Dean Baquet

Dean P. Baquet[1] (/bæˈkeɪ/;[2] born September 21, 1956)[3] is an American journalist. He has been the executive editor of The New York Times since May 14, 2014. Between 2011 and 2014 Baquet was managing editor under the previous executive editor Jill Abramson. He is the first Black person to be executive editor.[1]

Dean Baquet
Dean Baquet, 2018
Born (1956-09-21) September 21, 1956
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Alma materColumbia University
OccupationExecutive editor, The New York Times
Notable credit(s)
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times
Spouse(s)
Dylan Landis
(
m. 1986)
Children1
Parent(s)

In 1988, Baquet shared a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism, leading a team of reporters that included William Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski at the Chicago Tribune, for "their detailed reporting on the self-interest and waste" that plagued the Chicago, Illinois, City Council.[4]

Early life and education

Baquet was raised in Tremé, a Black, working-class neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana.[5] He is the fourth of five sons of New Orleans restaurateur Edward Baquet.[6]

Baquet graduated from St. Augustine High School in 1974.[7] Baquet received a scholarship to attend Columbia University, where he studied English from 1974 to 1978. He left to pursue a career in journalism.[8][9]

Career

Baquet began his journalism career at the New Orleans States-Item, which later merged with The Times-Picayune.[10][11] After six years at the Times-Picayune, he joined the Chicago Tribune in 1984, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, before joining The New York Times in April 1990 as an investigative reporter on the Metro desk. In May 1992, he became the special projects editor for the business desk. In January 1994, he held the same title, but he operated out of the executive editor's office. In 1996, he became national editor.[12]

In 2000, he joined the Los Angeles Times as managing editor, working as editor John Carroll's "right-hand man". Baquet became the top editor in 2005 after Carroll resigned amid clashes with the Tribune Company, which had acquired the Los Angeles Times from the Chandler family in 2000.[12][13] Baquet was fired in 2006 after he publicly opposed plans to cut newsroom jobs.[14]

Two months later, Baquet rejoined The New York Times as the Washington bureau chief.[15] He became managing editor in September 2011,[16] serving under executive editor Jill Abramson,[17] and was promoted to executive editor on May 14, 2014.[12][18][19] Baquet has made hiring reporters and editors of color a priority, saying that his efforts to diversify the newsroom have been "intense and persistent".[20][21]

Baquet, who U.S. President Donald Trump has attacked by name,[22] has spoken out against the president's anti-press rhetoric, telling The Guardian that Trump has put "his reporters' lives at risk".[23] Baquet was formerly on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.[24]

Notable stories

Baquet was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1988, in recognition of a six-month investigation that he conducted alongside Chicago Tribune reporters William C. Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski documenting corruption and influence-peddling in the Chicago City Council in a seven-part series. Baquet was also a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, for stories that exposed "fraud and mismanagement" at the largest U.S. non-profit health insurer.[25][4]

As managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, Baquet was involved in the newspaper's decision to publish, a few days before the 2003 California recall election, an article raising concerns about containing "a half-dozen credible allegations by women in the movie industry" that Arnold Schwarzenegger, a front-runner in the election, had sexually harassed them.[26] The newspaper debated whether to withhold publication until after the election, ultimately deciding not to do so.[26][27]

In 2006, Brian Ross and Vic Walter of ABC News reported that Baquet and Los Angeles Times managing editor Douglas Frantz had made the decision to kill a planned Times story about NSA warrantless surveillance of Americans, acceding to a request made to him by the Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and Director of the NSA Michael Hayden.[28] Baquet confirmed that he had spoken with Negroponte and Hayden, but said that "government pressure played no role in my decision not to run the story," and that he and Frantz had determined that "we did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on" based on highly technical documents submitted by a whistleblower.[28] Baquet's decision was criticized by Glenn Greenwald, who said that Baquet had "a really disturbing history of practicing this form of journalism that is incredibly subservient to the American national security state."[29]

In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Baquet explained to NPR that some mainstream media outlets were too secular for their own good. He said:

I think that the New York-based and Washington-based ... media powerhouses don't quite get religion. We have a fabulous religion writer, but she's all alone. We don't get religion. We don't get the role of religion in people's lives. And I think we can do much, much better. And I think there are things that we can be more creative about to understand the country.[30]

