A tip for journalists tackling Martin Baron’s terrific “Collision of Power” when the book becomes available on Oct. 3: Read the epilogue first.

You surely know a lot already about the 68-year-old first-time author, who chose as his subtitle “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron retired in 2021, after serving eight-plus years as the Post’s executive editor — what he called his career’s “homestretch.” (He now calls home the Tanglewood area of Western Massachusetts.) But his life’s work of overseeing major investigations, including numerous Pulitzer Prize winners, is already journalism lore.

Prior to leadership at the Post, including over coverage of candidate, and later President Donald Trump, Baron most famously oversaw the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer reporting that won special renown — when that paper’s Spotlight investigative team exposed pedophile Catholic priests, eventually featured in the 2015 Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”

(Courtesy: Flatiron Book)

But before diving into “Collision of Power’s” tale of how the Washington Post — then newly purchased by multi-billionaire Jeffrey Bezos, who was also Amazon’s owner — powerfully covered the many controversies involving Trump, it helps to have a sense for Baron’s view of “objective reality.” And that’s something he saves for Page 461, in his epilogue’s 17-page explanation of why news organizations may be in need of a different standard for “fairness in journalism.”

There he describes objective reality as a test for reporting news “honorably, thoroughly, fairly, with an open mind and with a reverence for evidence over our own opinion.” By adopting objective reality — as a stand-in for “truth,” which Baron considers an opinion-tinged term far too often these days — he offers a loose reality-test approach first described by journalism-philosopher Walter Lippmann in his century-old book “Liberty and the News.” It involves pursuing “as impartial an investigation of the facts as is humanly possible.”

As Baron explains: “Journalists routinely expect objectivity from others. Like everyone else, we want objective judges. We want objective juries. … We want doctors to be objective in diagnosing the medical conditions of their patients, uncontaminated by bigotry or baseless hunches. … We want scientists to be objective in evaluating the impact of chemicals in the soil, air, and water.”

And, Baron concludes, “Journalists should insist on it for ourselves as well,” especially in a time of the “lightning-fast spread of misinformation, disinformation and crackpot conspiracy theories of today.”

Such belief in reporters’ and editors’ evidentiary rules is what “Collision of Power” celebrates time and again, and that Baron cites in the Post’s own coverage — first of candidate Trump, and later President Trump.

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Baron opens Chapter One by explaining why he was ready to leave the Globe — 10 years after its Pulitzer-winning Catholic priest coverage, and with the “Spotlight” movie still in development. For one thing, he was uncomfortable with growing financial losses under the Globe’s then-ownership by The New York Times Co.

“What a legacy that would be,” Baron muses, were the Globe to “close on my watch.”

Then came a feeler from the Post’s long-time owners in the Graham family, offering to move him to the capital to take over as executive editor of a publication so long-respected, in part for its Pulitzer-winning Nixon-era Watergate investigation.

On his first visit to the Post he saw that his leadership might well be needed: “I was stunned,” he writes, “that we struggled almost every day to find stories good enough to put on the front page.” It was Baron’s kind of repair work. He took the executive editor job.

In earlier times when he’d taken over a newsroom — at the Miami Herald and, of course, the Globe — he had been fortunate that big, exclusive stories broke early in his tenure. And it happened again at the Post: reporters investigating secrecy at the National Security Agency won the Post the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. The Post’s winning work, Baron writes, helped the paper get its “swagger” back.

In addition to swagger, the Post had gained astounding new financial strength with the paper’s purchase by Bezos, who also owned Amazon. Baron’s third chapter, titled “Regime Change,” recounts how — despite some early worries about having one of the world’s richest men as the Post’s owner — he discovered that “fresh thinking” by Bezos, as well as his financial strength, was opening new doors for the paper.

Early on, candidate Trump had praised both the Post and its new owner, Baron writes, with Trump calling himself a “fan” of the paper, and also of that “amazing guy” Bezos.

