2025 is turning into the “Year of Confessions” for America’s elite journalists. 

First there was David Enrich of The New York Times, who—as was first reported in Chronicles—apologized to me earlier this year for his appalling lack of courage during the 2018 Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. Then there was a host of settlements in the lawsuits brought by President Trump against ABC, CNN, and MSNBC.

Next up we have Marty Baron, the “legendary” former editor of The Washington Post. In a recent interview with John Heilemann, Baron admitted that George Stephanopoulos of ABC had screwed up. ABC had to pay $15 million to Trump after Stephanopoulos on the Sunday show This Week, repeatedly and falsely insisted Trump had been “found liable for rape.” Stephanopoulos had to issue an apology.

At around the 50:00 mark this exchange takes place: 

Heilemann: Trump loves to sue, and he’s getting rewarded for it. We see this across the board in instance after instance…In these dire economics times for our business these are potentially ruinous lawsuit and you’re seeing people fold…I don’t know about you but it seems like you’re just asking for more abuse if you settle one these lawsuits and bend the knee to Trump.

Baron: Uh, yeah. Look, I think Stephanopoulos should have been more careful and that he should’ve corrected it right away. I think we in the press have a duty to do that. The language is what it is and he could have explained it more clearly and I think he should have. I don’t think that means they should have paid a settlement of the sort they did or any settlement at all for that matter. Clearly Disney did not want to find itself in conflict with the administration on other matters.

While Baron rushes ahead to hammer the legacy media for wanting to protect its financial interests, the most important part of his answer is the first part. Heilemann offered Baron a slow fat pitch to drive out of the park. Instead, Baron admitted that George Stephanopoulos had defamed the president. More and more journalists seem to be getting the message that contrition may be the only hope they have to begin repairing the damage they’ve done to their brand over the last half-century. Between Russiagate, Hunter Biden, and the settlements in all these lawsuits, the press is desperate to do whatever it takes to survive. The dying patient cannot afford to refuse this chemotherapy. 

Of course, this will not prevent most members of the media from indignant refusal to take their medicine. Indeed, Marty Baron often refuses to take his own advice and apologize when he gets something wrong. I called Baron out recently in the pages of Chronicles. In Baron’s book Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and The Washington Post, he defended the appalling hit pieces the Post were passing off as journalism in the fall of 2018, when they were desperate to prevent Brett Kavanaugh from becoming a Supreme Court justice.

In fact, the nature of the lies about me and Kavanaugh in the Post—claims that we were involved in drugging girls and gang rape in high school—was very like the lie Stephanopoulos told. So George Stephanopoulos should apologize to Trump, but Marty Baron won’t correct mistakes he made about me in print? In one of the stories the Post printed, they profiled a man named Mike Sacks, who said “all bets were off” when me and Brett drank. The Post admitted in the piece that Mike Sacks has never met me, Brett Kavanaugh, or any of our friends. What kind of journalism is that? Does Marty think that deserves an apology?

The irony of Baron’s roasting of Stephanopoulos in the Heilemann interview is even thicker when considered alongside this fact and when one considers that Heilemann is the America’s worst living journalist—a virtue-signaling lummox who is poisonously ideological and dangerously incompetent. In her book Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne Conway recounts that Heilemann passionately made the case that she was the infamous “Anonymous,” a supposed Trump administration insider who published a piece in The New York Times heralding his work as part of “the resistance.”

Anonymous, instead, turned out to be a man named Miles Taylor, a low-level political appointee few had ever heard of.

In October 2020, Heilemann tweeted this about the origins of the Hunter Biden laptop story: “Whatever its origin, foreign or domestic, an awful lot about the Hunter Biden story doesn’t add up and stinks to high heaven.” Conway sums up listening to Heilemann perfectly: “Your brain might hurt after talking to him, but you will feel supersmart that you’re not this guy.”