Baquet later characterized an article in which the New York Times public editor[31] questioned whether the Times' prior coverage of President Trump's possible Russia ties had been unnecessarily and overly cautious[32] as a "bad column" that comes to a "fairly ridiculous conclusion".[33] In an interview after the Mueller report came in, Baquet said: "We wrote a lot about Russia, and I have no regrets. It’s not our job to determine whether or not there was illegality."[34]

Personal life

In September, 1986, Baquet married writer Dylan Landis.[35] They live in Greenwich Village.[36][37]

Awards and honors

In 1988, Baquet earned the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for coverage of corruption in the Chicago City Council,[38] as well as the Peter Lisagor Award for investigative reporting.[39] He received the Chicago Tribune's William H. Jones Award for Investigative Reporting in 1987, 1988, and 1989.[40] He received an honorary degree from Loyola University New Orleans in 2013,[41] was a guest speaker at Columbia College Class Day in 2016,[42] and received the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' Freedom of the Press Award in 2018.[43] In 2019, Baquet received the Larry Foster Award for Integrity in Public Communication at the Arthur W. Page Center Awards,[44] the Norman C. Francis Leadership Institute National Leadership Award for Excellence,[45] and was named one of the "35 most powerful people in New York media" by The Hollywood Reporter.[46] He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Xavier University of Louisiana in 2020.[47]

