Baquet, who will appear as keynote speaker at Colorado SunFest <\/a>at the University of Denver on May 1, also reflected on the challenges posed by covering a president with a well-documented penchant for lying<\/a>, lessons he learned from mopping and things he might do differently today if life offered do-overs.<\/p>\n The following conversation with Sun publisher Larry Ryckman this week has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Sun: I\u2019m going to go way back to when you were a kid. As I understand, you routinely mopped the floor of your family\u2019s Creole diner in the mornings before attending classes in high school. What lessons did you learn in those days that served you as a journalist and as a leader?<\/p>\n Baquet: Oh, that\u2019s a great question. Hard work, obviously. Getting up early, obviously. Being responsible. We lived in the back of my father and mother\u2019s restaurant in New Orleans, and you obviously could not skip mopping. I mean, if you didn\u2019t do it, somebody else had to do it. So I think hard work and responsibility. And I think of myself as somebody who always worked hard and has always worked hard. And also, frankly, watching them and seeing them every day as two people who built a restaurant from nothing. I learned a lot about working hard and being responsible.<\/p>\n Sun: Thinking back on it, it\u2019s also attention to detail, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n Baquet: Totally. Attention to detail completely. And also a little bit of empathy for people. It\u2019s easy when you\u2019re not working with your hands, it\u2019s easy when you\u2019re not cleaning up, though everybody ends up cleaning up behind people at some point in their lives, but it\u2019s easy to forget what it\u2019s like to actually work and get your hands dirty, literally physically dirty. So it just makes you a more empathetic person too, I think.<\/p>\n Sun: You\u2019ve had a distinguished career and been at the center of many big stories, including at the Times during Donald Trump\u2019s first term. As you look back, what are you most proud of and is there anything you\u2019d like to go back and do differently?<\/p>\n Baquet: You know, as far as stories are concerned, I\u2019m proud of a lot of stories. I\u2019m probably proudest of the Harvey Weinstein stories<\/a>. I was the editor of the Times when we investigated Harvey Weinstein, the movie and theater producer, which led to the beginning of the MeToo movement. I\u2019m really proud of that. I thought it was an example of what happens when journalists are very, very ambitious and do a very difficult story that maybe could have been done even years before. I\u2019m really proud of that.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot I wish I could do over again. I guess the first thing is, I think journalists, myself included, were too slow to understand the possibilities of the internet age. I think we were so focused on the things we did to produce a print newspaper that when this new thing came along, we got scared.\u00a0<\/p>\n And we were a little bit set in our ways. I\u2019m speaking of myself, frankly, but also my generation of journalists. I thought it was new and disruptive. And I think we only started to understand later, in some cases a little too late, that this could be better, that we could reach more people, that we could have more impact, that we could mash up disciplines, suddenly in a news report, video could mash up with words in a very powerful way.\u00a0<\/p>\n If I had to do it over again, the first time I heard the word internet, I would have jumped for joy instead of like everybody else in my generation sort of getting nervous about it.<\/p>\n Sun: You\u2019ve been critical of some of the language and actions coming out of the current White House directed toward journalists. We all have learned in this business to develop a pretty thick skin. But so why should the average person care if the president calls journalists the enemy of the people or worse?<\/p>\n Baquet: I think we should care because this is not about criticism of individual journalists. Individual journalists should have thick skins. And certainly when I was running the New York Times and the LA Times, I had to develop a thick skin, partly because if you believe in the First Amendment, you have to believe that people get the right to criticize you.\u00a0<\/p>\n But I think what this White House has done is undermine the First Amendment and journalism in a much more profound way. This is not like saying \u201cLarry or Dean, I think you\u2019re a jerk,\u201d or \u201cLarry or Dean, you got it wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEnemy of the People\u201d has a very powerful connotation in American vernacular. And what it really says is not that we got it wrong. What it says is that we intentionally are doing things to undermine the democracy. It\u2019s an unfounded attack and it\u2019s very powerful and it undermines journalists and it undermines the First Amendment.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I think this is one we should be very anxious about and talk about and own up to the fact that we\u2019re gonna have to do everything we can to make sure people understand that that\u2019s what it is.<\/p>\n Sun: Clearly, these are unprecedented times and we\u2019re hearing language that we\u2019ve just never heard before coming out of an occupant of the Oval Office. Journalists struggled, certainly in his first term, to deal with that. And we as an industry struggled with, do you call it a lie? Is it a misstatement? Language is important. We\u2019re in the language business. I wonder if you might just talk a little bit about that and maybe what we got right collectively, what we might\u2019ve done differently and have we learned anything since that first term?<\/p>\n Baquet: So we were among the first, if not the first, to use the word \u201clie\u201d and very hesitantly, waiting for the right moment. First off, you don\u2019t want to use the word \u201clie\u201d capriciously, right? You don\u2019t want to. If the governor says his budget is $1 billion and it turns out to be $1.2 billion, that\u2019s not a lie. It might be a lie, but it\u2019s not easily described as a lie.\u00a0<\/p>\n We chose to do it when Trump continued to insist that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, against all evidence. And that was clearly a lie. I do think we were surprised and got caught a little flat-footed by this president.