People say I’m crazy
Doing what I’m doing
Well, they give me all kinds of warnings
To save me from ruin
When I say that I’m okay, well they look at me kinda strange
“Surely, you’re not happy now, you no longer play the game”

— John Lennon “Watching the Wheels” (1980)

A long-running gag in journalism for awhile was to parody the ubiquitous “Why I’m joining The Athletic” columns that writers would post when, you guessed it, they joined The Athletic. And there were lots of those columns four or five years ago.

I wrote one, too, when they recruited me in 2019. Funnily enough, the URL for that piece now directs to the New York Times, which later bought The Athletic for $550 million and determined 18 months after that that twenty of us were no longer needed (with another twenty jobs left vacant as Times’ management and ownership try to cut their way to profitability, and chase breaking commodity news clicks, i.e. the failed Gannett model).

Now, more than a year after that professional defenestration, it’s time for the inverse of those rah-rah columns. It’s time for “Why I’m leaving journalism, after it left me.”

This being me, there’s an immediate caveat, an asterisk and a proviso, if you will: I’m still a freelancer, albeit one who’s lance isn’t free. As Harlan Ellison once said, “I sell my soul, but at the highest rates. I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it.”

I still want to write for an audience and get paid for it. I have no other saleable skill. And I’m good at it. Maybe not the best, not a Tom Brady or Joe Montana, but definitely a Kenny Stabler with reporting and words.

Anyways, after getting laid off, I did seek fulltime journalism work, especially in the sports business world that’d I’d successfully worked in for years and had become a minor name in that small niche of journalism. No dice. There are some great news outlets devoted to that topic, but none wanted to take on damaged goods, I suppose. Expensive, middle-aged damaged goods, too. I get that, even if it’s a shitty reality.

Inherent vice, a term that lent itself to a great Pynchon novel and Paul Thomas Anderson flick, is defined as “an inherent defect in certain goods that makes them liable to damage.” I am filled with inherent defects, baby, and as I’ve gotten older they can no longer be contained. But maybe the defects are not with me? [Narrator: Most of them definitely are.]

The journalism I’m leaving is the day to day mainstream stuff. I’ve made the choice to become an open partisan about issues important to me because I could not otherwise look myself in the mirror. The stakes are too high.

One of the basic tenets of mainstream American journalism is that a reporter (and, by extension, the outlet itself) is supposed to be a neutral chronicler of events, faithfully telling the public without bias what is going on. Something akin to a court stenographer but with enough wiggle room to put the news into inoffensive context, to tell what the reporter sees as the truth.

That’s why news outlets forbid reporters, for the most part, from publicly stating opinions about topics such as politics. I get the reasoning even if I think it’s ultimately a deceptive act against readers.

A reporter’s partisanship generally doesn’t matter with so-called “chicken dinner” community news such as crime reports and stories about house fires, traffic accidents, etc. The news-of-record stuff that’s the backbone of local newspapers.

Nuanced reporting is where things get hazy, and where context exists amid innate human bias. And where truth becomes a topic of debate by both well-meaning people and hyper-partisan grifting disinformation merchants.

Some housekeeping before we go on: I’m writing about a print journalism perspective (ink on dead trees and live pixels on a screen) because that’s my experience. TV and radio are somewhat different creatures within journalism and my experience there is nil. I’ve zero interest in what the shouty talking head shows have to say. They’re mostly info-tainment, not journalism. In sports and politics, they’re mostly a corrosive pox.

We’re all biased, in ways big and small, and we usually never notice our biased choices we consciously and unconsciously make every day. That’s true in journalism, too. And because space is limited in both print and digital space, what we include and don’t include in reporting is a biased choice.

