The New York Post just reported that Will Lewis, publisher of The Washington Post, met for coffee last month with “a prominent right-leaning journalist to discuss ways to lure more conservative reporters and editors to the predominantly left-leaning outlet.” Lewis met with Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson.
Lewis has an obvious solution to his quest. He can hire me and let me write what I want. My recent history has not been great with the Post. I thought about suing them, called former editor-in-chief Marty Baron a coward, and told the company to exercise the same kind of ruthless turnover with its left-wing staff as Bezos does with his Amazon Fresh stores—where I worked for a year.
Here’s the elevator pitch. I’m a Washingtonian who has decades worth of experience in journalism. My grandfather was a great first baseman for the Washington Senators. My father was an editor at National Geographic. My brother once won the Helen Hayes Award, given to the best actor in Washington, D.C. The British Spectator called me “the city incarnate.” For three summers I taught a journalism class at Georgetown University.
I got my start in journalism in high school at Georgetown Prep. In college in the late-1980s I began writing for Washington City Paper. The weekly was a showcase for young journalists with long “literary” pieces. I did stories on people all over the city, from radical teachers to punk zine editors to Sam Lacy, a black sportswriter. (It was great training, even if the editor’s liberalism and lack of street smarts would eventually cost him.) In 1990 I won a Dateline journalism award for my story “Safe at Home” about my grandfather’s baseball career in the 1920s—including a World Series—and his 1990 induction into the Hall of Stars at RFK Stadium. The article became the book Damn Senators.
By the late-1980s my writing came to the attention of Post editors—specifically David Ignatius in the Outlook section. I wrote several pieces in Outlook about the history, culture and politics of the city that’s in my blood. I wrote about the history of the Howard Theater, a black cultural institution. I wrote about giving up TV for Lent. I wrote about baseball and my grandfather Joe Judge. I wrote about jazz, which I took in regularly at Blues Alley.
I broke away from the Post in the mid-1990s when they changed some wording in a piece I wrote and didn’t tell me until it was too late. It changed the meaning, making it more left-wing. This was a betrayal of the journalism I’d grown up with, and a bad omen of the new cloud of wokeness that would descend on the paper. That cloud hasn’t so choked off the ability to think freely that the Post is losing $100 million a year and has no readers. That’s why Will Lewis is looking for conservative talent.
In the years since I left the Post I’ve become a conservative journalist. However, I pride myself on never wanting to fully join any club. I’ve written about how too many conservative journalists are lazy, coasting by on woke outrage without going out to find stories. When they get things wrong they don’t bother to make corrections. Like so many liberal journalists, none of them are athletes anymore. Too many conservative journalists don’t know anything about artists.
A main barrier to me rejoining the Post is the Brett Kavanaugh issue. In 2018 I was swept up in a nightmare when Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault at a 1982 high school party. His accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, claimed I was in the room when it happened. The story was broken by the Post. The reporter, Emma Brown, purposely left out an exonerating witness, Leland Keyser. Ford claimed that Keyser was at the party where the assault took place. Keyser denied the party and said she doesn’t even know Kavanaugh. Emma Brown left Keyser out of the story.
It was a left-wing set-up, which I describe in detail in my book The Devil’s Triangle. It’s inexcusable journalistic malpractice that the Post refuses to review or even discuss this book—a Washington book rotten by a Washingtonian about his life growing in Washington and involvement in one of the biggest Washington political dramas of the last several decades.
This should be a reason the Post wants me writing for them. They once valued writers who have balls and will go against the mob. Instead, these days they’re still flogging the gassy old horse Ruth Marcus.
The fact that I’ve so relentlessly sought the truth about the Kavanaugh hit and debunked so much of the Post’s reporting is exactly the kind of courage and honesty the Post is lacking. On October 22, 2018, the Post ran a piece with this headline: “A writer mined his ’80s adolescence in the D.C. suburbs. Then came the Kavanaugh hearings.” The article, by Rebecca Nelson, is a profile of Mike Sacks, a comedy writer who grew up in Maryland. Sacks had a lot of slanderous and libelous things to say about me, Brett Kavanaugh and our friends, despite the fact that Sacks doesn't know any of us. He’s never laid eyes on me, Kavanaugh, or anyone we grew up with.
You read that correctly. For a story about Kavanaugh and me, the Post profiled a man who’s never met us. At one point Sacks tweeted, “I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge and their type in my new book. I didn’t. But I did. If that makes sense. Maryland!!!” No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make sense because this asshole doesn’t know us from Madonna.
In her piece, Post reporter Nelson then offers this astonishing admission: “For the record, Sacks didn’t go to Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, the school Kavanaugh and Judge attended. He went to public school. He didn’t belong to a country club, just the neighborhood pool. But growing up in Montgomery County, he says he spent time with ‘this entitled type,’ as he referred to Kavanaugh. ‘Things had a tendency to happen while you were around them, he says. ‘When they got drunk, all bets were off.’”
Then here was the hit piece by Avi Selk. “What the man accused of being part of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault had to say about women’s sexuality” is an attempt to smear me as advocating violence against women: “Judge has written dozens of columns in the decades since, including several for this newspaper. Femininity, masculinity and sexuality are perennial themes. He has written that disposable razors are too feminine, that former president Barack Obama is practically a woman, and that gay men have infiltrated the priesthood."
Shortly after the article was published, Selk went on MSNBC and had this exchange with Ali Velshi:
VELSHI: He's a guy who has written a lot about women, and he has expressed what he thinks women's role in society is. What's the Cliffs Notes version of this?
AVI SELK (REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST): The Cliffs Notes is he's never used the words, but he's the type of person that are sometimes referred to disparagingly as men's rights activists. He writes about his notion of femininity and masculinity, whereas masculinity is like a man being a man, that quote about unbridled male passion, he's a fan of, you know, movie scenes of guys, you know, violently taking women and doing things to them.
This is what the Post has become. This is why the paper is on life support. I was born in 1964. A deep impression of my young life in D.C. was formed during Watergate. All the President’s Men was one of the first movies my father ever took me to. I idolized the Post and its staff. Watching what’s taken place over the last few decades has been like washing a bright and fearless young friend becoming a heroin addict.
Recently, a story of mine went viral and wound up being reported on Fox News. I confronted a New York Times reporter about that paper’s own abysmal 2018 Kavanaugh coverage. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my role in the Kavanaugh coverage,” David Enrich told me, “and I would be happy to talk to you about it at some point. For now, I will just say that I have learned some lessons and would probably do certain things differently next time.”
That kind of contrite honesty might just save America’s Stasi media. The people at the Post who slandered me and refused to review my book most likely don’t have the guts or the honor to let me back in their pages. The fentanyl-like high of leftist hubris, which has fueled dopes like Jonathan Capehart for decades, is just too sweet. The intervention they need, a blast of pure free speech and conservative wisdom, is too much to take. As John Dean says in All the President’s Men: “You have to understand, these are not very bright people.”
