On the spring equinox I went to see the man on the mountain. Seymour Hersh did not know I was coming, and after a wary nod from his wife, he exploded out the front door and asked, “What the fuck is wrong with you? What happened? Did you watch All the President's Men too many times? Write me an email like a normal person. I’m not going to reward this fucking behavior. Think of a question and ask me a question in an email. Has door knocking ever worked for you?” (Yes.) “Well, it's not working now!” (Slam.) 

On the bus ride up the hill I had pictured a buddy montage unspooling. Laughing over beers, combing through old files, and downloading the teachings of the master. I had gone to see the old man not only to say I had, but also because no one at my magazine had the key to smoking out stories in the twenty-first century. I’d done okay poring over public records and cold-calling hundreds of officials, but there had to be an easier way, a secret way. When I was asked to write this article on “journalistic responsibility,” I thought of getting chewed out by Sy.

But before getting into why and what should be done, it's worth persecuting the mainstream media once more for old times’ sake. There isn’t one journalism these days, but scattered islets in an increasingly unprofitable archipelago. Each is laden with different rules and failings. There is a corpse-ridden no-man's land of pock-marked small town papers, their metropolitan elders fully desiccated, if not squeaking by, with a few raspy op-eds a week. The Boston Globe fits this category, as will the Washington Post by the time this article hits print. Then you have the big digital players whose ratings are also in the ditch: CNN, NBC, ABC. The Vox consortium of anemic entertainment media. There are the gasping left-wing magazines of New York and the wizened remains of the New Republic, all of which have given up on breaking news, choosing instead to offer insipid commentary in pre-packaged cartons of left, pretty left, and very left. 

There are the startups: cynical vultures like Semafor, Punchbowl, and Puck, raising big dollars from the likes of bloodthirsty gulf monarchs, venture capitalists, and the writhing lobbyist hordes of Washington. There are the good, the bad and the ugly on Substack: my former colleagues Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein punching above their weight, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss shrieking banshee-like into the void, and various flavors of monstrous cringe—Harry Potter fan fiction, hyper-sonic #Resistance-core, and a small army of elite-spawned sojourners aiming telescopic lenses at two piss-stained blocks on the outskirts of Chinatown. 

And at the top of the food chain remain the Ivy league dandy fuckers. In this court sit the demonic squinty-eyed avatars of the New Yorker, the graying zombies of the grey lady, and the squeaky clean nerds at Propublica who, in all fairness, manage some solid reporting between hall monitor badge-shining and Pulitzer Committee meat-riding. But even this prestige class appears flagging as sheet-pan weeknight recipes and Supreme Court exposés ring hollow under the shadow of Trump II.

There are the good, the bad and the ugly on Substack: my former colleagues Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein punching above their weight, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss shrieking banshee-like into the void, and various flavors of monstrous cringe—Harry Potter fan fiction, hyper-sonic #Resistance-core, and a small army of elite-spawned sojourners aiming telescopic lenses at two piss-stained blocks on the outskirts of Chinatown.

An Absent Bedrock of Trust

The villains who brought us to this precipice are well-known. Digital ad monopolies castrated every small to medium sized paper, destroying a blue collar industry and creating a deficit in local news to grind down and polish up into national stories. Without the tributaries of local papers, national editors now grope in the darkness of their own minds, unable to predict the news, let alone cover it in any meaningful way. 

I hope that small local papers will one day reclaim their place after a cudgeling by the ad barons. They served an essential function similar to a public utility: information on road closures, arrests, where to pick up garbage permits. They exposed corruption, documented the sentiments of the heartland, and dredged up stories of national importance. They were a bedrock of trust, as it was local citizens, and not the storied elite, filling their pages. 

(I am reminded of the strapping Spokane reporter who sat next to me in his own dim cubby hole in the Capitol Hill press gallery, anxiously spooning tupperware leftovers into his mouth while trying to come up to speed on the arcane procedures governing the imperial core. He had used up all his vacation on his honeymoon, spent his savings moving to D.C., and now, as cold gold light streamed out from the partitioned press room where the Washington Post and New York Times’ coffee machine percolated sinisterly, he wondered out loud whether he had made the right choice.)

But it seems increasingly that the only way out is through. Joining the elite ranks and fighting from the inside has not gone well for those I know who have tried it. The meager efforts to seed local newsrooms with foundation funding has also had limited success. And even if there was an effective mass transfer of wealth from foundations and trusts at a scale that revitalized local news, those small town papers would still be beholden to the sentiments and neuroses of the elite patrons paying their bills. 

