Kalb hello, welcome to the National Press club and another edition of the kalb report. Im marvin kalb. On our program tonight, we are talking guardians of the Fourth Estate and our guardians are our guest. Dean baquet, executive editor of the New York Times and martin baron, executive editor of the Washington Post, arguably the two most influential editors of the two most influential newspapers in the country. Dean has been in this job since 2014, having earlier served as managing editor and washington newspapers in the country. Dean has been in this job since 2014, having earlier served as managing editor and Washington Bureau chief of the times. He also edited the Los Angeles Times and won by a Pulitzer Prize reporting for the Chicago Tribune and started his newspaper career way back when as a Young Journalist at the Times Picayune in new orleans. Martin baron, marty to most of his friends joined the Washington Post in 2013 after 11 years editing the boston globe. Both papers under his leadership harvested 12 poster prizes. 12 bullet surprises. Blitzer Pulitzer Prizes. Baron also in earlier times helped edit the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the miami herald. Allow me to start our discussion tonight with a simple proposition, that in a democracy such as ours, if freedom of the press is jeopardized then democracy itself is jeopardized. Each one is linked to the other. During the president ial campaign of 2016, candidate donald trump routinely criticized the press or the media, humiliating a number of reporters, bullying others, challenging the very concept of freedom of the press as written into the First Amendment of the u. S. Constitution. Many said this is all campaign talk, if he won been this would inevitably change, that that is the way it has always been. Well, he won and it has not changed, indeed it has gotten much worse, even on occasion, frightening. And i use that word, deliberately. The word of the president is much more consequential than the word of a candidate. I know that other president s have had their quarrels with the media, but donald trump crossed a bright red line when he accused reporters of being the enemies of the American People. Forgetting that that phrase was a favorite of many 20th century dictators. He has gone further, warning that he might change libel laws, that reporters might have to reveal their sources on Sensitive National security stories or risk imprisonment. Even warning networks such as nbc that their licenses for broadcast might be revoked if their news stories displease the white house. Stories called fake news. What is President Trump seeking to accomplish in this running war with the media and what should the presss response be . So, dean, marty, welcome, good to have you both with us. How does one cover a President Trump in a wild era of expending Digital Horizons . How do you do that without at the same time perhaps undercutting your own traditional standards of mainstream journalism . Dean . Dean baquet first of all, you start by holding onto your standards of journalism, truth, fairness, aggressive, skeptical. I think you hold onto those things and obviously, you have to cover him as you would any president at a remarkable speed and with him, you have to dodge the fact that yes, what you said with is true. I think what he says is an attempt to appeal to his base by making the press look like it is not fair, and by turning the press into a punching bag. I think over the long haul, if you tell the truth, if you are accurate and aggressive and fair and you hold onto your principles, i think in the end, you will recover. Host the question i am trying to get at is that this president has a very skillful way of dominating the environment, he is all over the place. He does that with his tweets, with his personality and his style. How do you keep up with that kind of domination of the environment . Do you have enough reporters . Do you have to stick to your basic rules as dean was saying before and still be able to cover him . Marty baron i think so, i agree with dean. We have new ways of publishing, we publish at a greater speed, we have to publish immediately, people expect to get their news immediately, typically on their cell phone. The instant that it happens, that poses a challenge to us. But we still have our values, our mission, that remains the same. Every day when i walk into our newsroom, we have the principles of the Washington Post on the wall facing me, and the very first which has been there for more than 80 years is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained. There is a sense of striving there, because the truth can be elusive but it says that there is such a thing as the truth. It is not just a matter of personal opinion, there is a truth and our job is to come in every day and do our work and try to determine the truth. That is exactly what we do, it is nothing fancy, it is our work, the same work we have been doing for decades. Host you use the word truth. This is a president who has been violating the truth almost on a daily basis. We use the word lie now routinely to describe many of the things that a president of the United States is saying. You have your standards, and in my judgment they are the right standards, but how do you maintain them when the man you are covering is not dealing with the truth on many occasions . Dean baquet i actually chose to use the word lie on the front page of the times. It was a controversial decision and i think a lot of thoughtful editors would disagree with it but we do not do it all the time, we did it that one time. I think the way that we cover it is, if he says x and it is wrong, you report out why. I think what marty said is true, i think you