But in late 2015, the Post began to irk the candidate — to put it mildly. Especially when the editorial page opined that he “sees people as caricatures and stereotypes … rather than as individuals with dignity,” adding that Trump has “basic contempt for facts.”(On the Post’s fact-check desk, meanwhile, reporter Glenn Kessler described Trump as “a fact checker’s dream … and nightmare.”)

That Dec. 7, Trump posted what Baron calls a “Twitter threesome,” with the first tweet saying: “The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @jeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.” The other two tweets were no less negative.

Baron’s book also details some stories behind various Trump campaign scandal scoops that the Post had broken. In 2016, the Post’s David Fahrenthold, who eventually won a national reporting Pulitzer for his campaign coverage — revealed Trump’s sharply inflated claims about his charitable donations. The stunning final story in that winning Pulitzer entry, though, involved Fahrenthold’s October 2016 disclosure of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape — the vulgar 2005 “hot-microphone” conversation in which Trump bragged to TV-show host Billy Bush about how Trump physically abused women, reaching for their private parts, because as a TV star, “they let you do it.”

Baron’s book includes information about how the Post faced challenges in authenticating the tape, and making it acceptable to run in the Post. “One concern,” he writes, “was that the most offensive words were recorded when Trump and Billy Bush were on a bus and not visible on camera.” When the candidate was presented with a transcript, “Trump dismissed the idea that the words could possibly be his,” Baron writes. When the video was provided, though, Trump admitted, “It’s me.”

Confirmed and posted on the Post website, Baron says, the video racked up “what was then the highest digital traffic for any single story in Post history.” Trump’s response? No defense at all; but, rather, this statement: “Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course — not even close. I apologize if anyone was offended.”

Notes Baron, “But for once, Trump couldn’t blow it off so easily. He was forced into a second statement, apologizing for the first time that anyone could recall: ‘I said it, I was wrong and I apologize’.”

Baron writes of being unsure how the election would go. (He considered Hillary Clinton’s message “muddled,” and “disproportionately centered on how horrible Trump was.” She suffered blunders, unlike “a Teflon-coated Trump,” he writes.) Baron knew what to say to a “news staff that had endured Trump’s threats and insults,” though: Expect “four, or eight, more years of the same or worse.”

The book elaborates on the response Baron had when questioned about his reaction to President Trump’s so-called war on the press: “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.” The slogan caught on at the Post, as did another slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Indeed, a month into the Trump presidency that one actually became part of the Post nameplate, appearing in the printed paper. Bezos, says Baron, envisioned it as a mission statement. “With its timing and grimly aggressive tone, Trump’s allies saw it as a shot at the president, which it was not,” Baron writes.

In writing about the four Trump White House years, Baron’s “Collision of Power” covers many topics. But a frequent theme is Trump’s effort to rein in the Post — and challenge Bezos — by implying that, as owner, Bezos was controlling its negative Trump coverage. As Baron insists repeatedly in the book, Bezos had no such motive.

As Post executive editor, though, working to keep political coverage fair and balanced, Baron had learned much about Donald Trump over the years. And few trained political observers likely would disagree with the “objectivity” of the words Baron chose to begin the book’s epilogue:

“For eight years I have observed Donald Trump upend American politics. Faced with the challenge he has posed to democracy, I find my conviction about the need to hold powerful leaders accountable is as strong as ever. So, too, are my convictions about the standards that journalists should meet as they endeavor to do that.”

More on Marty Baron and ‘Collision of Power’

• The Washington Post review: Martin Baron recounts leading The Washington Post during the Trump era (Kyle Pope)
• The New York Times review: Impeachments, #MeToo, Trump: Running The Washington Post During a Decade of Turmoil (Sewell Chan)
• The Boston Globe review: ​​Marty Baron, author of the new book ‘Collision of Power,’ tells the stories behind the stories (James Fallows)
• The Boston Globe: The inscrutable Marty Baron (Mark Shanahan)
• The Boston Globe: Five revelations from Marty Baron’s new book, ‘Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post (Mark Shanahan)
• Q&A: Local news can’t be a ‘damsel in distress’ and Q&A: Marty Baron on pursuing facts in a time of lies (Mark Caro)