“Renaissance Man” Don Baer, inaugural Frank A. Daniels Jr. Executive-in-Residence at UNC Hussman, to bring New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman to Carolina
by Barbara Wiedemann
The Daniels Executive-in-Residence and the Daniels Distinguished Lecture have been postponed from the originally-planned Fall 2021 semester. The rescheduled dates will be shared on the UNC Hussman website and social media platforms. Email Director of Communications Kyle York with any questions.
The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s Dean Susan King announced today that global communications powerhouse Donald A. (Don) Baer, one of the world’s most experienced strategic leaders across the media and communications industries, will serve as the inaugural Frank A. Daniels Jr. Executive-in-Residence at UNC Hussman during the 2021 fall semester. He brings four decades of leadership experience to his residency at UNC Hussman. A senior partner at global critical issues firm Brunswick Group and the longest-serving board chair in PBS’ 50-year history, Baer will lead UNC Hussman students in a semester-long course entitled “The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again?) of the American Media” (MEJO 490.2), leveraging his unparalleled network across journalism, the media business, government, politics and non-profit sectors. Baer will also host the first-ever Frank A. Daniels Jr. Lecture, a capstone fall 2021 event open to the UNC-Chapel Hill community at large to discuss emerging issues at the intersection of media, politics and public discourse. Baer’s special guest will be Thomas Friedman, internationally renowned three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and the author of bestselling books including “The World is Flat” and “From Beirut to Jerusalem.” Details of the Tuesday, September 28, conversation between Baer and Friedman at Carolina are forthcoming.
Dean Susan King said, “Don Baer was seemingly born to be our inaugural Daniels Executive-in-Residence. He touches so many journalism and communication experiences that he will attract students of all interests. I couldn’t be more thrilled that Don took me up on the invitation to join us this fall. I know he will lead frank and challenging discussions about how to be a communications leader in America during this time of disruption and change when democracy needs trusted information now more than ever. The added significance of having Thomas Friedman join Don for our inaugural Frank A. Daniels Lecture underscores the value this new initiative will bring to the entire University community.”
Baer has known UNC Hussman Dean Susan King for decades—first as an accomplished D.C. journalist and then as a colleague working for the Clinton Administration and a friend who talked with him as she made the decision to join UNC Hussman as dean in 2012.
“To be able to watch and now to be a modest part of Susan’s extraordinary achievements developing UNC Hussman from its very substantial foundation to being an even greater, world-class force, is a tremendous honor,” said Baer, who looks forward to being a presence on campus this fall.
“Growing up, the journalism of The News & Observer formed a significant part of my sense of our state and its great potential,” said Baer, who remembers starting to read the paper as a six-year-old son of parents who instilled in him a commitment to politics and public life. “When I was growing up,” Baer added, “there were three pillars that I was always taught mattered in terms of civic purpose in our state: one was UNC-Chapel Hill; the second was the governorship of Terry Sanford, whom we were close to and believed in deeply; and the third was the journalism of the N&O, which Frank A. Daniels Jr. helmed from 1971 through 1996. Bringing together the first and third of those pillars in this new opportunity makes it that much more meaningful for me.”
A Fayetteville, North Carolina native, Baer is a 1976 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina who went on to earn a master’s degree as a Rotary International Scholar from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Earlier this year, he joined Brunswick Group as a senior partner, where he’ll continue to work during his UNC residency. He joined strategic communications giant Burson-Marsteller in 2007 as worldwide vice chair and was worldwide chair and CEO from 2012–18 before serving as global chair in 2018–19 of the merged company Burson Cohn & Wolfe. He left the firm in 2020. At the Clinton White House from 1994 to 1998, he served as an assistant to the president first as chief speechwriter and then as White House director of strategic planning and communications. Following the White House, Baer spent eight years as senior executive vice president for strategy and development at global media company Discovery Communications, where he served as an executive committee member.
