Why has there been a sharp decline in institutional trust amongst Americans and how can that confidence be rebuilt? This week Gerard Baker joins host Roger Ream to discuss the loss of trust in American institutions (particularly in the media, government, and big business), the reasons behind that decline and the impact of globalization. Plus, the true value of objective intellectual diversity in journalism.
Gerard Baker is the editor-at-large at The Wall Street Journal and was recently named TFAS Media Fellow. Baker writes a weekly column for the editorial page and hosts a weekly podcast, both named “Free Expression.” He has written and broadcasted for a wide range of outlets including the Financial Times, The Times of London and the BBC. His latest book is “American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence.”
Episode Transcript
The transcript below is lightly edited for clarity.
Roger Ream [00:00:02] Welcome to the Liberty + Leadership Podcast, a conversation with TFAS alumni, faculty, and friends who are making an impact today. I’m your host, Roger Ream. I’m pleased to welcome Gerard Baker to the podcast today. Mr. Baker, hereafter referred to as Gerry, is Editor-at-Large at The Wall Street Journal. There, he writes a weekly column for the editorial page called “Free Expression,” that appears each Tuesday morning. He hosts a weekly podcast of the same name where he interviews the world’s leading writers, influencers and thought leaders about a variety of subjects. Gerry also writes a weekly column for The Times of London. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2018. Prior to that, he was Deputy Editor in Chief from 2009 to 2013. He’s been a journalist for more than 30 years, writing and broadcasting for news organizations, including tenure at the Financial Times, The Times of London and the BBC. Gerry is the author of “American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence,” published in 2023. In addition to all this, I’m very excited to announce that Gerry has just been named TFAS Media Fellow, a position that will facilitate his involvement in working with TFAS and our Center on Excellence in Journalism. Gerry, welcome to the show.
Gerard Baker [00:01:42] So, first of all, thanks very much, Roger, for having me on for this discussion, and more importantly, thanks for having me as part of the TFAS Team in the alliance. The work that the team and The Wall Street Journal have done, together, I’m really honored and privileged to be a part of that. So, thank you very much for all that you do too and the great educational work that you do.
Roger Ream [00:02:01] Let’s begin by talking about your superb book, “American Breakdown.” The book begins with a discussion of the loss of trust in American institutions. Those institutions you mentioned, many include government, the media, education, both higher education, public education, science, big business and many others. Let me first ask you, what inspired you to write the book, and how did you kind of go about the writing process?
Gerard Baker [00:02:31] I mean, the answer to how the book came about is, so I was editor The Wall Street Journal, Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal, which is the new side of The Wall Street Journal, if you like, for about five and a half, maybe in six years. And during that time, I hope the two things are not directly connected, but it was very obvious to me as it’s obvious to everybody, but I had a kind of a ringside seat of the process. The trust in the media was declining at a dramatic pace. I mean, it’s been declining for some time, but in that period in particular, which is roughly 2012, 2013 to about 2018, 2019, we saw this extraordinary decline. I could see that there was a decline in media. You could just see the people didn’t really trust what they were reading in the news. But it was evidence particularly backed up by data. Lots of polls are done on how much trust people have in Americans have in their various institutions. And trust in the media declined precipitously during that time, in what we think of what people call the mainstream media. And again, as the editor of The Wall Street Journal, I was close up to that. I should say, I’m glad to say, too, that The Wall Street Journal was a pretty notable exception to that. Trust levels did decline in The Wall Street Journal, but by nothing like as much as the rest of the mainstream media, the New York Times or television networks or things of that sort. So, I had this opportunity to see what was going on with the media, how and why the big news organizations in America were basically losing the trust of Americans at a very, very rapid rate. People did not believe what they read or saw. I tried to address that again, obviously in my day job as it was editor of the Wall Street Journal. But when I stepped down as editor of the Wall Street Journal, I thought this was it seemed to me this was a real profound problem in American politics and culture, that if people don’t trust the media, then they don’t trust the information they’re getting, then how can they be well informed to make decisions that affect their lives, decisions about the affect the lives of the life of the country, about democracy. So, I started to look at it in more detail. I had more time. I was no longer working as editor. I was then writing for the editorial page. I looked into this in some detail, sort of what had gone on with the