I had to buy a physical copy of the paper and see it for myself. I needed to hold it in my hands. Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, had just dropped a bomb of an editorial. It is one I’ve waited 30 years to see in print, so, as I had done for most youth growing up in Washington, I had get a hard copy of the Post.

What Bezos has done is historic.

The headline is a stunner: “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.” Bezos explains why the Post is not going to endorse Kamala Harris, a decision that caused an uproar at the paper and resulted in several high-level editorial defections, most memorably neoconservative Robert Kagan. Bezos was unsparing and owned it. The Post is biased, and people don’t trust it: 

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

He wasn’t done:

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccuratesocial media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way—in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area.)

I began writing for the Post in 1990. The relationship started in 1989, when I sent a letter to the editor to complain about a piece that appeared in the Outlook section, the part of the Sunday paper dedicated to opinions. I was working at a record store in D.C. when I got the call. Two Post editors had seen my letter, and they wanted me to come in and talk about writing for them. I was 25, and so being invited into the sanctum sanctorum of American journalism felt like quite a big deal. I met with the editors of the Outlook section, who invited me to write “about whatever you want.” I didn’t even feel my feet touch the sidewalk as I walked from the Post building to my dad’s office at National Geographic a couple blocks away for a congratulatory lunch. I had made it.

Interestingly, one of the editors who brought me on was David Ignatius, who would go on to infamy as one of the Russiagate stooges, claiming the ridiculous Steele dossier had been “confirmed.” In 1990, Ignatius was the editor of the Outlook section and pointedly announced that the Post should hire more “weirdos, misfits, outcasts,” eccentrics and brilliant oddballs who had something interesting to say and could say it with some style. So there I was. But Ignatius’s wish and my thoughts hit some opposition. I was told by one editor that the Post was an iceberg that moved in micromillimeters. They could talk about change all they wanted, but the template was set. This is the iceberg Jeff Bezos just demolished.

Still, I wrote several pieces for the Post in the early ’90s, most often for the Outlook section but also some record reviews, which was lots of fun. As my views became more conservative, however, I became more and more aware of what the parameters were. Nothing pro–life, nothing too blatantly Christian, nothing arguing about natural law or homosexuality—unless, of course, it was a switchback, like when Laura Ingraham wrote about her love for her gay brother. 

This was all fine. It’s a liberal paper, and I knew that going in. But there was one event in 1994 that revealed to me the totalitarian underbelly of The Washington Post. The Outlook section ran, at a full page, an op–ed/essay of mine about saving the Howard Theater, a D.C. landmark and one of the oldest historical black theaters in America. I recounted the history of the Howard, and then something strange happened to my copy. I had referred to the “moral and cultural collapse” that had destroyed the Howard and surrounding neighborhood—the drugs, rioting, and black racism that had brought down that part of town in the 1960s.

The night before the paper came out, I was called and told that the phrase “moral and cultural collapse” had been changed to “social upheaval.” Again, this was an editorial I had written for what was, ostensibly, the editorial section. It also had nothing to do with race, but with culture. My Irish ancestors had come to America in the late 1800s and landed in New York, a violent world of crime and alcoholism.

It was unacceptable. They were not just editing me; they were putting words in my mouth. I was told by friends and family to get over it, that I had a platform at the world-famous Washington Post. From the time I was a kid I had held the paper in awe.

My father, still working at National Geographic just a couple blocks down from the Post, had taken me to see All the President’s Men when I was 12. In grade school we went on a field trip to the Post’s offices, and I remember the monkish solemnity we observed when entering the environs of 15^th and L. We were slipping down the same corridors as Woodward and Bernstein and we still thought that meant something. In the mid-1980s, my brother was a successful actor in Washington, and won the Helen Hayes Award, given to the best actor in D.C. When we saw his face on the front of the Style section, we knew he had made it.

Working as I did at the record store while going to college when the Post had first contacted me, I was interested in punk rock—in other words, I was one of the kids who was among the “misfits, outcast and weirdos” that David Ignatius said he wanted to appear in the paper. The problem for the Post was that we outcasts were also truth-tellers, the kind of kids who do not like being censored or told what to do. 

So I told the Post to get bent over their mutilation of my words. I never looked back. I would rather live freely on a right-wing outer satellite than as a slave on Planet Post.

The Post came roaring back into my life in 2018, when I was dragged into the Brett Kavanaugh nightmare, which had been launched by that paper. I have written extensively about that ordeal and the disgraceful behavior of the Post —how the paper left exonerating witnesses out of its stories, sent me misleading emails trying to catch me off-guard, doing ridiculous deep dives into how many beers I drank, the girls I dated, and our high school underground newspaper, The Unknown Hoya. The Post even did a profile of a guy named Mike Sacks who talked trash about what Brett and I were like in high school. The problem? Mike Sacks, by his own admission, has never laid eyes on me or Brett Kavanaugh.

I don’t need to go into all of that again. Let me just say this: In 2022, I published a book, The Devil’s Triangle, about my experience during the Kavanaugh battle. It’s a book about a seminal Washington event, and it is written by a Washingtonian whose family’s history in the city goes back over 100 years—I mean, my grandfather was a professional baseball player for the Washington Senators. He played in the 1924 World Series. It cut deep to see my city’s paper of record become such a rag.

The Washington Post has not mentioned or reviewed my book. Their malpractice was even called out by Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Now that the Post has hit rock bottom, it takes on the persona of the drunk who wakes up in jail, his wife gone, his job torched, his life in ruins. The Bezos intervention is the paper’s last chance to admit it has a problem.

For 30 years I’ve had to settle for publishing elsewhere, but there’s no substitute for doing meaningful and fun journalism as a free man.