Prior to the White House, Baer was a journalist, including working as national political correspondent, White House correspondent and assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Baer also worked for The American Lawyer, and for the Washington, D.C.-based Congressional Quarterly and as an attorney with the New York City firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, where he helped represent major media companies including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Daily News.
In 2013, when Baer was inducted into the NC Media & Journalism Hall of Fame, then-Chancellor Holden Thorp—also a Fayetteville native—told media and journalism students to take note.
“This is a person who used the skills he learned in college and followed his passion,” said Thorp. “The result is a stellar career centered around a common theme: how to use words and images to bring ideas to the world.”
North Carolina native son
Baer is the son of a double Carolina graduate and brother of two double Carolina alumni. He tells the story of his mother, Helga Blum Baer (1931–2019), a refugee from Nazi Germany whose family fled to Rome and then Havana before settling in Birmingham, Alabama. She met Ervin Baer ’50, ’53 (Law) while he was at Carolina, and they eventually raised a family in Fayetteville. When Baer was a senior at Terry Sanford High School—serving as student body president, writing for the student newspaper and working on local and statewide political campaigns—he asked his mother for the money to cover the cost of an application to Duke University, having already been accepted at UNC.
“Why would you do that?” Baer remembers her saying. “I married a man from North Carolina so my children would go to Carolina.”
At UNC following a summer interning with The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, Baer studied political science while working at The Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s storied student-run newspaper, and serving in his senior year as co-chair of the then-biennial Carolina Symposium. As a young lawyer, he wrote a number of op-eds that were published by The New York Times, which rekindled his passion for journalism. After a year-and-a-half with The American Lawyer magazine, he was hired by North Carolina native David Gergen at U.S. News & World Report in the late ’80s. Baer was rapidly promoted to the Presidential election beat, then to White House correspondent and eventually, to assistant managing editor. In 1991, he profiled a young governor from Arkansas who was running for president. The two bonded over a shared faith and optimism in the future of what was then called the “New South.” When Bill Clinton won the 1992 election for president and Gergen became his senior adviser in 1993, Baer became chief speechwriter for the president.
“I had only written two speeches in my whole life,” Baer quips. “My bar mitzvah speech and the one I gave running for student body president in high school.”
For Baer, a treasured memory of the White House years is crafting the theme of what would be “a symphony of speeches” around the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994. Baer and two other speechwriters traveled to Europe, including Normandy, with the president, himself a fabled editor and writer (and re-writer) of speeches. They created a series of speeches that allowed President Clinton to speak directly to veterans of the Greatest Generation. “We are the children of your sacrifice,” was the main line Baer crafted.
“We were still working on the final versions of speeches at 3 a.m. aboard the USS George Washington,” Baer remembers. “We were moored in the middle of the English Channel. A helicopter landed to take the president and First Lady Hillary Clinton to the Normandy coast for a 6 a.m. landing in honor of the troops who landed at precisely that moment on June 6, 1944. And, as we stood there on deck, the president turned around and motioned for us to come join them on the helicopter. We flew straight into the famous landing zone at Pointe Du Hoc, where the first U.S. troops had hit the coast on that fateful day.”
“What a treat it will be for journalism students at UNC to benefit from the wisdom and stories Don Baer will share,” said Mike McCurry, who served as the nation’s 18th White House Press Secretary and is now the director and a professor at the Center for Public Theology at Wesley Theological Seminary. “He was a great colleague when we worked together for President Bill Clinton at the White House. Don is a master communicator, crafting interesting and provocative messages for those he has served. His wealth of knowledge about politics, public relations and life in general will be a tremendous resource for all those on the UNC campus.”
