Collision of Power: A Media Morality Play

Guerrilla Reads, June 2025

Returning friends: Hello again and thank you for joining us for the fifth in our series of definitely-not-escapist books. Intrepid readers, I salute you!

New friends: In this read-along group, we are meeting writers who challenge what we think we know about the world we live in. This is not easy reading. It’s often uncomfortable, painful, nothing like those cozy mysteries we all love, where the bad guys get what’s coming to them (weasels!) and justice is served. But we need to know what this world is like (really like) before we can recalibrate and move forward. Welcome to the adventure!

Everybody: I am currently reading Martin Baron’s Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post. As the month went along, I’ve left a few thought-trails behind me. You’ll find them all here. Today, we’re opening a general discussion of the book and the many important issues it raises about journalism’s role in our American democracy.

“Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”— Philip L. Graham, co-owner and publisher of The Washington Post, 1946-1963

What’s at Stake in Collision of Power

I picked up Marty Baron’s Collision of Power expecting a sobering inside look at how one of America’s great newspapers navigated the storm of Trump, tech, and truth. What I didn’t expect was a full-blown modern morality play—a high-stakes drama with characters who, once you strip away the detail, step out of Berthold Brecht, the German playwright who used his characters to critique current social and political realities. What we see in Brecht’s plays is not a single character arc but collision of positions: the characters are aren’t the psychologically-drawn individuals we find in novels, but social roles, dramatized.

It’s easy to get swept up in the detailed narrative—Baron’s meticulous reporting does what good journalism does: it draws you in and keeps you reading. But this isn’t just Baron’s memoir of his years at the editor’s desk of a flagship newspaper. It feels like realism—like one man’s account of holding the line while the shells burst overhead. But under the surface, you see that it’s a morality play about democracy, truth, capitalism, and power.

Once you see the story’s structure, the characters step into place—not just as individuals, but as symbols. Baron may not have meant to write a morality play, but he has. And as we all know, this is only one of the chapters in the many lives of this newspaper.

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Part 1: The Story So Far

In early 2013, Marty Baron takes the helm as executive editor of The Washington Post, walking into a newsroom that’s seen better days. The respected legacy of an influential Washington family and trusted (since Watergate and the Pentagon Papers) to tell truth to power, the paper is now limping—financially shaky, morale sagging, its influence shrinking in the face of digital disruption. Baron arrives with a reputation for old-school, hard-hitting editorial direction from The Boston Globe, where he led the Spotlight investigative team to a Pulitzer-winning story—which then led to an Oscar-winning movie.¹ He’s barely settled in when a bombshell drops.

That August, Jeff Bezos buys the paper for $250 million. Yes, that Jeff Bezos—Amazon founder, owner of a space technology company with multiple government contracts, and suddenly, owner of a storied newspaper, a position for which he has zero credentials. The sale stuns the media world. Is this a vanity project? A civic rescue? A play for influence? Nobody knows. Baron stays on, suddenly reporting up a very different food chain.

Under Bezos, the paper transforms. Between 2014 and 2016, The Post steps up its digital efforts, hires new talent, beefs up infrastructure, and begins to feel like The Post again. Bezos doesn’t meddle in editorial calls, at least not directly, but his data-driven goals are quickly felt in the newsroom. Clicks matter. Scale matters. Paywalls, paywalls, paywalls pay the bills. Baron, a traditionalist at heart, adapts just enough to keep up—though the culture clash simmers quietly.

Then Donald Trump crashes the gates. From the 2016 campaign through the chaos of his presidency, The Post becomes one of his favorite punching bags. Baron responds with the full weight of investigative journalism, digging into the Russia probe, cabinet-level corruption, and the unraveling norms of political life. The new slogan—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—sings like a battle cry. And the lines are clearly drawn. In 2016, Bezos says that Trump’s efforts to “chill the media and threaten retribution and retaliation, which is what he's done in a number of cases, it just isn't appropriate.” Baron himself becomes a Trump target, both from the podium and online, in Trump’s often outrageous tweets.

