Peter Baker is the Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times and a political analyst for MSNBC, covering his sixth presidency after decades reporting for The Times and The Washington Post. He previously served as Moscow co-bureau chief, chronicling the rise of Vladimir Putin, and has reported from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Jerusalem. The author of seven books, including “The Divider” and “Days of Fire,” Baker has won all three major awards for White House coverage. The Harvard Political Review sat down with Baker to discuss three decades of presidential reporting, the Trump presidency, and the evolving role of journalism in an age of polarization and political violence.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: You’ve reported on six presidents across both The Washington Post and The New York Times. How has White House coverage evolved over the course of those administrations, both in terms of the presidency itself and the journalism around it?
Peter Baker: It’s changed drastically — both in the way reporting works and in how the White House and politics themselves operate. When I started covering the White House in 1996, we didn’t have iPhones or email. I carried a beeper, and if the White House wanted to send out a statement, they’d buzz us with a number and would flip through wooden binders to pull out the printed statement. I would file one story at the end of the day.
Now, we have a nonstop, completely accelerated pace of news. What we still call a “newspaper” is also a broadcast and social media outlet. I don’t wait until six o’clock to write my story; we report in real time, one paragraph at a time sometimes. The challenge for journalism is not to let that pace, which is relentless but necessary, distract from other parts of journalism we’re responsible for, which are deeper, broader, more insightful and analytical pieces.
Today’s political environment is more toxic and stressful. I covered Clinton, Bush, and Obama. My job was always adversarial. At the same time, we could have conversations, and they weren’t always automatically hostile. We never had a president until now who would refer to the media as the “enemies of the people.”
Trump will openly use words like fake news, and it just changes the nature of the relationship. It’s more incendiary, and we see that with the violence with Charlie Kirk. We see that the political environment generally, not just the White House, has become so much more radicalized, and that obviously sifts down to the White House and into the press pool.
HPR: What elements did you find genuinely unique about Trump’s White House versus prior administrations — structurally, culturally, or in terms of information flow?
PB: We now have a president who effectively serves as his own press secretary, spokesperson, and communications director. Whether you like him or not, he is the most transparent president in terms of willingness to engage with the press in a public way, on the record every day, sometimes multiple times a day. From a reporter’s point of view, we always prefer to hear from the president, the number one person. They set the tone, and in Trump’s case, he’s really candid. His point of view is not always factually accurate, but we know what he’s thinking.
At the same time, that means he’ll say things out loud that no other politician would ever say. He’s not a reliable fact witness. No politician is thoroughly honest, but this one is more than ever a challenge to cover, because you cannot trust what he says. It’s our job to make sure that we tell readers and viewers what the truth is, because he’s not reliable in doing that. He says things over and over and over again that are not true.
In the case of any other politician I ever covered, if you caught them telling a lie and you reported it, they were embarrassed, and they tried to avoid doing it again to not get caught or criticized. Trump doesn’t care: you can fact-check him to death, and it won’t stop him from saying what he wants to say, no matter how untrue it may be.
There’s an important question that arises during interviews: How much should an interviewer fact-check Trump in real time? Should they stop and say, “Wait a second, Mr. President, you just said it wrong.” If you do that too many times, then it’s hard to even have a conversation. You may look like you’re fighting against him, which he kind of likes because it makes us the enemy. It’s not our job to be the enemy, the opposition. It’s our job to be an independent source of information, as Adolph Ochs, who bought The New York Times in the 19th century, put it, our mission is to report “without fear or favor.”
HPR: What are the practices that make it possible to report without fear or favor? What practices are essential for restoring public trust and upholding those nonnegotiable values?
PB: Our most important priority is getting the story right. That is the oldest value of journalism, and it’s one that we need to stick to very religiously, because if we get it wrong, then we contribute to the lack of trust and we give ammunition to people who want to discredit us. Donald Trump was once asked by Lesley Stahl off-camera,“Why do you always attack reporters?” He says [something to the effect of], “In order to discredit you, so that when you write something I don’t like, people won’t believe you.”
It’s very deliberate in that sense, and we need to be careful about falling into that trap. We need to minimize the mistakes we make. We do make mistakes because we’re humans. But we need to be transparent about the mistakes, own up to them, correct them, because people will trust you.
HPR: From your perspective, how do presidential crises — impeachments, wars, scandals — reshape the demands and responsibilities of White House correspondents?
PB: The problem for us is that no one scandal sticks for more than a day because there’s another one coming along. I tell the reporters not to worry about missing a big story in the Trump administration. It’s like being at the bus stop; if you miss a bus, just wait for five minutes because another one is coming along. The problem is it’s a challenge to really dig into any single one of these big stories and fully report it out because we’re already off to the races on the next one.
We have staff up at The Times and other places as well to try to make sure that we don’t let stories go after a day, but it’s just hard. I think our record is as many as 80 stories in a single day. We can’t read all those stories in one day, so our readers certainly can’t. I don’t know if that’s a strategy by Trump or just the way he rolls, but certainly it’s made him teflon to scandals that would have hurt other presidents. What he is doing in this term, that he didn’t dare do in his first, is monetizing the presidency by collecting money from people who otherwise would never be seen as allowed to give money to a President, including foreign sources, and through crypto[currency]. This all gets lost in the wash because there’s just so much of it.
HPR: It appears increasingly challenging for journalists to maintain objectivity when reporting on highly polarized issues. You’ve mentioned that you never vote in presidential elections to maintain neutrality. How do you balance personal political views with the imperative of objectivity, and do you think this approach is essential for all journalists?
PB: I’ve stopped using the word objective because it suggests that we’re robots. We’re all human, with our own personal biases. The goal is to discipline yourself so that those biases aren’t driving your coverage. I prefer the word “independent,” which refers to news being independent of ideology, independent of party, independent of vested interests, and independent of preconceived notions. There are plenty of columnists and plenty of pundits who will give you opinions; they’re great, and that’s part of the whole ecosystem of the media. However, you also should want beat reporters whose job it is to follow the facts and provide fact-based analysis.
It’s a fine line between analysis and opinion. I do a lot of analysis, I bring a lot of experience to the table, and therefore, I try to share that experience in coming to an analysis of a particular president or White House. But it’s not supposed to be based on my opinion; it’s supposed to be based on observation, experience, and analytical skill.
HPR: You’ve extensively covered Russia, including significant time spent on the ground in Moscow in the early days of Russia under Putin. Do you see parallels between the rollback of democracy in Russia and threats to press freedom or political discourse in the United States today?
PB: I wrote about this early on in this term. Moscow, when we were there from 2001 to 2004, was the beginning of Putin’s tenure, and it was still a pretty open, robust place. You could speak your mind without worrying about punishment too much. Over the four years we were there, that changed. Alternate centers of power were eliminated, crushed. People were made to fear speaking out. I see a little of that here in Washington right now. This comparison should not be overdrawn, but I’ve never experienced Americans who are as afraid of speaking out today. I have sources who used to be very vocal, very out there criticizing Trump, now say, “Hey, I can’t be quoted by name. I’ve got a husband who works for the government,” or “a kid who’s got a federal grant,” or “a mother who works at a university that’s under pressure.” I never expected that in Washington to see people afraid to be public because of the fear of retribution. That does remind me of the early days of Vladimir Putin.