media, but then it occurred to me in a sort of quite emphatic way that actually this decline in trust was not just trust in the media among Americans, it was trust in pretty much every single major institution of American life. Obviously, the federal government, legislative and judicial branches. Big decline in trust in big business, academia and education more generally. Even public health, public health institutions, technology companies, every one of these institutions that play such vital roles in our lives and in American democracy, the polling indicates the survey evidences over the last 20 years, trust has declined precipitously. So, this is what sort of inspired me to write the books. I started out again from very much my own direct experience in the media, but it obviously was clear that this was a much broader pathology of American. Life. So, that’s how we started out, and then the answer to your second question is how did I go start going about doing that? Well, I really pulled over a lot of this data, this survey data we had, we have which Gallup to a polling every year on trust in major institutions. Pew, the big research, the big public opinion research organization does similar polling. There’s other polling, this other survey evidence, and then there’s a lot of some sort of literature on it, obviously secondary literature, academic literature, issues. By the way, one other important phenomenon, which I’m sure we’ll talk about is not just trust in institutions, but trust that Americans have in each other, and there’s lots of, again, social science research on this, sort of academic research on what’s called, social capital that is the mutual trust that Americans have, how that has declined too. So, I pulled through this data, did spoke to quite a lot of people. People who are familiar with a lot of this work spoke to draw drew on my own experience. You know from the book there’s quite a few examples from my own experience as a journalist, over 30 years here in this country, examples of decline, of reasons why trust is declined. I started to put it together like that.
Roger Ream [00:06:50] Yes, and we’ll dig into some of those, different institutions. But you do distinguish at the outset the difference between mistrust and distrust, and that’s probably worth mentioning. And, that some level of, I think, mistrust can be healthy. Skepticism or mistrust in institutions is not wholly a bad thing, right?
Gerard Baker [00:07:16] Yeah, exactly. Look, I know this is semantic difference, some people think mistrust and distrust is the same. I was trying to make a distinction between exactly what you describe, Roger, which is you can have a healthy mistrust. Look, in many ways, the history is, as I say in the book, the United States was founded on, mistrust, if you like, or a lack of trust in the in the ruling authority, across the water in England, and a kind of healthy mistrust in government, in powerful institutions in full and American life and democracy, literally, since its foundation very much informs the Constitution. I mean, so many of the principles of the Constitution, the separation of powers, federalism, all those things are built on an understanding that the Founding fathers had, that institutions can become too powerful and that there is a mistrust of them. So, we need to build a set of institutions that allows for the fact that people are understandably, untrusting, or mistrusting those issues. So, that can be healthy. And again, I think, in many ways, again, that’s almost what defines America that you’re doing in distinction say from many other countries in the world where people sort of accept authority and say: “Yes, this is authority. This must be right. These people working with you can go back to the divine right of king in Europe from most of European history up until about 150 years ago. Or you go to other cultures, there is a sense that authority must and can be trusted. Americans have always been skeptical about that. So, that’s healthy. I think where it becomes unhealthy is where people simply stop trusting. Those just skeptical of their institutions aren’t just querying and unwilling to place their faith in these institutions, but actively don’t believe anything those institutions say to them and don’t believe, crucially, that those institutions are acting in their interest, that becomes very, very unhealthy. That is the situation we’ve got today with many people. Think again, whether it is the federal government, whether it’s the media, whether it’s academia or whether it’s big business, these big, these big powerful companies, they not only just have a kind of healthy skepticism about what they’re doing, they actively think that they are deceiving them, misleading them and actually not serving them and not acting in the interests of the public. And I do want to stress, and I stress in the book that one of the one of reasons has been this decline in trust and this growth in distrust is that the institutions themselves have forfeited that trust. To some extent, maybe we can talk about the extent to which this is part of a culture of people sort of believing crazy things and conspiracy theories and stuff like that, there is an element of that, but actually I think at the core of this is that these big institutions have forfeited the trust of Americans through their actions, through their behavior, through some of the things we’ve seen over the last 20 years.
