In their heyday, the most famous newspapers in the United States and Great Britain were subjects of intense public curiosity. Histories of their management and biographies of their rather flamboyant owners could turn a tidy profit. It is moderately encouraging that this genre of books, which scrutinizes the comings and goings of senior editorial officials at major newspapers, is coming back in fashion. It suggests some renewed interest in the beleaguered newspaper industry. But I have my doubts that Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post or The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism will meet with the same enthusiastic reception as their predecessors. These two volumes are of uneven quality.

Martin Baron’s Collision of Power is, I’m afraid, not a very good book. Both its text and its photographs confer upon the author an importance it is not clear he attained. Baron, who edited The Washington Post from 2012 to 2021, revives once again the fragile legend of the Post as a courageous, vigilant guardian of constitutional democracy. In doing so, he clearly hopes to justify his paper’s rabid hostility toward Donald Trump, as if that shameful exercise in naked partisanship was just one more brave act of defiance in the paper’s storied history