Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer columnist John Baer was tagged in 2002 by the National Journal as one of the nation’s top 10 political journalists outside Washington. The Journal said Baer “has the ability to take the skin off of a politician without making it hurt too much.”
A graduate of Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland, he holds a Masters Degree from Temple University, was a Congressional Fellow in Washington under the auspices of the American Political Science Association and a Fellow of Loyola University School of Law’s inaugural Journalists Law School program in Los Angeles.
His work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, USA Today, The Nation, Newsweek, Salon.com, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications.
He’s appeared on the Fox News Network, CNN, C-SPAN and MSNBC’s “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. He is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, a founding member and president of the Pennsylvania Press Club and a board member and past president of the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents Association.
He taught graduate-level journalism at Temple and guest lectures at many colleges and universities including Penn State, Drexel, Gettysburg, St. Joseph’s, Villanova, LaSalle and the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels School of Government.
He has won numerous awards including First Place in 2018 Media Awards sponsored by the Pennsylvania Bar Assn., for commentary on law and justice issues, the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence from the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association and the 2014 Common Cause Media Award for distinguished reporting on accountability in government. In 2015, he won First Place honors for column-writing from both the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association and the Associated Press Managing Editors.
He is also a recipient of the Mount St. Mary’s University Simon Brute Medal, the highest award conferred by the university’s national alumni association.
He is author of the book “On the Front Lines of Pennsylvania Politics: Twenty-Five Years of Keystone Reporting” (The History Press, 2012).