Roger Ream [00:10:27] Yeah, we’ll get more into the source of that problem, but let me, just dive a little more into the news media. As you note in your book, it was as early as the 60s and 70s, particularly conservatives start to complain about the media bias, but what we’ve seen in more recent years, that you talk about so well from your own experiences, drifting in the news section of the paper, even if we thought the papers might be editorially biased and more liberal, you could rely on a newspaper to give you good information, to report the stories, the facts of the stories. But it seems now that most news sections, not all, and The Wall Street Journal have been exception as regard, but have been pushing an agenda, not just giving us the account of what happened. You note that we’ve seen so many journalists coming out of a lead American institution of higher education where there’s this uniform mindset in many cases. What’s caused this trend where the news sections became indistinguishable from the opinion sections in newspapers?
Gerard Baker [00:11:37] Yeah, it is one of the key questions, Roger. Look, just to bring it, right up to the present as we’re recording this.
Roger Ream [00:11:44] Week before Labor Day.
Gerard Baker [00:11:45] After the Democratic convention, in late August, we saw the coverage of the Democratic convention. There was some reasonably objective critical coverage, but so much of the coverage and I’m not talking here in the opinion pages exactly as you say, I’m talking in the news pages, but also on main use of the TV networks or the cable news networks. We just see this sort of hagiographic, incredibly sort of propagandistic coverage of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party. That has become pretty well routine, that you see this and this is one of the reasons. And as you say: “Why so much distrust has arisen.” Look, I think the reason for this is, and there are a number of things, again, I talk about in the book, I think it is partly and again, you touch on this, it’s partly a kind of a demographic phenomenon with journalists, actually. So, back in the days, especially in the day, sort of before Watergate, let’s go back to the 50s, 60s in particular, and before that, these people became journalists tended to be, journalism was a kind of a craft. It was not a profession. People didn’t really see it particularly as the profession. It didn’t really require professional qualifications, didn’t even require, for most people a bachelor’s degree, to become a journalist, but you had to have curiosity, a certain amount of tenacity, an intelligence, certainly, a kind of lively intelligence, just a fundamental desire to find out what’s going on, whether in your locality to write about crime or whether it’s writing about what’s going on in Washington politics. It was just that sense of curiosity about understanding what’s going on. We see the official information was put out by institutions, what’s really going on. And that’s really how journalism suddenly took journalism, I think came to be as good as it was in America in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. And because it was done by people who didn’t really have a kind of particular ideological position, but they just wanted to find out, they wanted to find out what was happening. Beginning in the 60s and then dramatically accelerated by Watergate, in particular, in the kind of journalism, the sort of heroism, phenomenon that journalism was that was conferred on journalism by Watergate. The demography of journalists changed dramatically. You had to go to college, you had to have a bachelor’s degree. In almost all cases, you’d have a master’s degree, perhaps in journalism, and these institutions that would confer journalism degrees on people and often the people who would go and work for the New York Times, The Washington Post, he news divisions of the major television networks would then be graduates of Ivy League colleges, very, very well-educated, often from a particular sort of demographic in the country. Because they considered themselves of higher intellectual standing, they didn’t really want to just go out there and find out what was going on. They didn’t want to go out and find out information. They wanted to tell people. They sort of grown up in this kind of culture, particularly being educated in these expensive universities, this sort of culture of ideological, if you like, embracing sort of particular ideology. And of course, the dominant ideology was liberal, kind of liberal left, and they wanted to take that into their jobs, into their professions as journalism became. So, they became kind of proselytize of an ideological position, whether it was on social issues or the role of on issues like abortion and guns, or gay marriage, things like that, or whether it was on economic issues, the role of government, the proper role of government, the proper level of taxation and government spending and the intervention of government in the economy, whether it was on international issues, whether or not we should be strong on U.S. Defense or more internationalists. They had all of these. They came equipped largely with these ideas that came with them from, again, either