lit a candle 5h agomy dad texted me a screenshot of one of his old columns instead of just saying he died. that was his way of telling me it mattered.
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John M. Baer was an American political columnist who covered Pennsylvania state government and Capitol politics for more than half a century. He died on 24 September 2026 at his home in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, at the age of 79, after a two-and-a-half-year battle with esophageal cancer. Through that illness…
John M. Baer was an American political columnist who covered Pennsylvania state government and Capitol politics for more than half a century. He died on 24 September 2026 at his home in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania, at the age of 79, after a two-and-a-half-year battle with esophageal cancer. Through that illness he continued to file weekly columns for PennLive and The Patriot-News, keeping the sharp, independent voice that governors, lawmakers and readers had come to expect.
Baer was born in Harrisburg on 25 June 1947 and grew up around the Capitol newsroom where his father, John H. Baer, worked as a Patriot correspondent. He graduated from Bishop McDevitt High School and Mount St. Mary's College, taught high-school English and coached football and basketball, then entered journalism in 1972 at the Harrisburg Evening News just as Tropical Storm Agnes and Watergate remade the news. He later produced for public broadcaster WITF-TV, briefly left the newsroom to speak for Lieutenant Governor Bill Scranton's 1986 gubernatorial campaign, and spent about 32 years with the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer before joining PennLive and The Patriot-News in 2019, a homecoming to the paper where both his career and his father's had begun.
His reporting and columns earned national notice. In 2002 the National Journal named him one of the top ten political journalists outside Washington, D.C., praising his ability to take the skin off a politician without making it hurt too much. He received the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association's Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence in 2015 and was inducted into the Pennsylvania News Media Hall of Fame in 2024. He also wrote On the Front Lines of Pennsylvania Politics, a book drawn from decades on the Capitol beat and the campaign trail. Over roughly ten gubernatorial administrations, from Milton Shapp to Josh Shapiro, colleagues across party lines remembered him as acerbic, dogged and hard on every side that held power.
Baer was married for 57 years to Rosemary Ruggieri Baer, his college sweetheart. He is survived by her, their sons Johnny and James, daughter-in-law Melissa, and grandchildren Aiden, Owen and Emma. A Mass of Christian Burial was scheduled for 11 a.m. on 29 September 2026 at Saint Theresa Catholic Church in New Cumberland. Governors including Josh Shapiro, Tom Ridge, Ed Rendell and Tom Corbett joined the Capitol press corps in mourning a chronicler whose pen, they said, had shaped public life in Pennsylvania as much as it recorded it.
Biography adapted from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); PennLive / The Patriot-News obituary by Amy Worden (25 Sep 2026); family survivor details reported therein.
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1John Baer, Pennsylvania political columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Inquirer and PennLive
by People Forever
that's exactly how my uncle told me too