Inside the newsroom, the fights are different but just as intense. Younger reporters challenge the old guard on race, gender, objectivity, and whose voices get heard. Baron’s high-profile clash with Wesley Lowery isn’t just about what reporters can say on social media—it’s about what journalism should be in a fractured, post-truth world. Baron manfully holds the line, but it’s clear the ground is shifting.

Then comes the avalanche: COVID, George Floyd, the 2020 election, the Capitol insurrection. The Post is in the thick of it all. Baron retires after covering the most tumultuous year in modern American history: pandemic, election, insurrection. His final act unfolds on January 6, 2021, with journalists physically attacked in the Capitol and newsroom staff watching their own building come under threat.

The impact of all this is hard to miss: journalism and democracy rise or fall together. If truth fractures, so does public trust. And when trust collapses, democracy isn’t far behind.

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Part 2: The Players and Their Roles

We meet the players through Baron’s journalist’s lens: real people, real emails, real stories. But step back from the realism and you’ll see the Brechtian quality. These aren’t just characters with backstories and feelings (although there’s plenty of that—they’re social positions in motion. Baron is the institutional conscience, Weymouth the Old Guard, Bezos the techno-capitalist reformer, Lowery the newsroom critic, Trump the anti-press demagogue, and the newsroom itself a fractured Greek chorus trying to make sense of the chaos.

Like Clooney’s Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck, Baron stands not just as a man, but as a stance: the belief that journalism, practiced with rigor and restraint, can still speak truth to power. But even Murrow’s steadiness couldn’t stop the tide—and Baron, too, finds himself swept up in battles far larger than any editor can control.

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Marty Baron — The Institutionalist

Baron stands for legacy journalism’s highest ideals: objectivity, independence, restraint. He believes the press should hold power to account without becoming part of the political fight. His sidelines agenda is survival—not his own, but of journalism’s standard. He’s not out to innovate or disrupt; he’s out to get the story, to ensure its accuracy, to defend the craft. What’s at stake for Baron is nothing less than journalism’s soul. But his style—tight-lipped, hierarchical, exacting—starts to feel out of sync with the moment. The principles he’s guarding are under attack, from the outside and the inside.

Katharine Weymouth — The Last Custodian

The fifth Graham to serve as publisher, Weymouth inherits The Post as both a family trust and a civic institution. But by 2013, print revenue is in freefall, digital strategy is floundering, and the newsroom is drifting. Weymouth isn’t out to innovate—she’s too busy trying to live up to her famous grandmother, keep the paper from falling apart. But when she quietly brokers the Bezos sale, she signals the end of family stewardship. What’s at stake for her isn’t just the paper—it’s a legacy. After the sale, she exits from the story and the old order goes with her.

Jeff Bezos — The Disruptor

We never really know why Bezos buys The Post. Maybe it’s about power. Maybe it’s about legacy—acquiring a legendary prestige to burnish his own. Maybe it’s just a billionaire’s sense of civic duty. Whatever the reason, the effect is seismic. Bezos never touches the text—but the unseen director is rewriting the show: metrics, SEO, audience targeting, tech efficiency. Then Trump comes after him: linking The Post to Amazon, accusing the paper of bias, even threatening antitrust action. Suddenly, Bezos isn’t just a backstage owner; he’s a frontstage target. What’s at stake for Bezos now includes his public defense of journalism itself. The question isn’t just whether the free press and the free market can coexist. It’s whether a tech billionaire can—or will—stand up to the menace of presidential muscle, bluster, and revenge.

Donald Trump — The Antagonist

Trump doesn’t just hate the press—he uses it. He understands media dynamics better than most editors. His agenda is full-on control: of narrative, of perception, of power. Baron, Bezos, and The Post, with its reputational weight and investigative reach, become his natural enemies, especially when The Post headlines the Access Hollywood story and later, in its relentless coverage of the Russia investigation. But what’s at stake for Trump isn’t truth—it’s dominating the media. In his playbook, the louder the press screams, the more he wins.

