A decade of failing to persuade the New York Times to pay attention to Leonard Leo [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://medium.com/@thcarter123/the-old-gray-lady-aint-what-she-used-to-be-a-decade-of-failing-to-persuade-the-new-york-times-to-8c3ab0dcea5e

Robert Draper, award winning NYT reporter, was my Capitol Hill neighbor. He’d walk his dog Bill, a friendly black mutt, past my house almost daily. I’m usually outside doing yard work and Draper often stopped to talk, before Bill moved on to another bush or hydrant.

One day spring day in 2012, Draper was wearing a “Daily Show” baseball cap. “Where did you get that,” I asked. He said it was swag from a recent Jon Stewart appearance.

I was impressed. “Daily Show? Really? Who the fvck are you?”

DC journalism royalty, as it turns out. Originally from Texas, Draper had written a history of Rolling Stone magazine, a book on the Bush years and more recently, “Do Not Ask What We Do: Inside the US House of Representatives.” It was that book he was on “The Daily Show” promoting.

I had retired a few months earlier and had my own connections to conservative DC. I spent 25 years as a print reporter on the foreign desk of the Washington Times (1983–2008), a year as media director at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and then three years as a federal government pr flack (2009–2012) for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

Heading up USCIRF was a pudgy little lobbyist for the Federalist Society — a GOP political appointee and my de facto boss: Leonard Leo.

*snip*