Former ‘Post’ editor Marty Baron on his ‘Collision of Power’ with Trump, Bezos

The front page of The Washington Post newspaper from Aug. 6, 2013, the day after it was announced that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had agreed to purchase the newspaper from the Graham family.

Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Former newspaper executive Marty Baron has overseen some of the biggest stories in American journalism. In 2000, he served as an editor at the Miami Herald during the presidential election recount, which hinged on results from Florida. Later, he presided over The Boston Globe during the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, which was dramatized in the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight.

His new book, Collision of Power, focuses on his time as the executive editor of The Washington Post. One issue that came up early during his tenure at The Post was the decision to publish Edward Snowden’s revelations of government surveillance.

“You don’t make a snap decision on those sorts of things,” he tells Fresh Air of the Snowden story. “I didn’t want to be necessarily party to doing anything that would endanger the lives of ordinary people and the security of the country. On the other hand, there was a surveillance regime in this country that had been put in place by the intelligence community.“

Baron began at The Post just a few months before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos purchased the newspaper in 2013 from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933.

“We were in the position of managing decline at The Post,” Baron says of the sale. “Bezos obviously knows technology extremely well. And importantly, in my view, he also understands consumer behavior. And he certainly has the resources to invest for the kind of…