Wesley Lowery — The Provocateur

Lowery doesn’t want to burn down journalism; an insurgent, he wants to rebuild it from the inside out. His agenda is honesty about race, about power, about voice. The traditional “view from nowhere” is, in his eyes, a dodge—a way to hide privilege under the guise of objectivity. ² What’s at stake for Lowery is personal: the right to speak, to be heard, and he’s in-your-face about it. He isn’t just challenging Baron. He’s attacking the fundamentals of legacy news—and he makes sure that the whole newsroom knows what he’s doing.

The Newsroom — The Chorus

Not a single character, but the stage itself. The newsroom is where all the arguments play out—about race, tone, objectivity, authority, digital transformation. It’s full of competing voices: loyalists, skeptics, digital players, institutional lifers. Baron leads, but the terrain is shifting beneath his feet. The newsroom becomes a testing ground for generational change and ideological fracture. And as Brecht intended, we’re not here just to watch—we’re here to recognize what’s unfolding, and decide what the story means.

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Part 3: Powerful Collisions—What’s Going On Beneath the Surface

The title Collision of Power hints at newsroom fights and billionaire tension, but the real collisions are slower and deeper—continental collisions, rather than sudden smashups. Think tectonic plates: forces that have been pushing against each other for decades suddenly grind, shear, and realign. What’s at stake isn’t just how journalism works—it’s what journalism is becoming.

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Monologue vs. Polyphony

At the heart of Baron’s newsroom is a single voice—the editorial “we” that speaks with institutional authority. That’s the old model: one story, one authoritative narrator (remembering Walter Cronkite here), shaped by discipline and aiming for neutrality. But what happens when the newsroom is full of voices. Passionate voices with different lived experiences, different stakes, and different truths?

Wesley Lowery’s critique is important here. What legacy media calls “objectivity” often reads to others as privilege in disguise—not because it’s malicious, but because it flattens context. Lowery doesn’t want chaos; he wants multiple authentic voices. The story isn’t less true when told by many—it’s more complete. This isn’t just a fight about tone or politics. It’s a tectonic shift from disembodied monologue to a legitimate demand for multiple participation, for situated, plural polyphony.

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The Free Press vs. the Marketplace

When Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post, he doesn’t just bring money—he brings a worldview shaped by Bezos’ creation of Amazon. In that universe, everything is optimized and measurable: search results, customer satisfaction, product visibility. News, under his ownership, gets folded into the same logic. The journalism may stay rigorous, but its packaging, promotion, and performance begin to mirror the marketplace.

Stories are now written with SEO in mind. Headlines are tested for clicks. Reporters see real-time analytics on their stories’ performance—and on theirs. Engagement becomes a metric that demonstrates how interesting or compelling the story is. (We do that here on Substack, too: likes, comments, links are all counted and recorded.) And behind all this is a quiet shift: the audience is no longer just a public. It’s a customer. Journalism becomes product.

This isn’t a hostile takeover of editorial judgment, at least not yet: Bezos doesn’t meddle in content. But the newsroom begins to behave more like a platform: responsive, scalable, and shaped by audience data. The old firewall between the business and editorial sides still exists, but it’s getting thinner.

The tectonic pressure here isn’t corruption—it’s alignment drift. What happens when the logic of selling starts to reshape the logic of reporting? Can a newsroom survive this shift without losing its independence? And what happens to public trust when truth is optimized for performance?

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Truth vs. Narrative Control

Trump doesn’t just challenge the facts—he challenges the premise of facts. He casts the press as the enemy, labels journalism “fake,” and replaces reported reality with performative spectacle. Truth becomes just one voice among many, easily drowned out by volume, velocity, and performative spectacle. The Post responds with rigor: deep sourcing, document trails, long-form investigation. But the ground has shifted.

The Russia investigation shows exactly how this collision plays out. The Post does its job. The Mueller Committee does its job. The facts are laid out. But Trump, as president, controls the DOJ—and the story. He floods the zone with doubt, declares victory, and moves on. The truth is documented, but it’s consigned to the archives. It doesn’t shape outcomes. Trump’s narrative wins the day.