See also

References
  1. Smith, Jessie Carney, ed. (2012). "2005". Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events (3 ed.). Visible Ink Press. ISBN 978-1578593699. The first black journalist to lead a top newspaper in the United States was Dean P. Baquet...
  2. Remnick, David, in 'The New York Times' Journalists Maggie Haberman and Dean Baquet on Covering Trump. The New Yorker. June 14, 2018. Event occurs at 00:15. Archived from the original on July 24, 2020. Retrieved July 24, 2020.
  3. Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich; Fischer, Erika J., eds. (1989). Local Reporting 1947-1987 (Pulitzer Prize Archive Part A) (2011 ed.). De Gruyter. ISBN 978-3598301735.
  4. "Finalist: Dean Baquet and Jane Fritsch of The New York Times". The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  5. Rainey, Richard (May 15, 2014). "New Orleans-born journalist Dean Baquet named The New York Times' top editor". The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate. Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  6. Auletta, Ken (October 3, 2005). "Fault Line: Can the Los Angeles Times survive its owners?". The New Yorker. Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  7. Massa, Dominic (May 14, 2014). "N.O. native Dean Baquet named New York Times executive editor". WWL-TV. New Orleans. Archived from the original on May 17, 2014.
  8. Edmondson, Catie (May 26, 2016). "At Columbia College Class Day, Dean Baquet urges graduates not to let ambition blind them". Columbia Daily Spectator. Columbia University. Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  9. Peterson, Sarah (October 2, 2013). "New York Times Editor Dean Baquet Speaks at Foster-Foreman Conference". Onward State. Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  10. McCalmont, Lucy (May 15, 2014). "10 facts about Dean Baquet". Politico. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  11. Coscarelli, Joe (May 14, 2014). "Everything You Need to Know About Dean Baquet, the First Black Executive Editor of the New York Times". New York. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  12. Pompeo, Joe (June 19, 2017). "The Not-So-Bitter Rivalry of Dean Baquet and Marty Baron". Politico. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  13. Smolkin, Rachel. "Nothing But Fans", American Journalism Review, August/September 2005.
  14. Katharine Q. Seelye, "Los Angeles Paper Ousts Top Editor", The New York Times, November 8, 2006.
  15. Strupp, Joe. "Baquet Joins New York Times as D.C. Bureau Chief" Archived February 8, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Editor and Publisher, January 30, 2007. Retrieved February 16, 2007.
  16. "New Orleanian named editor of N.Y. Times". The New Orleans Advocate. May 17, 2014.
  17. Peters, Jeremy (June 2, 2011). "Abramson to Replace Keller as The Times's executive editor". The New York Times.
  18. "Times Topics: Dean Baquet". The New York Times.
  19. "Dean Baquet Named executive editor of The New York Times" (Press release). The New York Times Company. May 14, 2014.
  20. Pompeo, Joe (July 24, 2017). "The Agony and the Anxiety of The New York Times". Vanity Fair. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  21. Spayd, Liz (December 17, 2016). "Preaching the Gospel of Diversity, but Not Following It". The New York Times. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  22. @realdonaldtrump (May 22, 2020). ".@deanbaquet is to be seriously respected. He has long been considered one of the dumbest men in the world of journalism, and he became Executive Editor of the Failing New York Times. Not easy to do. He has given up on "figuring Trump out". Called it all wrong from the..." (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  23. Waterson, Jim (November 18, 2019). "New York Times editor says Trump has put his reporters' lives at risk". The Guardian. Retrieved July 22, 2020.
  24. CPJ Appoints Three New Board Members, Committee to Protect Journalists (November 10, 2003).
  25. Elizabeth A. Brennan & Elizabeth C. Clarage, Who's Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners (Oryx Press: 1999), pp. 358-59.
  26. Michael Schudson, "The Multiple Political Roles of American Journalism" in Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America (eds. Bruce J. Schulman & Julian E. Zelizer) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 196-97.
  27. Gary Cohn, Carla Hall & Robert W. Welkos, Women Say Schwarzenegger Groped, Humiliated Them, Los Angeles Times (October 2, 2003).
  28. Brian Ross and Vic Walter, "Whistle-blower Had to Fight NSA, LA Times to Tell Story", ABC News, March 8, 2007.
  29. "Glenn Greenwald On Dean Baquet: A 'Disturbing History' Of Journalism 'Subservient' To National Security State". The Huffington Post. May 16, 2014.
  30. Douglas Ernst (December 9, 2016). "NYT executive editor: 'We don't get the role of religion in people's lives'".
  31. Spayd, Liz (January 21, 2017). "Trump, Russia, and the News Story that Wasn't". New York Times. Retrieved January 21, 2017.
  32. Borchers, Callum (January 22, 2017). "New York Times public editor says paper might have been 'too timid' on Trump and Russia". Washington Post. Retrieved January 22, 2017.
  33. Wemple, Erik (January 21, 2017), "NYT's Dean Baquet rips 'fairly ridiculous conclusion' in public editor's column on Russia coverage", Washington Post
  34. "Will Rachel Maddow face a reckoning over her Trump-Russia coverage?". The Guardian. March 28, 2019.
  35. "Dean Paul Baquet Marries Miss Landis in Larchmont". New York Times. September 7, 1986.
  36. Gardner, Eriq (April 9, 2015). "New York Times' Dean Baquet Gives Look at Private Office, Says He Checks Facebook 15 Times a Day". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 6, 2020. Still, the newsman has a hard time switching off, even under pressure from his wife, Dylan, at their Greenwich Village house post-8 p.m.
  37. "The New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet named speaker for Columbia College Class Day 2016". Columbia College. March 23, 2016.
  38. McCalmont, Lucy (May 15, 2014). "10 Facts About Dean Baquet". Politico. Retrieved August 6, 2020.
  39. "Who Is Dean Baquet? 6 Facts About the New York Times' 1st Black Executive Editor". The Root. May 14, 2014. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  40. "Judges: Dean Baquet". University of Michigan. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  41. "Dean Baquet of The New York Times receives honorary degree tomorrow". Loyola University New Orleans. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  42. Edmondson, Catie (May 26, 2016). "At Columbia College Class Day, Dean Baquet urges graduates not to let ambition blind them". Columbia Daily Spectator. Columbia University. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  43. Nitz, Amelia (May 10, 2018). "Reporters Committee honors Dean Baquet for leadership in journalism, from investigative reporter to executive editor". Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  44. McVerry, Jonathan F. "Baquet, Laurie and Rowe named 2019 Larry Foster Award honorees". November 12, 2018. Pennsylvania State University. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  45. "Norman C. Francis Leadership Institute Honors Leaders". The New Orleans Tribune. October 2, 2019. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  46. Brower, Alison; Guthrie, Marisa (April 11, 2019). "The 35 Most Powerful People in New York Media 2019". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
  47. "Xavier University Celebrates Graduation with Virtual Ceremony Saturday, May 23". The New Orleans Tribune. May 21, 2020. Retrieved August 11, 2020.
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