from their own backgrounds, their own family backgrounds, all the education, the expensive education they received, and they wanted to kind of promote that. They wanted to promote that in their journalism. So again, that that phenomenon really took off post-Watergate in particular 70s, 80s, 90s, and it just continue to this day. On various occasions, there are very surveys done of journalists, and it’s not just an ideological and political kind of uniformity that so many journalists have served as a journalist, 80, 90% vote Democrat or whatever. It’s also the geography of those journalists. There was a study and again, I quote in the book, a few years ago, something like 90% of the journalists at the major news organizations in this country either have been or currently live and work in the major metropolis, grew up or live or work in the broad metropolises of New York, where I am Washington D.C., or San Francisco or Los Angeles, in California. These are such a narrow, sort of field from which to draw people who are writing and covering news for the whole country. So, I think, it’s primarily a demographic factor. As I say in the book, and again, I won’t spend too long, but this was then, compounded by the radical change that came across cost of the news industry in the 2000 when the internet came along, and briefly, newspapers in particular, but also television news was largely funded by advertising till the internet came along. The Wall Street Journal, something like 90% of our revenue was from advertising in the year 2000. Then when the internet came along, that advertising went away from traditional news organizations, particularly newspapers to Google and Facebook and other digital platforms and newspapers, in particular, to some extent is also true of cable news. They had to find alternative sources of revenue, and the alternative source of revenue that they did find was subscription revenue, which is that people would pay to be subscribers to the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post or the L.A. Times or whatever. And when that happens, you get a change in the incentive structure of the people who are paying the salaries of journalists when you had advertising. Advertising, generally speaking, didn’t really mind what the coverage was, didn’t particularly mind what position, what ideological position or cultural position the coverage took. They just wanted to get in front of as many faces, as many eyes as possible, and depending what they were selling, they wanted to either mass market or particular niches. But as long as they were reaching a wide audience, that was their concern. When that’s gone away and that’s largely all gone to digital platforms, and you now have to rely on subscriptions. You have to produce content that appeals to subscribers so that they will part with 100, 200, 300 and $400 a year, to get that daily dose of The New York Times or The Washington Post or whatever it is. And when you do that, and that has been successful, New York Times has done that very successfully, but one of the effects of that is it makes the paper much more responsive to and indeed accountable to their readers. Those readers, whatever it is, the 6, 7 million, 8 million subscribers of The New York Times want their news coverage to have a particular kind of a viewpoint. Now, as it happens, it fits very nicely, as we’ve just talked about, with the kind of with the with the backgrounds of the journalists who do that news, but that reinforces that what I describe as that sort of demographic effect in which journalism changed. So, you now have an economic and commercial incentive to actually for these news organizations to produce news that appeals to a particular audience, and that further drives them in this direction of producing news, essentially increasingly used to be opinion, if you like, increasingly, it blurs the distinction between news and an opinion. And again, all of that means that the wider trust that people have in the news that they’re reading diminishes because they see news and they think: “Well, that’s just somebody’s opinion. I don’t have to believe that, because I know that that person is presenting their very, very strong kind of ideological political opinion. So, I don’t really trust it anymore,” and that’s one of the key things that’s happened to result in trust declining.
Roger Ream [00:20:09] Now, that’s a good analysis, and I note in your book, you identify a major source of the problem by writing that it’s the vast gulf, that’s opened up in the last 30 years between the elites and the rest of the country, and that kind of captures what you’re just saying. But you’re also only kind of half convinced me about another factor that you mentioned in there. And that’s globalization. Now, obviously, you include that in the falling trust in big business, but I think more broadly, you include that in what kind of led to that break between elites and real people, is globalization. I’ve always thought globalization is mostly a good thing. It’s helped much of the world develop and become richer and opening markets and trade between countries is a positive thing. Can you talk a little more about how you write about globalization as a factor?
