Don Baer

Don draws on a career that has included decades of leadership roles spanning business, journalism, media, government, politics and non-profits to help clients across all major sectors around the world.

From 2012-19, Don was Worldwide Chair and CEO of strategic communications firm Burson-Marsteller and Global Chair of its successor firm BCW. He joined the firm in 2007 as Worldwide Vice Chair. In 2011, Don joined the PBS Board of Directors, serving as its Chair from 2014-21, and he continues as a PBS Foundation Board member. From 2014 until its sale in 2021, Don was a member of the Board of Directors of publicly traded media company Meredith Corporation.

Don served President Bill Clinton as Assistant to the President and White House Director of Communications and Strategic Planning, and, before that, as Chief Speechwriter/Director of Speechwriting and Research. He worked on domestic and foreign policy initiatives across the Clinton presidency and the 1996 re-election campaign.

From 1998 to 2007, Don worked at media company Discovery Communications overseeing strategy and development as a principal deputy to the CEO. Among other roles, he led corporate communications, marketing, responsibility, research and public policy. He also led new ventures and acquisitions, including the Discovery/New York Times Company joint venture, the Discovery Times Channel. His productions included the 2004 Emmy Award-winning series “Decisions That Shook the World” and the feature-length documentary “With All Deliberate Speed” to mark the 50^th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Don led the founding of the Silverdocs documentary festival with the American Film Institute.

Before the White House, Don was a journalist at U.S. News & World Report as an assistant managing editor, national political reporter and White House correspondent, and at The American Lawyer. Don started his career as a media lawyer in New York City at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.

Don is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Boards of Directors of Planet Word, National Democratic Institute and The City and the Governing Council of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. In 2020, he was a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow and a Hauser Leader at Harvard’s Kennedy School. For 15 years, he was a writer for the annual Kennedy Center Honors TV production, winning two Writers Guild of America awards. He was inducted into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame.

Don received a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Phi Beta Kappa), a M.A. in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.