Dean Baquet


Dean P. Baquet 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 American to serve as executive editor.
In 1988, Baquet won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism, leading a team of reporters that included William Gaines and Ann Marie Lipinski at the Chicago Tribune which exposed corruption on the Chicago City Council.

Early life and education

Baquet was raised in Tremé, a Black, working-class neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the fourth of five sons of New Orleans restaurateur Edward Baquet.
Baquet graduated from St. Augustine High School in 1974. Baquet received a scholarship to attend Columbia University, where he studied English from 1974 to 1978. He dropped out to pursue a career in journalism.

Career

Baquet began his journalism career at the New Orleans States-Item, which later merged with The Times-Picayune. 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.
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. Baquet was fired in 2006 after he publicly opposed plans to cut newsroom jobs.
Two months later, Baquet rejoined The New York Times as the Washington bureau chief. He became managing editor in September 2011, serving under executive editor Jill Abramson, and was promoted to executive editor on May 14, 2014. Baquet has made hiring reporters and editors of color a priority, saying that his efforts to diversify the newsroom have been "intense and persistent".
Baquet, who U.S. President Donald Trump has attacked by name, has spoken out against the president's anti-press rhetoric, telling The Guardian that Trump has put "his reporters' lives at risk". Baquet formerly served on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

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.
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. The newspaper debated whether to withhold publication until after the election, ultimately deciding not to do so.
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. 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. 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."
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: Baquet later characterized an article in which the New York Times public editor questioned whether the Times prior coverage of President Trump's possible Russia ties had been unnecessarily and overly cautious as a "bad column" that comes to a "fairly ridiculous conclusion". 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."
In 2017, Baquet interviewed music mogul Jay-Z about race, therapy, marriage, and politics. In May 2019, Baquet said in defense of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange: "Obtaining and publishing information that the government would prefer to keep secret is vital to journalism and democracy. The new indictment is a deeply troubling step toward giving the government greater control over what Americans are allowed to know."

Personal life

In September, 1986, Baquet married writer Dylan Landis. They have one son, Ari.
According to Baquet's colleagues, he prefers to be known as "Creole" as opposed to African-American. His brother, Terry, has stated, "Creole in New Orleans is black. We're descendants of Haitians. We're black; Creole is not a race."

Awards