Gerard Baker [00:21:05] No, I don’t think there’s any question that globalization has produced enormous economic benefits. This is the end of the Cold War, essentially, since the late 1980s. What we associate between roughly 1990 and let’s say the mid-teens, mid 20 teens, 2015, global trade, global capital flows, even global labor flows took off. I mean, absolutely exploded. Standard economic models will tell you that that will result in dramatically improved opportunity, dramatically increased supply, and all of those results in the sharp decline in prices overall global standards of living. I mean, more people have been lifted out of poverty around the world in the last 30 years than have been lifted in the entire history of the world before that. So, I don’t disagree with you there, Roger. All of those things have clearly been benefits with of course, costs. Well, let me move on to that. So, obviously that benefit, that massive benefit of globalization does come with costs, and there’s an economic cost, which we’ve seen here in the United States, particularly industrialized countries for that long period lost as companies moved their production to offshore facilities where wages were much lower, large numbers of jobs were displaced here in the United States. Now, to be absolutely clear, many of those jobs have been replaced. This is the dynamism of capitalism that produced other jobs elsewhere. It also lowered costs for people. So, even as we’ve seen these communities in the United States devastated, if you like, by offshoring places like the Rust Belt in particular, or the textile industry in North Carolina, there’s no question of being replaced by other economic activities, and we can argue about the sort of social merits or economic merit of those, but there’s been benefits. The reason I cite globalization as a reason for declining trust is because in America in particular, but in the West more generally, it’s been associated with two main phenomena. Actually, three main phenomena. One is mass immigration, which we’ve seen, particularly in the last few years, even more than we had in the previous 10 or 20 years, mass immigration and a sense that leaders, whether they’re business leaders or political leaders, are prioritizing immigration over the interests of people are already here, whether they be native population, legal immigrants, people who’ve been here for a long time or whatever. That is created tremendous mistrust or distrust, in both political and business leaders, because people think that “my interests as an American are being essentially subordinated to, or at least put on the same level as people who don’t actually have a right to be here.” We’re talking particularly about illegal immigration. That’s a phenomenon of globalization that’s led to a lot of distrust. The second phenomenon is there’s just no question that businesses have pursued very successfully profits and opportunities by being global companies. And I citing the book anecdotes, I won’t go into them here, but how American companies, the biggest American companies do seem in the process to prioritize the interests of foreign activities over U.S. activities. The best example I can give of that is, this became this was a controversy a few years ago when the whole Black Lives Matter thing was erupting here, take something like the NBA. Basketball has become a very big business. The NBA has pursued opportunities as all professional sports organizations have pursued opportunities in China. So, it pursues those options in China, has huge market in China, big following of NBA, less recently, because of the political tensions. But there’s a big following of the NBA in China. The NBA teams have gone to China, played there, big stars and popular in China and all of that. Hollywood is another example of this. Hollywood has pursued these fantastic opportunities by this growing Chinese market, while at the same time being incredibly critical of what’s going on here in America. The Black Lives Matter movement, again, absolutely catalyzed this because you had these companies or organizations, institutions like the NBA criticizing the nature of American society in basically saying America was a terrible place where minorities were oppressed and treated horribly and was an evil country and had to do something about it while they were going to China and pretty well, literally kowtowing before a regime that oppresses its own people and treats its ethnic minorities far, far worse than the United States does. So, I think, that phenomenon of globalization, where companies pursued opportunities which were not just necessarily to the economic benefit of the United States, but to the kind of broader cultural elevation of other societies, other countries at the expense of the United States. I think that led to significant mistrust, too. And the third way, I think, in which globalization has led to mistrust is just this wider political sense that I think a lot of people do have, that we’ve had successive governments that have pursued the interests of the rest of the world. I’m going to bring this back to the very domestic political issue here, but rather at the expense of America First. So, whether it was pursuing wars in the Middle East, particularly under George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq, or whether it was pursuing, we don’t want to get into the details, the argument about alliances in Europe and NATO, there was this sense that the globalization in its widest sense meant the United States actually prioritizing or at least giving too much weight in its foreign policy and in his outlook on the world to the interests of other countries. Again, I think, I think George. Bush, a great man in many ways, some aspects of his presidency was successful, but that second inaugural address by George W. Bush, in which he basically said it was the U.S.’s goal was to sort of go out and build democracy around the world. I think that created a tremendous backlash. So again, I think the loss of trust that we’ve seen in business, in politics, in our leadership more broadly has been significantly influenced by the sense that they’re pursuing, they have the interests of other countries and other peoples at heart, at least as much of Americans or perhaps in some senses even more than Americans, and understandably, that makes that makes people mistrustful.
Roger Ream [00:28:07] When they do in that pursuit, they often do it very poorly.