Baer left the White House in 1998 and spent a semester as a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. As Baer was leaving the White House, Vice President Al Gore introduced Baer to John Hendricks, the founder of the once-fledgling Discovery Channel, which now reaches 431 million homes in 170 countries. Baer was hired to be a deputy to Discovery Corporation COO Judith McHale, who became the company’s CEO, and he ran a range of corporate functions related to strategic communications, marketing, research, strategy, development and growth from 1998–2007. There, he was able to work “outside the lines” on projects like a joint venture documentary channel with The New York Times and a documentary film festival named SilverDocs, now AFIdocs, which launched under his watch. He co-produced “With All Deliberate Speed” to mark the 50th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the Emmy Award-winning “Decisions That Shook the World” television mini-series exploring presidential choices that shaped history.
In 2008, Baer joined Burson-Marsteller, one of the largest public relations and communications firms in the world, acting as vice chair to fabled pollster Mark Penn, an old friend who was the new CEO. When Penn left for Microsoft in 2012, Baer become CEO. His work took him from Davos, Switzerland, for World Economic Forum conferences to corporate boardrooms around the globe for clients like Bank of America, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel, The Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Motor Company. When the firm merged with Cohn & Wolfe in 2018, Baer became global chair of what is now known as Burson Cohn & Wolfe. He left the firm last year and was a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center and Center for Public Leadership in 2020.
Baer is a member of the Board of Directors of media company Meredith Corporation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and for 15 years he was a writer for the annual Kennedy Center Honors TV production, winning two Writers Guild of America awards. After serving as a founding member of the PBS Foundation Board starting in 2008, he was elected to the PBS Board of Directors in 2011 and as its chair in 2014. By virtue of the broadcasters’ board guidelines, he will step down at the end of this year.
“It has been one of the most rewarding, meaningful opportunities to serve the public interest I have ever had,” said Baer.
Baer was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Urban Institute from 2011–2020. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Planet Word and chairs the Advisory Committee of the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Public Diplomacy. Baer received a Distinguished Young Alumni Award from the UNC General Alumni Association in 1995. At UNC, Baer served on the Board of Visitors from 1997 to 2001 and received a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2018.
“Don is a Renaissance man,” said UNC General Alumni Associate president and Fayetteville native Doug Dibbert ’70. “He is also someone who is remarkably incisive, insightful, wise and candid.”
Coming home to Carolina
Baer well remembers talking his way into Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Vermont Royster’s classes at the “J-school” as a sophomore political science student on Carolina’s campus, and how influential the veteran journalist’s classes were to him as a young student. He aspires to make as much of an impact on his UNC Hussman students and to being similarly inspired by the future communications and journalism professionals in his class. Baer has met many Hussman students over the years during their “Career Treks” to Washington, D.C. and more recently, in a series of three “Meet the Pros” virtual events this spring semester.
“I’m always deeply impressed by how intelligent, informed and interesting they are,” said Baer. “The conversations I have with them amaze me. They open my mind to all kinds of possibilities I haven’t considered.”
He continued, “I know it is a dynamic time in the college setting, and I’m looking forward to engaging in deeply provocative conversations. I hope I will bring insight to them, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a two-way street.”
Baer anticipates bringing weekly guests to the classroom throughout the fall semester, describing his plans to bring leaders who have helped build and sustain quality media for America and the world over the last 40 years.
“Visionaries in their way, yet also very pragmatic people,” he said, “who have wrestled with the big challenges—changing business models, consumer habits, cultural and political demands—with eyes set on the long horizon and serving the public.”
Baer looks forward to returning to UNC-Chapel Hill.
“Carolina has always been a place where the horizons are very wide and long,” said Baer. “It has inspired me since I was very young, and, like everyone else now, I can use much more of that—and hope I can help others find their horizons as well.”
The Frank A. Daniels Jr. executive-in-residence program and Daniels Lecture were established in September 2020 to honor the extraordinary legacy of leadership and public service the 1953 Carolina graduate created in his 26 years at the helm of The News & Observer newspaper. The program aims to bring top talent to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus to inspire and teach the next generation of journalism and media. Daniels served as chairman of the Associated Press, the American Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation, the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association and served on the board of Landmark Communications. His leadership extended to many civic organizations including the United Way, United Arts Council of Raleigh and Wake County and Rex Hospital.