series of public remarks attacking his colleagues at the Washington Post.
You can gripe with specific aspects of the Washington Post’s relatively stringent social media policy, but it’s pretty clear that Baron is fundamentally trying to do two of the most important things editors must do in our stupid, social media-ridden times. First, he’s protecting the credibility of his brand by preventing news reporters from outing themselves as too political, and second, he’s preventing his newsroom from becoming toxic by forbidding his employees from attacking their peers. These are consistent and compelling standards, and ones that ultimately benefit employees.
Some of these stipulations, such as not criticizing competitors or voicing political opinions, are irrelevant to opinion writers, media critics, or even reporters at outlets such as Vox or National Review, which openly acknowledge their political bent. But Baron’s most salient concern, namely that his employees shouldn’t attack their colleagues, is a good general rule for every newsroom. Although we certainly don’t want to prevent whistleblowers from exposing legitimately abusive behavior — NBC’s culture of silence protecting Matt Lauer comes to mind — it’s a lot nicer to work at a place without the threat of your colleagues bullying you publicly hanging over your head.
Otherwise, what do you get? Woke mobs running roughshod over editorial standards and attempting to get their colleagues fired. It’s not only wildly unprofessional and devastating to a brand’s journalistic integrity. It’s also tactically dumb not to use the nation’s most prestigious opinion papers to hash out cogent arguments rather than fulminate on Twitter.
