Dean P. Baquet[1] (/bæˈkeɪ/;[2] born September 21, 1956[3]) is an American journalist. He served as the
editor-in-chief of The New York Times from May 2014 to June 2022.[4] Between 2011 and 2014 Baquet was managing editor under the previous executive editor
Jill Abramson.[5] He is the first Black person to have been executive editor.[1]
A native of
New Orleans, Baquet began his career in journalism there in the 1970s before moving to the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s. He joined The New York Times metro desk in 1990 and in 1995 became that paper's national editor,[6] after having served as deputy metro editor. In 2000, he left to become managing editor, and later executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. He returned to The New York Times as Washington bureau chief in 2007, after he refused to implement management-desired news room budget cuts at the Los Angeles paper.
Baquet was raised
Catholic in
Tremé, a working-class African-American neighborhood in
New Orleans, Louisiana.[8] He is the fourth of five sons of New Orleans restaurateur
Edward Baquet.[9]
Baquet worked in New Orleans for almost a decade, before leaving for the Chicago Tribune.[16]
Career
Baquet began his journalism career at the New Orleans States-Item, which later merged with The Times-Picayune.[17][18] 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.[19]
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.[19][20] He was the first Black person to serve as the newspaper's top editor.[21] Baquet was fired in 2006 after he publicly opposed plans to cut newsroom jobs.[22]
Two months later, Baquet rejoined The New York Times as the
Washington bureau chief.[23] He became managing editor in September 2011,[24] serving under executive editor
Jill Abramson,[25] and was promoted to executive editor on May 14, 2014.[19][26][27] Baquet has made hiring reporters and editors of color a priority, saying that his efforts to diversify the newsroom have been "intense and persistent".[28][29]
Baquet, whom U.S. President
Donald Trump has attacked by name,[30] has spoken out against Trump's anti-press rhetoric, telling The Guardian, "I think personal attacks on journalists, when he calls them names, I think he puts their lives at risk."[31] Baquet was formerly on the board of directors of the
Committee to Protect Journalists.[32] In April 2022, The New York Times announced that Baquet will no longer be executive editor, and will be succeeded by Joseph Kahn. The company stated that they have plans for Baquet to lead a new venture and will still remain at the paper, without giving further details.[33]The New York Times later announced that Baquet would lead a fellowship program to train young journalists in local investigative journalism.[34]
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.[35][7]
Between 1990 and 1995 he reported on different cases of corruption and money laundering.[36]
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 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.[37] The newspaper debated whether to withhold publication until after the election, ultimately deciding not to do so.[37][38] 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 them by the
Director of National IntelligenceJohn Negroponte and
Director of the NSAMichael Hayden.[39] 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.[39] 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."[40]
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.[41]
Baquet later characterized an article in which the New York Times public editor[42] questioned whether the Times' prior coverage of President Trump's possible
Russia ties had been unnecessarily and overly cautious[43] as a "bad column" that comes to a "fairly ridiculous conclusion".[44] 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."[45]
In 2019, The New York Times published the headline "Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism", referring to Trump's speech on the
2019 El Paso shooting and the
2019 Dayton shooting. Baquet called it a "bad headline" but defended the Times' coverage of Trump.[46] The next month, The New York Times published personal details about the whistleblower at the center of the
impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, a decision which Baquet defended.[47]
He received the Chicago Tribune's William H. Jones Award for Investigative Reporting in 1987, 1988, and 1989.[54] He received an honorary degree from
Loyola University New Orleans in 2013,[55] was a guest speaker at Columbia College Class Day in 2016,[56] and received the
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' Freedom of the Press Award in 2018.[57]
In 2019, Baquet received the Larry Foster Award for Integrity in Public Communication at the Arthur W. Page Center Awards,[58] the Norman C. Francis Leadership Institute National Leadership Award for Excellence,[59] and was named one of the "35 most powerful people in New York media" by The Hollywood Reporter.[60] He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from
Xavier University of Louisiana in 2020.[61]
^
abSmith, Jessie Carney, ed. (2012).
"2005". Black Firsts: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events (3 ed.). Visible Ink Press.
ISBN978-1578593699. The first black journalist to lead a top newspaper in the United States was Dean P. Baquet...
^
abMichael 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.
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time from 1953–1963 and the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting from 1964–1984