report aggressively and i think you sort of layout the facts, that is what we have been doing since i started as a reporter in 1977. I do not think it is different, i think it is faster, i think it is even more aggressive. We have done things, newspapers have done things like that uphold truth squad operations. We no longer wait the way that we did when i started for 23 days to evaluate whether a politician is telling the truth, we try to do it immediately. We set up systems to do it immediately. It is sometimes easier to check things today, the internet may have perils but it also has great gifts. Its hard to check ally that a lieis hard to check that quickly, isnt it . If the president says he is going to cut the program by half 1 billion, i do not think that is easy. Anything that is 90 of the things youre talking about. It is easy, you just challenge him, you reported out and you lay it out. Host marty, when the president dismisses some of your best reporting as fake news, when according to many polls, from 30 40 of the American People are buying into that description, how do you deal with that . How do you fight back . Marty baron we do our job. I realize they are looking for something more, but i do not think there is a lot more to it. The president on his first day in office went to the cia headquarters and said, i have a war with the press. The reality is we do not have a war with him, we are not at war, we are at work. We are doing our jobs every day the same way we have always done it. You talk about fact checking, we have had Fact Checkers at the Washington Post for a long time, well before the trump administration, in fact we doubled the size. We added an extra person. We have more people doing it who have been doing fact checks for a long time. They have to be busier these days than they were in the past, i have to say, [laughter] but they are doing the same sort of work everything all day. The very fact that the president is attacking us does not change things. We cannot just be reactive to that, we have to go out, gather the facts, provide the context and do it in an honorable and honest way. That is what we endeavor to do every single day. Host what has been different about covering trump . Well, it is a more hostile environment, there is no question about that. He was attacking us during the campaign regularly, even withdrew credentials from the Washington Post for a time. He condemned us, he sought to delegitimize us, even dehumanize us. Garbage andcum and the lowest form of humanity. When that was not enough, he called us the lowest form of life itself. He has also threatened us in the way of talking about the possibility of litigation against us, suggesting as has been reported by the New York Times in his conversations with the former fbi director, the prospect of wanting to send some reporters to jail for leaks. Particularly of classified information. So this is what is different, it is more threatening and hostile environment. Dean baquet i agree with marty, if i could add, it is also a significant shift in the culture of washington. There has always been a tense relationship, i was in the Washington Bureau i was the chief of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times for five years and i never met barack obama the entire time. There was a notion that papers like the post and the New York Times had a cozy relationship but i actually do not want to have a cozy relationship with the u. S. President. I dont go to the christmas parties. I dont go to the white house correspondents dinner. But, President Trump turned up the volume, there is no question, he dramatically changed the culture of washington. I know that this is not the sexiest answer, but i actually think that calls for us to stick to our principles even more. It calls for us to hold on to the same values, the fairness, the toughness, but especially there are these traditional journalism standards that i think have been threatened in some institutions in the digital age, even before the arrival of donald trump. If anything, i think the last year has been a call to hold onto those and to hold onto them tightly. Host i want to tell you a story. Back in 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the baseball barrier on color, he still faced a great deal of prejudice and he got into a lot of fights. His boss pulled him aside one day and said, jackie, dont punch back, just beat them on the field. Turn that into journalism now, how do you adjust to the almost daily taunts and jabs and insults of the president , without punching back . You are all making it seem, both of you, that it is the same, your principles are the same, everything is hunkydory, but it cannot be. How do you not . Marty baron you say that it cannot be, but it is. [laughter] i do not think it is true, i think we have come to expect it. It happens every other day, may be every day. To someas become degree, like background music. And it is not pleasant background music, but it is background music. If we are going to react to this every single day and get worked up about it, spend our time making an issue out of it all the time, we would not be able to do our job. If that is what he wants to do, that is what he wants to do, we know what we want to do. We want to do our job and that is what we will continue to do. Host you and i and everyone in this room knows that there are people who argue that the two of you, the New York Times and Washington Post are in a kind of unseemly competition. [laughter] to topple this president , to pull another watergate. What i would like to know from you, how do you respond to that kind of criticism which is not widespread, but it is there . Dean baquet marty and i are friends, friends, and we