Chasing Bernie Sanders … and reflecting on The Post
A few thoughts on the thing all my friends, family and sources are asking me about.
On Friday, The Washington Post published my profile of Bernie Sanders — a 4,054-word story that was months in the making, and involved following Sanders around the Capitol and across the country.
It was mildly overshadowed by other news at The Post that day.
It’s a strange thing to know you’re living through a future business + journalism school case study. And honestly, I would not recommend it.
I’m not going to tell you how to feel about The Post, about our owner Jeff Bezos, about his decision to abruptly change our policy on endorsing presidential candidates days before the election.
I’ve heard from people in every corner of my life. Family and friends. College classmates. Sources who normally dodge my calls, but are now pestering me because they want answers.1
I understand the confusion and frustrations.
I can only speak for myself: my job is no different today than it was last week or last year. To report without fear or favor. To do watchdog journalism, particularly on behalf of Americans who stand to lose health coverage, medications and protections.
And to pursue it with independence.
In my nearly four years at The Post, I’ve written articles about Trump’s policies and fitness, Biden’s policies and fitness, Harris’s policies and fitness, the most powerful health care company in the world … the list of sensitive stories goes on. You get the idea.
I’ve never faced any publisher interference. Not even when I wrote about how Bezos himself was lobbying the Trump White House to change social distancing rules during covid.2
I mostly noodle around on Substack because I think journalism benefits when readers can actually know journalists. Hear our voices, hear the stories behind the stories.
We live in a moment of fading trust in institutions and rising connection to online personalities. Long before a billionaire publisher rattled readers’ faith in The Post, I watched as people with big social-media followings parsed my own articles and tweets, sometimes down to a single word choice, for intentions that weren’t there.
If reporters aren’t going to speak up for themselves, who will?
I’ve been on both sides of it. Until 2016, I was a guy with a consulting job who was blogging at 2 am about the things that the mainstream media was getting wrong.
Then I got to be inside the mainstream media and see for myself — yes, sometimes the media really does get it wrong. But also witness how careful and fair the best journalists are, and experience the challenges of reporting out the most sensitive stories.
And understand how important it is to have a deep, collaborative and independent newsroom. Like the one we have at The Post.
My colleagues and I spent nearly a year on a series on America’s declining life expectancy, and the overlooked reasons behind it, traveling to rust belt states and grilling the politicians and lobbyists standing in the way of cigarette taxes and seatbelt laws. We uncovered a federal investigation into billions of dollars of potential Medicare fraud, hearing from many older Americans thankful for answers after their personal data was compromised. We dug into how new state abortion bans were colliding with federal emergency-care laws, and the doctors and patients caught in the middle.
These stories aren’t what you’d call clickbait.
We also regularly break the news that quickly gets aggregated and shared.
To pick one example: you may have seen the widespread news this year that the Navy quietly demoted Ronny Jackson — Trump’s ally and former doctor — despite Jackson, Trump and others continuing to refer to him as an “admiral.”
That was our scoop at The Post. It took weeks of work, careful cultivation of sources, and an unlikely team-up — a health reporter and a military reporter — to uncover an embarrassing story that had gone unreported for nearly two years.
I believe independent journalists can provide a terrific service, which is why I pay for at least nine substacks and patreons; I subscribe to dozens of others.
But I also know there are precious few newsrooms left that have the scope, resources and patience to chase the biggest, hardest stories. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deeply worried about the future of my own.
Anyway: Bernie Sanders!
I was sitting at a White House event in April when it struck me.
Bernie Sanders’ staffers were in the room. Bernie Sanders’ policies were on the screens. Bernie Sanders himself was standing on a podium, behind a presidential seal, giving fiery remarks about the greed of Big Pharma.
That’s when it crystalized: this was probably the closest we’d ever get to a Sanders presidency. He’d learned how to work through his one-time rival Biden to achieve his goals, like lowering prescription drug costs.
It was going to be the key moment in the Sanders profile I’d been slowly assembling. Then Biden ended his re-election bid, Democratic politics flipped around, and I went back to the drawing board for a few months on where to take the story next.
People have strong feelings on Bernie Sanders, especially after his two failed presidential runs and the more recent tensions shaking the Democratic party over the Israel-Gaza conflict.
I hadn’t covered him closely until he became the chairman of the Senate’s health committee in early 2023. Then I got to see him work, see him pull Bernie Sanders-style stunts to intimidate the drug industry, see him annoy Republicans who said he was too focused on political theatre and not enough on the job of running a Senate committee.
I also got to see other things, like watching the 83-year-old Sanders lift his semi-battered suitcase and shove it into an overhead bin in a small airplane headed to Ohio — one of many vivid reminders that he wasn’t president. And I got to witness him run, run, run, almost frenetically, in pursuit of his agenda and to stop Donald Trump.
There’s much, much more in our profile. You can read the story here, with a gift link:
Why Bernie Sanders is running
Sanders hasn’t publicly commented on the story3, although a few hours after The Washington Post published our long profile of him, he decided to send this tweet.
Regardless of what Sanders thinks about The Post at this moment, I tried to write this profile not just for this news cycle, but for the reader who stumbles on it in 5 years, in 10 years, in 50 years, and wants to know more about a figure who helped define our current political moment. I hope the story holds up — and that the paper that published the story holds up too, something I definitely wasn’t worried about until the past few days.
And like my other feature stories: my editors at The Post gave me time to chase this article. They were supportive of the angles that I wanted to pursue. They even let me write 4,000-plus words for a newspaper that has real print constraints. I’m grateful for that.
I’ve directed a few friends, family, etc. to this New Yorker Q&A with Marty Baron, our former editor.
The process to report on Bezos turned out to be strikingly normal: I got in touch with one of his spokespeople, I asked her to confirm my reporting, and after she responded, my editors and I published the story we thought was worth telling.
A couple of his aides and allies did tweet and share the story, which I’m interpreting as a sign they liked it.