What we choose to write or not write about is rooted in bias. Whose voices are included in the story, what background information, what color, and so much more are all reflective of bias. Most of this is unconscious bias but it remains bias, and bias isn’t always a dirty word. It’s how we recognize and navigate important bias that is meaningful. (And I’m talking about news writing, not columns and op-ed fodder)

At The Athletic, I campaigned to write social justice stories because my personal politics had evolved over many years, functionally doing a 180-degree change in ideology. As a lowercase libertarian and moderate Republican, I probably would have avoided such reporting and opted to focus on sterile numbers and economics, but it would have reflected a pro-capital perspective even if I wasn’t consciously aware of it. That occurs often in sports business reporting, which mostly is dollars and cents journalism told from capital’s perspective and consumed by a public conditioned to come at media from capital’s POV. It’s why many fans jeer players that hold out for more money: The sporting public is often reflexively on the side of billionaire owners that see fans as nothing more than sentient money to be hoovered up. It’s absurdly misplaced class loyalty in a new Gilded Age of wealth inequality. I’m all for the players getting their bag.

There’s an old expression that the role of journalism is to “afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted” (and it’s got an interesting history). It means punching up and holding power to account, while exposing crimes and misuse of power that harm the general public. Makes sense, right? But that’s absolutely a position of bias and not a neutral or objective role. I subscribe to that role for the media, by the way. Others in the industry clearly do not.

As I evolved as a person and a journalist, i.e. unstuck my head from my ass and grew my under-developed sense of empathy and compassion for humanity and the world, what I wanted to write and accomplish changed, too. The perspective of how I reported changed. Late, but not too late. I got to Dicken’s Ghost of Christmas Present when it occurred to me: “Um, I was an asshole. I was wrong. We better fix this.” I didn’t need the final spirit’s visit to show me my headstone to be spooked into better caring about other people, the world, and our democracy. I want to see the comfortable afflicted.

For the record, I’m probably what’s considered a modest form of social democrat. I’ve been labeled a communist by very stupid people that couldn’t define communism if Marx and Lenin flanked them holding copies of Das Kapital For Dummies and The Dipshit’s Guide To The Communist Manifesto. I’m not a communist, but I’m absolutely an anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian.

One of the pieces I was most proud of at The Athletic was about there being a single Black owner among the 150 U.S. major league sports teams (Michael Jordan, at the time), and why that was the case and how it could change. The hundreds of comments on the story included a typhoon of overt and casual racism.

I was aware while reporting and writing the story that the responses would be a lot of middle-aged white male sports fans angrily up in arms over something that doesn’t impact them at all. I’d occasionally wade into the comments to duke it out with some of the worst offenders. Such instances fueled intense, sometimes crippling anxiety. It sucked, but I thought it was worth it to tell an important story about the systemic and structural inequities at the highest levels of sports, and why it’s important to rectify such things. And sometimes it felt worth it to push back against racist comments. My editors had my back.

I told the Black sports team ownership story from a place of conscious bias in favor of equality and equity. Saying and writing such things angers some people. Power doesn’t appreciate truth about itself, and power’s useful idiots will let you know in the comment section — they did in this and other cases. And sometimes skittish editors under pressure from ownership will let you know, too. In that case, I was OK. Other times in my career, I’ve been more hung out to dry.

“STICK TO SPORTS. SHUT UP AND DRIBBLE.”

No. There is no sticking to sports, because sports are inherently political. They’re shaped by and reflect the wider society. Inequality, race and racism, gender, politics, economics, media, culture, sex, war … none of it exists on its own.

And this is where it gets thorny, because many sports fans refuse to believe that, and do not want anything spoiling their mindless good time. They want an escape, they want their gladiatorial bloodsports unpolluted by politics and to not think, which I understand but it’s a view to which I’m no longer sympathetic. Speaking broadly, such reader complaints can get noticed by editors and managers and every type of corporate flunkey, earning the reporter a talking-to or worse.