Gerard Baker [00:28:10] Yeah, exactly.
Roger Ream [00:28:12] We’re a nonpartisan educational organization, but I do want to ask you a few questions related to the election season, and you’ve written some very powerful columns about it recently. As I understand, you covered both conventions. The one area where trust is certainly a big issue is the integrity of elections. Both sides seem to be attacking the other, threatening democracy or trying to change rules and cheating. It’s really a thorny issue. It seems like that’s one area of a democracy that’s vitally important for people to have trust in, and that’s the fairness of the elections that take place. While you don’t touch on that a lot in the book, it’s certainly related to all the things you do right about there. So, do you have any thoughts on how we restore trust in the integrity of elections?
Gerard Baker [00:29:05] So, there are two things. One of those ones is the very specific kind of allegations which have been proliferating obviously in the last 4 or 5 years about electoral malfeasance, shall we say. Again, whether it’s obviously Donald Trump’s claim that he was cheated out of the 2020 election, you can you can take your pick, by a range of schemes, supposedly, that that cost him that election. Whether it’s the kind of things we’re seeing right now, which is challenges on issues like ballot access, concern on the right of Republicans, that maybe illegal immigrants are being registered to vote and that this could influence the vote, concern on the left, as you kind of hint at about supposedly restrictive measures, states like Georgia, which i whether requiring an ID to vote, other measures that supposedly are restricting access. So, that is a big problem again, on both sides. I think part of the reason for that is we have these close elections now. When Ronald Reagan won in 1984, when he won 49 states. I mean, frankly, if 10 million people had been, it wouldn’t have made the difference to the outcome. Every single election we have these days is decided on a knife edge. So, a few thousand votes in a few states, where there clearly could be fraud, could be decisive. So, I think that’s one of the things we’ve seen. The wider thing, which I do talk about in the book, and this is a real problem. I think this is at the root of the problem about these specific ballot questions and is about trust too. In the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve steadily committed to delegitimizing the other party. But in that, again, this is on both sides. I mean, again, I’ve written very forcefully about Donald Trump in the 2020 election. I think he was wrong to do what he did. Legitimates have questions about many of the things that took place in 2020. But I think, he challenged the result of the election in the courts, he got nowhere, and then he tried to lead a kind of extra constitutional challenge. That, to me is completely unacceptable and wrong. It was the worst, but it wasn’t the first time that the parties and presidential candidates had challenged the legitimacy of the election in the last 20 years. In fact, it’s become pretty well routine to do so. I cite in the book and written about this before. While people obviously rightly again, let me stress this, many people are were appalled by what happened on January the 6th. They forget that in 2004, when George W. Bush won reelection, there were challenges to his election victory and a significant minority, over 100, I think, declined to endorse his election result. The thing that happens on January the 6th every four years after the election, they declined to endorse it. One of them in the Senate, had posted about it, saying close to 100 in the House declined to support him. Now again, they didn’t lead a riot on the Capitol in all of that, but they believed that his election was illegitimate in 2004. Even more so in 2000 when he was elected by a razor thin margin. A large number of Democrats think that was an illegitimate election. 2008, when Barack Obama won, there was a lot of Republicans who claimed that Barack Obama was ineligible for election on the bogus claim that he’d been born overseas. His legitimacy was challenged. When Donald Trump won in 2016. Again, winning as George W. Bush did in 2000, losing the popular vote, but winning the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton herself said that his election was illegitimate. So, we’ve unfortunately gone into this position again, just absolutely reaffirm my point that I’m not saying that any of those previous occasions was on a pair with what happened in 2020. That took it to a new level and a very new and very disturbing level, but it was in some ways almost logical progression, where one side simply doesn’t accept that the other side’s election is legitimate. There’s fraud, somebody was ineligible, the Supreme Court intervened improperly, all of this kind of stuff. That is a real profound and very disturbing mark of mist of distrust in our political system, because essentially, if you can’t accept the result when you lose, then you have lost democracy. That is literally what living in an electoral democracy means, that you put your case to the voters, you win, you get to govern. If you lose, you accept the result and you try again 2 or 4 years later. If you say every time, you lose now on either side.: “Actually, I didn’t really lose. They cheated,” we no longer a democracy that can function effectively in the interests of all the people, and I think that’s where we’ve got to.