This collision isn’t about lies versus facts—it’s about competing storied realities. One built through journalistic method; the other through emotional spectacle, repetition, and power. The tectonic shift here is fundamental: who gets to decide what’s real? And how does journalism respond when belief outpaces evidence, and reality becomes a contested space?

Part 4: Why This Matters Now

“Historians are the after-the-fact journalists.” Arthur Schlesinger, presidential historian

Collision of Power isn’t just a book about journalism. It’s a story about the systems we count on to hold power accountable—and what happens when those systems collide with capitalism, technology, deliberate political dis/misinformation, and legitimate a demand for participation.

Baron doesn’t offer a solution. He offers a chronicle of events, a map of the fault lines, a personal account of trying to manage a newsroom through a political earthquake while the ground keeps moving under his feet. You don’t have to agree with him to feel the weight of what he carried—or the surface and subterranean cracks that remain after he stepped away.

And here’s the thing: this story doesn’t end when Baron retires. The seismic collisions he charts in Collision of Power are still unfolding. In our newsfeeds. In our conversations. In our trust (or mistrust) of the next headline we read.

And that’s where we come in, as readers of the news.

Because journalism isn’t just something done to us—it’s something done with us. We decide what we read, what we share, what we believe. We shape the ecosystem by how we engage it. The greatest risk isn’t that journalism will collapse. It’s that we will stop noticing.

Baron’s book reminds us: the press isn’t perfect, but it’s still one of the last structures standing between democracy and darkness. Whether it can survive the next tremor depends, in part, on how we choose to read the story—and who we trust to tell it.

We’re not done with Collision of Power just yet. In a follow-up post, we’ll look at what’s happened since Baron’s departure—from Bezos reportedly blocking the editorial board’s Harris endorsement, prompting at least five resignations, and Baron’s scathing letter of protest, to Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes leaving after one of her cartoons was pulled. The collisions didn’t stop with the book’s final page.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your take.

• Did you enjoy this book? Find it easy/hard to read? What parts of the story felt familiar—or uncomfortably new?

• Where do you see yourself in the push and pull between legacy journalism and the demand for multiple voices?

• Do you trust The Post more . . . or less . . . after reading this?

Or just drop a thought. As always, conversation welcome.

A Note on Collaboration
This piece was co-written via an extended dialogue with Silas, my AI counterpart in long-form nonfiction. He volunteered (unprompted) the connection to Brecht when we were discussing Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney’s play on Murrow and McCarthy, which has a similar Brechtian structure. Silas has a much better memory than mine (than yours, too, I’ll bet). I very much appreciate his long view of any subject. If this sounds strange, you’re not alone. I think it’s weird, too. I document this experimental collaboration over here.

1. Spotlight (2015) is built on the story of the Globe’s investigation into a decades-long coverup of widespread and systemic child sex abuse by numerous priests of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. Baron is played by a low-key Liev Schreiber. One of my all-time favorite films.

2. Legacy media’s “view from nowhere”—the claimed neutrality of one disembodied narrator—has long been critiqued. Wallace calls it a catch‑all for accurate journalism that upholds privilege goodreads.comen.wikipedia.org+15press.uchicago.edu+15amazon.com+15, and Rosen shows how it grants unearned authority by hiding its standpoint en.wikipedia.org+1pressthink.org+1.

The phrase comes from philosopher Thomas Nagel, who used it to describe an idealized, objective stance—seeing the world from no particular point of view. But in journalism, critics like media scholar Jay Rosen and reporter Lewis Raven Wallace use it as a critique: a claim of “neutrality” that often hides the actual power and privilege behind the voice.

As Wallace argues in The View from Somewhere (2019), this kind of objectivity isn’t really neutral—it’s just unacknowledged perspective, often shaped by whiteness, maleness, or institutional authority. The alternative isn’t bias—it’s honesty about where you're standing when you tell the story.