Sports fans, particularly those willing to pay for subscriptions, can lean conservative and some are hardcore MAGA, i.e. a sinister stew of race science demons, barely closeted suburban Nazis and revanchist neo-Confederates. But there’s also an angry mob of generally working and middle-class white meatheads and wealthier oafs that at any moments are equally angry about the refs in last night’s games and about whatever convenient moral panic Donald Trump’s cabal of sordid fascist ghouls have whipped up this week. And those folks rush to the comment section and social media to spew ugly, poisonous bilge. There are untold numbers of pissed-off reactionaries in this country that want nothing more than permission to use the N-word and to kill their neighbors, and they think Trumpism will grant their heart’s worst impulses without consequences.

You can find examples of such people in comment sections across media, all over Twitter, in the depths of Reddit, and many other places. Facebook is a moth light to the worst of humanity.

Journalists are often told to just ignore it, to not read the comments, to have a thicker skin. If one has a healthy sense of compassion, operating in such a climate takes a toll. The thickest skins have their tolerance limits, too. Sometimes reporters are encouraged to engage in the comments, but pushing back can get you in trouble if you go too far … but who is the final arbiter of what’s too far? It’s a generally no-no to irritate the paying customers and advertisers, because American business, media included, has convinced itself that the customer is always right. Not out of any customer service principle, but out of not wanting to jeopardize revenue as part of the immoral and unsustainable lust for endless-growth profits.

Customers are not always right (and the original quote was that customers are always right in matters of taste). Often, the customer is full of shit, and sometimes worse. Horrifically worse. Profiteering worse. Antivax worse. Anti-choice worse. LGBTQ hate worse. Mass deportations and military tribunals and Proud Boys and pro-Russia worse. Eugenics worse. Tiki torch march worse. Charlottesville worse. Pulse nightclub worse. January 6 worse. Reactionary hate and violence are forms of taste that deserves both contempt and push-back. Sometimes, the customers need to be told to go fuck themselves.

In recent years, I reached a point of being finished with being civil to racists, bigots, misogynists, fascists, and other assorted third-rate minds that spew hate and stupidity about what I was writing. Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but returning to Harlan Ellison, it’s more than that: “You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.”

I need to push back, sometimes rhetorically brutally, against ignorance and hate and arrogant stupidity. But I don’t need to worry that I can’t pay my mortgage because I was mean to a fascist shithead. The freedom to be myself isn’t available in a traditional newsroom, and that’s a concession I’m willing to make (and obviously am having made for me).

I’m ok with that. I’m the one that has to look at myself in the mirror each morning (yes, I do cast a reflection). So here I am, a loose cannon willing to speak my piece unpaid, and mostly unread. That’s the bargain I’m forced to make to not work for people that will sanewash Trump and his repugnant ilk.

Fuck that. Our constitutional republic is rotten from within and on life support. Millions can’t or won’t see it because they’re consumed with making ends meet and just getting through the goddamned day without more bullshit from Washington and from The Media. It feels so distant, but isn’t until the wolf is at the door.

Well, the wolf *is* at the door, and trying to knock it down. But thanks to the rigors of late-stage American capitalism, and a proliferation of anesthetizing bread and circus distractions, most people don’t realize that we’re on the edge of a catastrophic precipice enrages and frustrates me. It can happen here.

So I’ve opted to no longer muzzle myself. I’m angry. White-hot incandescent rage. All the time. And I’m just a mediocre middle-aged white guy, i.e. the least affected by MAGA’s toxic authoritarian shit-mist of violent sophistry and ugly promise to reshape America into a Confederate Gilead.

The republic is in genuine peril. I’m done making myself smaller and what I consider professionally dishonest on behalf of rich parasites who don’t want to ruffle the jackboots of shitheads.

Whatever soul I happen to have is worth more to me than a paycheck, which I fully acknowledge is a moral stand made possible only by being in mildly privileged circumstances that allow me to do this without immediate need for unemployment or welfare. Others don’t have that luxury. I can eke by for awhile, and when I do return to work I have no idea what that will be. Probably not with a newspaper. Maybe I’ll end up back at Arby’s where I got my first job in 1989 or 1990. I do love Beef & Cheddars!

