Gerard Baker Quotes
The unfathomable isn’t something our media masters can tolerate. An unsurpassing self-assurance in their own moral and intellectual wisdom isn’t allowed to be punctured by the complex inexplicability of the real world. So to maintain the patina of omniscience they must fit the story into one of their narratives.
Even as late as the 1970s most media organizations did not feel any inhibition about having a spokesperson for a political movement or candidate comment about statements that were clearly untrue. The constant political criticism of the media produced this change and no matter how absurd or false a political statement is, most media will have a spokesperson for the lie appear on the program to repeat the lie. Both political parties are thereby encouraged to exaggerate or even lie as they will never by exposed by trusted journalists and can reduce all falsehoods to a “he says, she says.”
Gerard Baker writes the Editor at Large column for Review. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. He served as Editor-in-Chief between 2013 and 2018, and was Deputy Editor-in-Chief between 2009 and 2013. Previously, he was U.S. editor and an assistant editor of the Times of London. In 1994, he joined the Financial Times as Tokyo correspondent, moving on to head the paper's Washington bureau and serving as the FT's chief U.S. commentator. He also covered economics for the BBC and worked as an economist at the Bank of England and Lloyds. Mr. Baker holds a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Corpus Christi College, Oxford University.