Roger Ream [00:34:10] You wrote a very interesting piece a while back in The Times of London, about parallels between 2024 and 1968, many of them disturbing parallels. I think you wrote that, as I recall, before Joe Biden decided to step down, which was a parallel to 68, really, when Johnson decided not to run again. It was before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which is again, another parallel with Robert F. Kennedy being assassinated. We did not see the violence in Chicago, mostly because of the tremendous lockdown. Friends of mine who live in Chicago said they were basically a police state for a week or so, that prevented all that violence. Does that lead you to any kind of thoughts about what we expect in the next two months?
Gerard Baker [00:35:03] Yes, thanks for mentioning that. I wrote that piece right at the start of the year saying: “God forbid, but 2024 does look did look like 1968 all over again, right down to the Democrats having a convention in the middle of a war going on where there was significant anti-war sentiment in their own party.” I did talk about the risk of political violence that we obviously saw. In the 1968, we saw the two major assassinations, and the broader political violence that we saw. At that point, I didn’t expect Joe Biden to step down as LBJ did in 1968. You got a glass half full or glass half empty approach. You can draw either conclusion from the strong 1968-2024 parallels. The troubling, the negative, that glass half empty conclusion is that was an example of what happens when and how bad things can get, and we are still ten weeks away as we recalled this from the election. Thank God, you know, Donald Trump survived that terrible assassination attempt, but the level of rancor political sort of mutual political hostility that we have in this country, I’m afraid, is quite conducive to political violence. We’ve seen it on January the 6th, we saw it in the summer of 2020. That was a form of political violence, the riots across the country. So, it is a disturbing, and this is what I wrote at the start of the year, that there are disturbing parallels which could take us down that road that did end up in political assassinations, did end up in mass violence, did end up in a sense that the country was falling apart in 1968. The glass half full approach is, I tend probably towards this that actually, 1968 is a useful reminder that as bad as things seem today, hostility, partizanship polarization, angry words and actions in many ways on both sides in music, let’s remember that just a little over 50 years ago, 1968 was worse. We did have to put successful political assassinations, terrible, terrible events that they were, which were devastating for the country. The country was at war. Hundreds of American soldiers were dying at some various points during that year, every week. We don’t have that today. There was widespread domestic political violence, some sort of domestic terrorism, mass protests, anti-Vietnam War protests, some extent still some hang over from civil rights or counter civil rights, if you like, protest. There was extraordinary violence across the country, which again, which we don’t have today. There was the chaos of the Democratic convention in 1968, Lyndon Johnson dropping out of the race in rather different circumstances from Joe Biden. So, it is a useful sort of corrective to the idea that the country is in the worst state it’s ever been, in which a lot of journalists with very short-term memory can tend to do, and that democracy is somehow in peril. This is an election in which may decide whether or not democracy survives in this country. Maybe I’m just old or I’ve just been around too long, or maybe I’m missing something, but I tend to think I have a great faith in this country. I became an American just last year, as you know, Roger and I think this country has gone through terrible traumas in its past. 1968 was one. The depression of the 1930s, obviously was another wars when multiple wars and of course the greatest domestic, crisis of all the Civil War. Obviously, I hope that a civil war is not necessary to resolve our current tensions, but I do feel that in the U.S., you can say: “Look, as bad as things are. We’ve gone through terrible situations in the past, and we’ve come out of them better.” So, I think you use 68 either as a kind of a terrible sort of parallel to remind you how bad things are, or you can use it as an incentive almost to say: “Look, we went through that, it was worse than it is today, and we came through a stronger country.” So, I tend to that sort of latter more optimistic sign.
Roger Ream [00:39:25] One final question for you. As you know, TFAS is very involved in journalism. We have Robert Novak Journalism Fellowships for young professionals. We have the Joseph Rago Fellowships. We have two new fellows, starting after Labor Day at The Wall Street Journal. We’ve been building a network of independent newspapers on college campuses. The objective of those programs isn’t just to help get good news reported by these young people, but it’s to build a bigger pipeline of young journalists who can go into the news media, into careers in journalism, and hopefully bring intellectual diversity to the newsrooms and to the editorial pages. We can cite a lot of examples of where we’re having success in this regard, but I wanted to ask you, given your distinguished career in the field, whether you recommend to young people that they pursue a career in journalism, and perhaps any advice you’d give to them as they prepare for that?