Meanwhile, America’s tacky and weird aristocracy doesn’t have the foresight to grasp that money cannot always save it, especially our media barons. By their math, their tax breaks and business interests and mindless commitment to civility and the old rules are more important than democracy. So much of the ruling class believes in the old Michael Jordan adage: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” And as Jim Morrison said, “Money beats soul every goddamn time.”

So, a quick history lesson: The daily Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung was a middle class centrist/liberal publication that began publishing in 1617 – the year after William Shakespeare died. The newspaper closed in March 1934 under pressure from the Nazis and their violent censorship. Jewish staffers had been fired, and some certainly perished at the hands of the Third Reich’s executioners. Three centuries-plus of journalism ended at the hands of jackbooted rural thugs from Bavaria that had taken over cosmopolitan Berlin because of the ambition of a sleazy little thug from Austria who couldn’t paint well enough but was backed by the German industrialist and media ownership class.

That’s an extreme example but it occurred and can occur again. We have an autocrat in Trump backed by billionaire techno-fascist ghouls like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – the latter explicitly opposes democracy – that are obsessed with “free speech” in the sense they want to say terrible things (the N word in particular, and other slurs along with deadly anti-science nonsense, without consequences) while chilling the speech of their critics. And Trump has threated to pull the broadcast licenses of major TV networks and is suing CBS because an interview with Kamala Harris hurt his feelings. So what happened to the Vossische Zeitung is absolutely a warning.

This quote should be carved into the foreheads of many newspaper publishers:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” ― Desmond Tutu

Trump isn’t Hitler, even if he craves the Third Reich’s boot-licking generals. He’s lazy, tacky, and incurious, and he has no firm convictions beyond gratification of his own whims and self preservation (David Roth brilliantly and hilariously analyzed the sordid “Trump Aesthetic” for The New Republic in 2019). He’s a would-be oligarch, instinctually totalitarian and surrounded by genuinely evil henchmen. A lackadaisical fascist is still a fascist, and fascism itself is a broad term that encompasses varying toxic flavors of strongmen from Hitler and Mussolini, who were not interchangeable, to Francisco Franco and Juan Peron and Americans such as Father Coughlin and Huey Long. Trump contains aspects of all of them, even if he’s never heard of most of them.

As a traditional newspaper reporter, I cannot freely say those sort of things. As a random guy on the internet, I can and will.

Which brings us back to objectivity and bias. As I’ve written elsewhere, there are a trio of Hunter S. Thompson quotes that have influenced my view of objectivity in journalism:

“So much for Objective Journalism. Don’t bother to look for it here — not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.”

“If you consider the great journalists in history, you don’t see too many objective journalists on that list. H. L. Mencken was not objective. Mike Royko, who just died. I. F. Stone was not objective. Mark Twain was not objective. I don’t quite understand this worship of objectivity in journalism. Now, just flat-out lying is different from being subjective.”

“I don’t get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist’s view: ‘I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view.’ Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can’t be objective about Nixon.”

I no longer have to make any pretenses about objectivity and civility, but I am resolute in my commitment to facts and fairness. I can be subjective and rude in speaking my truth to power, even if power never sees my crude ramblings, but it always will come from a bedrock of facts. The best columnists use facts and evidence as the foundation for solid opinions. That’s my goal.

With that in mind, having my own site allows me the freedom to call a fascist a fascist in the most colorful invective I can gin up. And yes, they’re fucking weirdos. Dangerous weirdos.

So here I am, on this platform that costs me money, just to be able to yell long-form into the rapidly expanding New Dark Ages-cum-Idiocracy void. That’s the price of not having to play nice, to not worry about offending and to allow myself to be more of a brawling Samuel Adams than a cerebral John Adams.

This is for me. I no longer want to be polite, and haven’t been for some time, which you know if you follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading this clumsy, interminable doggerel this far. More soon, hopefully twice a week. Sometimes more, often less. I’m slave to the whims of the muse and the events of the world And I’ll try to keep it shorter. This was a long one, and I have a hard time killing my darlings.

Shea la vie.

XXX 30 XXX