have a tremendous the only competition is between us, it is not a competition to topple the president. I sincerely believe that i do agree that the washington pos and the New York Times are at the forefront of the story right now. I cannot imagine what it would be like if it was only one of us because it would mean that the other newspaper would be under tremendous pressure. But i will say that one of the most under discussed and undervalued qualities in a journalism that drives much more journalism than anybody realizes is competition. I hate it when i get beat, he hates it when he gets beat, the thought that we could collude to do anything [laughter] it is utterly ridiculous, except obviously, if we could collude to fight for our values. To collude to talk about the First Amendment. But the thought that we would be anything other than friendly and admiring but vicious competitors, while he is vicious [laughter] competitors . He had told me that it is better the both of us are in there, i have invited him to cede the territory to us. We contested and we will see how it goes. [laughter] host i would like to get your judgment on when the president keeps attacking the press, what is his ultimate aim . What is he seeking . To accomplish . You said before playing into his base, but is that it, is that all he is trying to accomplish . Dean baquet i will fall short of psychoanalyzing him, but if you look at Donald Trumps pattern through the campaign and as president first off, he clearly goes after his critics. And i think he goes after in particular critics and people of independent standing, which the press certainly does. Early in his presidency he went after the judiciary. Probably arguably the most independent and protected entities in society are the judiciary and the press. First of all i think that all president s are frustrated by the power of the press, the fact that they cannot tell us what to do and the fact that we at our and the fact that, at our best we push back at them hard. , but i think for a guy who grew up in the world of business, i think it makes him nuts. He is also a guy who grew up manipulating the press, page six was his playground. He famously announced a divorce to page 6 before he told his wife, i think. And he arrived in washington at the pinnacle of it all and here are these jerks who push and push them to do our jobs. Host you do not see a larger political purpose or ideology being served here . Dean baquet there is the obvious one, he plays to a base which generally might believe the press anyway but i think there is frustration. His m. O. In new york was to manipulate the press, and he got away with it, mainly the tabloids. So part of it is strategic but i think part of it is he is just a guy who finds himself confronting a very different kind of press than he confronted when he lived in the role of tabloid journalism in new york. Host is it possible that by attacking the press, by creating this sense of fake news, by delegitimizing what it is you do for a living to the American People, that he may succeed . That at the end of the day his vision may triumph . One, do you think that is possible . And two, what is the price of letting this happen . Marty baron it has a corrosive effect, no doubt about it. He is obviously saying something that appeals to a large segment of the population, Approval Ratings for the press are quite low and has continued to go down over decades. That is the same for major institutions of american society. We have the not great distinction of being a little ahead of congress on that front. [laughter] but the polls have actually shown a significant decline, particularly in the past year in the approval of the presidency as well, to the point where our standing and the presidency check outstanding are beginning to intersect. So if you look at the polls, if you look at them more recently, we have actually begun to see a little uptick in the standing of the press among the American Public. People see us doing our work in my view is that we have to look at this over the long run, will our reporting be validated over the long run. If you go back to watergate, for example, we had a president at the time was sharply critical of the press, spiro agnew before he had resigned was a designated attack dog and he embraced that will. The full ratings for the press jury the watergate investigation were very low. A huge segment of the American Population saw them as an enterprise and then it turned out that the reporting was validated and the Approval Ratings for the press after the nixon resignation went up. To the highest point that weve seen, which is not always so high. The mid50s is about as high as we are going to get because we are always going to upset somebody. So i take the long view of our standing among the American People. Mr. Kalb how does one reconstitute trust after you have eroded it. How do you gain back the confidence of the American People which you spend a lot of time and money doing is valuable and important . How do you sell that . Dean i may be naive, i actually think that when the press does its job, and it does its job which is to be an aggressive questioning watchdog of government, even if it drops it comes back, the press does its job vietnam, or, the press did not do its job during the buildup of the iraq war i think when the press is aggressive and does its job, even if it temporarily loses trust, if it holds on to its values, i think history is filled with examples of where it comes back. I think as long as you get it right, as long as you stand up to power, as long as you aggressively question, as long as you hold on to all of that, i just do not think you lose. And i think history is behind us on that. Mr. Kalb you do