Gerard Baker [00:40:23] Look, it’s so important. For all the things I say in my book, for all the things we’ve talked about here, Roger, how the media is not trusted, it’s important to remember how damaging that is to our society and to our democracy, that without news and information that people can trust, as I said at the start, we don’t really have any reason for people to believe that the democracy is working. So, it’s absolutely essential to go about rebuilding trust in the media. I think what you’re doing at TFAS is really an important part of that. I’m very encouraged by that. Again, I’ve been at The Wall Street Journal now for 15 years. I was editor and deputy editor in chief for four years, editor in chief, again for another five and a half, six years after that. At The Journal, both on the news side and I have I’ve now worked on the opinion side for the last five years, six years, we see this extraordinary, continuing flow of highly talented, highly committed, I don’t mean in a political way, I mean committed to the principles of journalism, people at young people coming through who want to do the right thing, who want to do a job, who understand, probably better than I do at my age, understand the challenges, the problems that the media have and want to do something to help correct that. Again, I saw that as editor. We had wonderfully talented people from across the country, by the way, and as you say again, diversity here is so important. I know there’s a lot of emphasis these days particularly in news organizations, on diversity, equity, inclusion, as it’s called, and increasing particularly the racial and ethnic mix in news organizations, and that’s important. That is absolutely important. It’s something we addressed at The Wall Street Journal when I was editor. But it’s more important, I would argue now, given what’s happened to trust in the media that we have genuine intellectual diversity. And we get away from this, what we’ve talked about, this kind of monolithic, progressive left, domination of our news organization. So, having people and by the way, and I’m not necessarily talking about, obviously, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is the premier conservative voice of this country, to some extent, the Western world and it does that job absolutely brilliantly. So, having conservative minded, opinion journalists, who want to come and work there and again, we have some wonderful, wonderful examples, who’ve come through the TFAS internship program. It was absolutely brilliant. Having people like that is really important, but I would also just stress that having people who are just genuinely want to find out, to discover what’s happening in the world to report with great rigor and integrity on what’s happening, not necessarily with a political bias, but just to restore that idea to journalism, that principle of “I’m just going to find out the story wherever it leads. If it leads to embarrassing information for Kamala Harris or for Donald Trump, I don’t care.” The important thing is to go and find out really important information that voters, readers, and viewers can trust. So, that is needed more than ever in American journalism. Again, you do a wonderful job in helping identifying and helping your student newspaper program, all of the things you do, in encouraging, giving people the tools and the ability and the exposure to all the kind of people that they need to do that, I think it’s incredibly important that we have more of that. I think that is the only way, actually, that we are going to restore trust in the media. In the end, it comes down to having people. It’s the people that are trusted, and it’s having really talented journalists, talented people who want to go into journalism, who are going to restore that trust. So, I’m very hopeful when I see the work that you do and some other organizations, too. I’m actually hopeful that as bad as it is right now, there’s a willingness and a determination to make it better.
Roger Ream [00:44:53] Well, Gerry Baker, thank you very much for joining me today. Thank you for all you’re doing in your distinguished career. Thank you for writing a very important and wonderful book and thank you for your work with TFAS.
Gerard Baker [00:45:05] Roger, it’s a great pleasure. Good luck to you at TFAS and thank you again.
Roger Ream [00:45:10] Thank you for listening to the Liberty + Leadership Podcast. If you have a comment or question, please drop us an email at podcast@TFAS.org and be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five-star review. Liberty + Leadership is produced at Podville Media. I’m your host, Roger Ream, and until next time, show courage in things large and small.
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TFAS has reached more than 49,000 students and professionals through academic programs, fellowships and seminars. Representing more than 140 countries, TFAS alumni are courageous leaders throughout the world forging careers in politics, government, public policy, business, philanthropy, law and the media.
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