Washington Post’s Marty Baron: ‘We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work’

Washington Post Editor Marty Baron says the newspaper is approaching the Donald Trump administration as it would any administration, not with open animosity.

“The way I view it is, we’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work. We’re doing our jobs,” he said at the Code Media conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, Calif.

He said the paper would have approached a Hillary Clinton administration with the same aggressive reporting.

Baron, who before leading the Post edited the Boston Globe for more than a decade, criticized Trump’s depiction of the media as an opposition party as illogical.

He said members of the press are too competitive with each other to behave in any way like a party, “and as far as being the opposition, we’re not the opposition either. We’re independent. And I think we’ve reached a strange point, where just being independent — which the press should be — is portrayed as being opposition.”

He said the Trump administration’s demonization of the press since the presidential campaign has served to discredit, marginalize and dehumanize journalists.

“To use language that says we’re scum, that we’re garbage — You know, at one point, [Trump] said we’re the lowest form of humanity. That wasn’t enough, so he said we’re the lowest form of life itself,” said Baron. “So I don’t know where we go from there. That’s apparently where we are.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.