Like David Enrich and Marty Baron, Heilemann disgraced himself in 2018 during the Kavanaugh ordeal. Heilemann attached himself to Michael Avenatti, the psychopathic lawyer who launched depraved attacks on Kavanaugh. Heilemann and Avenatti put in front of the press Julie Swetnick, a woman who claimed that in the 1980s she was drugged and gang raped at a party where Brett Kavanaugh and I were present. Swetnick, according to NBC, “says Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were in the same part of the house earlier that evening but she cannot be sure if they were involved … ’I cannot specifically say that he was one of the ones who assaulted me,’ she said.” There was allegedly evidence: “Swetnick said she told her mother and a police officer about the attack shortly afterward. Both her mother and the officer are now deceased. NBC News filed a public records request for related documents, but local officials said a response could take up to 30 days.”

At a media conference in Austin, Heilemann got personal. He claimed to have worked in a Georgetown bar in the 1980s that, he said, I used to frequent. He referred to me “buying or selling cocaine,” something I have never done. He also brought up my brother, saying that my brother and I were estranged, which was also not true. It got so bad that one of the other panelists, Virginia Heffernan, felt compelled to defend me. Heffernan said that it seemed to her that people were trying to cast me as a “sin-eater”—someone responsible for all the bad behavior of everyone else. When asked for specifics about the Swetnick story on MSNBC, Heilemann claimed that Swetnick “had had a long day” and “wasn’t in the position to do an in-depth interview.”

So what about that police report? Jackie Calmes, a journalist at the Los Angeles Times, tried to find it. As I have noted previously, Calmes is a hack whose work is full of errors. Toward the end of her book Dissent, however, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the Swetnick report:

County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through the thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.

When it became a question of putting her own skin in the game, Calmes did not want to take the risk on Swetnick. Of course, since Calmes is not an honest broker, this information was buried in the back of a book. It was not broadcast on NBC or CNN.

If you don’t support their narrative, legacy journalists will simply ignore you. This happened in the fall of 2018 when I received a disgusting, obsequious email from Ruth Marcus at The Washington Post. Marcus wanted to interview me for a book she was working on about the Kavanaugh nomination. “I am open-minded about what transpired and want to write as full and fair a book as possible,” she wrote. Yet Marcus was unwilling to answer a very simple question I posed. Christine Blasey Ford had years and years, and the entire summer of 2018, to contact me if she wanted to ask me about Brett Kavanaugh and high school. Why didn’t she?

In her book Supreme Ambition, Marcus addresses it this way: “One possibility: Ford would call Mark Judge, remind Judge of what had happened, tell him to call Kavanaugh, and advise him to spare his family the ordeal. She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.”

Wait. What? “She dug up Judge’s Twitter handle but wasn’t sure how to go about contacting him.” I’m a journalist who has written for most major publications and many minor ones. I’ve been on Fox several times, CNN and EWTN. I was on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I am not a difficult person to find. Ford, a woman with several advanced degrees, didn’t know how to contact me? And Marcus believed this? 

When Marcus was promoting Supreme Ambition at its launch, an audience member at a book signing stood up and noted that since 2018 no one has ever come forward to corroborate Ford’s story—this despite the fact that Marcus claims in D.C. “everybody leaks.” “Well there was no investigation,” Marcus said. Her questioner was not impressed: “But you investigated!” She had just published a book about it!

Marcus recently resigned from the Washington Post in a huff because its owner, Jeff Bezos, is tired of the woke socialist nonsense that is losing his paper hundreds of millions of dollars. If she still has questions for me, she can find a lot of information in my book The Devil’s Triangle.

Since 2018 I have been caught between two impulses. The first is to be glad I survived and let the past go. The second impulse is to not let the Stasi media off the hook for what they did. In a paradox, many of the same conservatives telling me to get over 2018, will in the next breath complain that the media gets away with everything and people should hold them to account. In other words, forget the past while holding the bastards to account. It doesn’t and it cannot work that way.

In working on the second part of that equation—holding the bastards to account—I received an apology from David Enrich, a story that went viral and changed the dialogue around Enrich’s new anti-Trump and pro-media book. I also dug important information about a woman named Monica McLean, an FBI agent who was central to the false accusations against Kavanaugh. 

The work of revealing media corruption can take years. Yet as more and more media outlets face up to their crimes and pay settlements, real change becomes possible. It’s possible to move forward on a personal level while not giving up on exposing the old crimes of the media—crimes that they love to cover up. At some point, Marty Baron may actually apologize to me.