I’m (Finally) Leaving Journalism

I still remember Dave’s face. It was about 19 years ago. Dave, a friend, had won $100,000 on Jeopardy! the previous year. I saw him at a party and excitedly came up to him. “Fantastic job on Jeopardy!” I said.

Dave’s face fell. He looked like I had reminded him of a kidney stone he had passed. “The money goes fast,” he said, then wandered off to get a drink.

It does. $100,000 is also the amount I raised in 2018 from donors who wanted to support my journalism. Some of it came from GoFundMe, while others mailed checks. The money allowed me to finish a book, which was published in 2022. After spending time promoting it, settling scores and writing about what interested me for the last few years, it’s time to put the laptop down. It’s time, at the end of the summer and after finishing pieces I'm under contract for, to leave journalism.

Journalism doesn’t pay anymore—especially as an outsider, which is where I’ve spent most of my career. It began in high school when two guys and I started an underground newspaper, The Unknown Hoya. We covered parties, new hairdos, sports, girls, rival schools. One story we covered—and which to our shock would gain national attention forty years later—involved a bachelor party we threw for our music teacher. It was the early-1980s and there was plenty of beer and with either a belly dancer or stripper—people are still arguing about which it was.

The editor of The Unknown Hoya, a guy I call Fletch, is still a friend and sharp editor. He reads my stuff and chimes in with praise or criticism. His instincts, honed not only by The Washington Post and New York Times but Mad magazine, Rolling Stone and National Lampoon, are still sound. He was responsible for one of my all-time favorite captions. It appears in The Unknown Hoya under a picture of our music teacher staring at the chest of the belly dancer/stripper who stands before him: “That’s definitely not a b-flat.”

In the 1990s after college I wrote for the Post, Times and Wall Street Journal. In 1996 after my father died I decided for the first time to leave journalism. I had one last article in the pipeline, a piece called “Manifesto of a Right-Wing Rock Fan.” I considered it unpublishable because it was so eccentric. It was picked up by New York Press, a brilliantly feisty, funny and eclectic weekly. The editor, Russ Smith, began running my stuff every week. The freedom was wonderful. I wrote books about swing dancing, Catholicism, and baseball. I wrote a book about going to a Jesuit Catholic high school, and a former teacher posted a review on Amazon: "A compelling read. It is also sometimes a haphazard and contradictory mix of the intellectual and the glandular; of the cogent argument and the primal scream; of the open minded discourse and the conservative rant."

My last salaried job in journalism was in 2015, for a conservative outfit in Virginia. I interviewed people like Kirk Cameron, Marilu Henner and Brian Dennehy. The job was eventually eliminated due to midget cuts—the story of most of the media in the 21st century. It was time to bail. The conservative media only hires based on nepotism and the buddy system, and the liberal outlets that had great cultural coverage would never touch me.

There would be, however, one last project. In 2018 the political left tried to destroy me during the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I’d gone to high school with Kavanaugh, and the political left tried to destroy him, using my 1980s youth as the weapon. Kavanaugh, a high school friend, was falsely accused of sexual assault by a woman who claimed I was in the room when the alleged assault took place in 1982 when we were in high school. As Jonathan Turley put it on Fox, I was supposed to be “roadkill” in the process. Fletch, as usual, came up with the best take. When the media was actually reporting on The Unknown Hoya and our gustatory 1980s coverage, he called me with a question: “Is it too late to print a retraction”?

After Kavanaugh I had two choices. I could move to the Outer Banks, go surfing and lick my wounds. Get a little job in a grocery store or restaurant. Even my lawyer was telling me to move: “Your life as you know it in Washington is over,” she said.

The other choice was riskier. I’d stay in DC, at least for a few years, continue as a journalist, write a book and get payback. That, I knew, was the only honorable choice. In his book Under Saturn’s Shadow, psychologist James Hollis notes that life has meaning if you’re part of a larger “cosmic drama.” Here’s how Carl Jung, quoted by Hollis, described it: “That gives peace, when people feel they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal… A career, producing of children, all are maya [illusions] compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”

I wouldn’t get much of an advance for the book—the major publishers would never touch me, and I was glad to land with Bombardier Books. There came a point about halfway through when I’d run out of resources, was still suffering from PTSD, and had nowhere to turn to. I want to give a special thanks to Instapundit, who highlighted my cause to his readers, who donated enough to keep me going and allow me to finish.

I have several more stories in the pipeline that I’m contracted for that will carry me through the summer. Then it’s time to bail. I’m excited for a piece I have coming up in The New Criterion, the best magazine in America and a high point to go out on. It’s an interview with Jennifer Hofmann, the author of the great novel The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures. It’s about a member of the East German Stasi and how attempts to destroy people through psychological and spiritual warfare can sometimes blow up in your face.

There’s also a writer for a glossy magazine doing a profile on me, which will be a nice wrap-up. I managed to get one of the reporters at the Times to (almost) come clean about the hit they put on me and Kavanaugh. I also have a movie script about the events of 2018, and there has been some interest. The Hollywood left will never touch it—and the conservatives aren’t comfortable with an R-rated film with sex, drinking and bad language. Just like 40 years ago with the underground newspaper, we’re outsiders.

I recently consulted with Fletch about what's next. I told him I had an advance copy of a book by a woman who was in a sorority. She claims a New York Times reporter came to campus and was “deflated” that the girls weren’t more promiscuous. “Wow, that’s great,” Fletch said. I hit him with my headline: “We Weren’t Slutty Enough”—Book Claims NYT Reporter was Disappointed in Low-Sex Sorority.

“That’s gold,” he said. “Just stipulate that whoever runs it can’t change the headline. We didn’t cover the bachelor bash in 1982 to punk out now.”