For all the bad news about news these days, piercing the blanketing silence of small town America is the cry of young people who, despite never having held a physical newspaper in their hands, are exploding with the need to replicate something they sense is missing. The hundreds of Youtube channels, Twitter accounts, TikTok shows, and other “independent” reporters show that people don’t just want slop; they want local reporting, gonzo camera work, and everything else that disappeared not that long ago. And so maybe instead of focusing on rebuilding the old world of printer paper and typeface, we should look forward to channeling the technology that seems here to stay, with the iconoclastic reporters that came before.

For all the bad news about news these days, piercing the blanketing silence of small town America is the cry of young people who, despite never having held a physical newspaper in their hands, are exploding with the need to replicate something they sense is missing.

Guides for the Future

Ken Silverstein, in stubborn disregard for the manufactured rules of journalism, impersonating a PR firm in Washington to reveal the ethical void of the lobbying industry. Julie K. Brown fighting off her editors, hired thugs, and US prosecutors to produce her groundbreaking Epstein investigations. I.F. Stone setting up shop in his fortified basement to lob grenades into Joseph McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities. Charles Bowden and William Vollman going off-grid to broadcast the dark secrets of America's interior and borderlands out into the public. A younger set, including Trevor Aronson, Seth Harp, Nick Turse, and Jack Poulson, pinning America’s forever wars in their crosshairs and firing away over and over again from their snipers den, perched high above the fray of mainstream media.

These are just a few of the many guides who have maintained a furtive monasticism, insulating the craft of reporting from the damaging tides of the red scare, the Bush era Department of Justice, and now an era of technological mass surveillance and Trump-induced hysteria. They are reporters who managed to survive and challenge not only the external powers which they reported on, but also the institutional blockades keeping their work from seeing the light of day. 

Our responsibility is not speaking truth to power, but to attack power wherever it may lay, with new tools of mass distribution. When both news producers and news awarders are overseen by Rockefellers, Restons, and Remnicks, that becomes more challenging. The highest awards granted to journalists, be they Pulitzer or Polk, do not pretend to represent sacrifice and mass effect, but, in their own words, seek to reward stories that are “distinguished,” “meritorious,” and “thought-provoking.” But despite the shortcomings of the mainstream press, the utopian promise of the internet still flickers in the light of digital and independent media. 

There is a feeling of unrepentant joy when a story comes into focus to unleash a truth that everyone knows in their hearts but are waiting to see in print. A sense of achievement when a White House press officer seethes and threatens, only to be fired when the piece still comes out. There is pure bliss when a manila envelope full of names is quietly pushed across a table in the darkness of a backroom bar.

But all of these joys require sacrificing the praise of the high priests of the fourth estate and the unified snapping of the socialist left. Journalists in 2025 should remember that their responsibility is not to their own egos but to actual American people who have little to no recourse for understanding what the fuck is happening in their country. They should also keep in mind the fact that in trading country club smugness for the dark, unrefined energy of the heartland, Trump was able to buck the power barons of his own party.

Journalists in 2025 should remember that their responsibility is not to their own egos but to actual American people who have little to no recourse for understanding what the fuck is happening in their country.

No Secret 

I’ve never thrown a typewriter through a New York Times office window like Seymour Hersh did in the mid-seventies, but I’ve come to understand the underlying sentiment over the course of my relatively short career in journalism. The institutions that publish our work should be reminded that they are a vessel to talk directly to readers, and not the participants in a dick measuring contest with other outlets. 

While I didn’t get the secret knowledge I was hoping for from my visit to Hersh’s house, I’ve come to view the incident as a parable when young reporters shyly message me online or call me up for advice. Nobody in the fourth estate holds the secret key to reporting on power. Certainly, nobody gets to define what truth is or what anyone should think based on the outlet above their byline. But more so, nobody can help you once you've understood the ebb and flow of American power. 

The historian Gil Troy wrote of Hersh’s progenitor, “I.F. Stone believed that radicals should be iconoclasts—rejecting truisms, left and right. He believed journalists should be independent—beholden to no bosses to bully them, no sources to massage them, no peers to pressure them. And he proved that defending democracy required vigilance, range, and creativity.”

It's never enough to just show up, and in fact, being a good reporter often means staying the fuck away, hunkering down, and shielding oneself from the damning winds of fame and excess. “A lot of reporters are eating crow tonight,” Hersh said on late night TV after breaking the CIA’s domestic surveillance operation wide open. “I know I'm not”.

Daniel Boguslaw is a freelance investigative reporter living in New York and leaving as soon as possible.