\u00a0<\/p>\n Presidents lie about big things. They lie about where we are in the state of the Vietnam War. They lie about the reasons for going to war in Iraq. They lie about big things. This is a president who frankly lies about big things and small things. He lies about the size of his crowd. He lies about conversations he\u2019s had that he\u2019s not had. And I think we were floored by that, frankly. We were a little bit slow to know how to call it out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Our critics say you should constantly use (the word \u201clie\u201d). But I\u2019ve also talked to people who think that that sort of degrades the language itself and that we can end up losing some of our credibility because the news report starts to look like a scream instead of sober coverage of a very difficult president.\u00a0<\/p>\n So I think we were a bit slow. It was less than using the word lie, because I think we did do that. It was more like, we never had a precedent. Look at today\u2019s news. We have a president who tweeted out a picture of himself as Christ<\/a>. You know, how do you cover stuff like that?\u00a0<\/p>\n There are people who say, \u201cYou guys cover him too much and you let him dominate the news.\u201d There are other people who say: \u201cThat is an amazing and outrageous thing for a president to do and you should cover it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That balance, and frankly, every day, several times a day, is really difficult to get right. I do think that in the second term, the press has gotten the balance much better. I think it was a big surprise in the first months of, you know, how do you cover a guy who gets out and says something demonstrably false like, \u201cI had the biggest crowd ever?<\/a>\u201d Or, you know, \u201cMy uncle taught the Unabomber.<\/a>\u201d You know, do you want to have 10 stories a day where you describe the lie and then frankly lose the sober ability to cover the news and to separate the serious from the less serious? It\u2019s tricky.<\/p>\n Sun: We\u2019ve seen CBS News come under new ownership and new leadership. CNN appears headed for an ownership change too, putting it under a family with close ties to the president. Here in Colorado, Denver\u2019s NBC affiliate 9News is about to shift apparently from being owned by Tegna to Nexstar<\/a>. What\u2019s your take on all of this consolidation and acquisition? Should Americans be concerned?<\/p>\n Baquet: Yes, I think Americans should be concerned. I think Americans should be concerned because news organizations that are owned \u2026 by companies that are dependent on the government for regulation and for other things are harder to act independently. Right?\u00a0<\/p>\n We saw it with, you know, one of the networks cut a deal with the White House. \u2026 The buyers of CBS had to court the White House<\/a> before they could buy it. The same buyers, the same institution is buying CNN<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n That undermines their independence or the appearance of their independence. In the, if you want to say, the golden era of journalism, networks were very powerful and independent and they could act without fear or favor of a White House or a regulatory agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n Frankly, one of the things I\u2019m proudest of The New York Times, is that the family that controls the Times, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, they don\u2019t own anything else other than the New York Times. In fact, after one of the networks acquiesced, I sent a text to A.G. Sulzberger, who\u2019s the current publisher and representative of the family that controls the Times. I sent him a text saying, Boy, am I glad you guys chose not to be really, really rich. They don\u2019t own anything. The only pressure you could put on them is the pressure you put on The New York Times.<\/p>\n Sun: We\u2019re talking about broadcast television, but of course we\u2019ve seen the same sort of consolidation, acquisition, closures, whatnot, in the newspaper sphere for 20-plus years. Again, I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll talk about this more at Colorado SunFest, but what are your thoughts about the current state of American newspapers in general?\u00a0<\/p>\n Baquet: I would say mostly scared. I mean, I\u2019ve spent a lot of the last almost four years since I stepped aside as editor, visiting newsrooms, helping newsrooms. The days of the big regional powerful news organizations that could stand up to the governor and the mayor, those days are fading.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are a lot of really strong regional news organizations, but not the way they were. Whole parts of America that are not covered. Suburbs that never see a reporter. Institutions, school boards that used to have reporters covering them every day that don\u2019t see journalists anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n The good news, though, is a lot of the startups, a lot of the relatively new news organizations, some of which you know of course, do really good work and are different and frankly do things better than we did.\u200b\u200b They\u2019re more connected to the communities, work really, really hard to understand their communities, are humble because they need readers more than my generation.\u00a0<\/p>\n Newspapers were funded by advertisers, and I think that kept us a little distant from our audiences. I think the new players are much, much more connected to their audiences, and that\u2019s the good news. And they\u2019re also not afraid of experimentation. Not afraid of playing with a new technology. And that\u2019s very cool to watch, honestly.<\/p>\n Sun: Do you have a quick bit of advice for people to help them gauge whether or not the (news) sources they\u2019re reading are trustworthy? How do you look at it?<\/p>\n Baquet: My advice is: Settle on The Colorado Sun, The New York Times, and a handful of news organizations that you trust and really invest in them. You know, if it\u2019s a nonprofit, donate to them. If it\u2019s not a nonprofit, if it\u2019s a subscription, buy a subscription. Help support the news organizations that you trust. And frankly, stay away from the ones that you don\u2019t. Don\u2019t spread misinformation yourself. And just really support a handful of news organizations because they work really hard and they\u2019re gonna do everything they can to give you trusted information. So help them out.<\/p>\n Type of Story: Q&A<\/p>\n An interview to provide a relevant perspective, edited for clarity and not fully fact-checked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former New York Times editor Dean Baquet said Americans should be concerned about consolidation in the network television…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[78915,78916,153,1208,9,11,10,23328,24995,69541,2556],"class_list":["post-197955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-colorado-sunfest","tag-dean-baquet","tag-donald-trump","tag-media","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-newspapers","tag-nexstar","tag-tegna","tag-television"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Screenshot-2026-04-14-at-7.16.01-PM-1.png\")
Dean Baquet, former New York Times editor. (Handout)<\/p>\n