“Can’t believe I’m just a dateline to my friends.”

By Admin • 05 Nov 2025

It takes a special kind of crazy fool to try and be a journalist today. But beyond that, you’ve got to be a masochist. IF IT BLEEDS IT LEADS.

This is the story of “horseglue” and how I watched the job of my dreams become the thing ruining everything.

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I want to preface this by just saying I know it’s often considered bad form to go deep into detail about a song’s meaning. But I think people need to hear the story here, because I think it helps explain some unfortunate truths about our country today, including why among other things The New York Times is struggling to describe fecal matter accurately.

I also just really want people to feel the message of the song whenever possible.

So here’s how we got to “horseglue”. My first week of employment in the mass media business was the week of Trump’s first inauguration, and I watched the whole Trump and Biden political era up close. The failure to repeal Obamacare. The slashing of the corporate tax rate. The resignations of men, forgotten by history. Paul Ryan. Al Franken. Anthony Scaramucci. Byzantine structures from our perspective today. I worked alongside a lot of people you’d recognize from talking on TV. Attractive talkers. Through it all I walked among the flock, turning from scrum to aimless scrum.

It was a life through which I, for a while, I found a calling.

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You see, I did actually want to fight injustice with The Truth. Yes, reporters like Glenn Thrush were being imitated on SNL, but some of it wasn’t fluff either. There’s a reason I found heroes in reporters who combed public records to discover, for example, that the first Trump administration was hiding potentially cancerous chemical contamination across the country. Or the people who tracked flights and receipts to reveal the government abuses of Scott Pruitt, a coal industry stooge Trump put in charge of the EPA. This led to my “career” in Newsland focusing around “energy and environment issues,” a blanket way media types like to describe anything that powers society and/or pollutes it. And I rallied to the cause of fighting climate change because — and it’s hard to remember this now — the global scientific community said we had preciously little time to do so if we wanted to avert catastrophic consequences. What is a bigger story than “the world is ending”? There isn’t anything. You aren’t anything compared to feet of sea level rise.

So I went for it. I had my own little moment in the hot sun. I broke stories, too, and they were important. Alleged flagrant corruption. Threats to national security. Each time one of those tweets would pop off, one after another, I’d excitedly tell the people in my life stuff like, “Did you know The Washington Post cited my story?”

And I’d yip “SCOOP!” like a dumb little puppy.

There’s a raw dopamine involved with feeling like you mattered because you did something with your nerd powers. But it was hollow. Every victory felt fleeting. I’d reveal someone in power was doing some apparent cover-up, and they’d just keep their job. The nomination would pass, the bill would move. Information, whatever was left of its value, was a declining currency.

At the same time, over the years, I watched the influence of journalism wane within the Beltway while a startling degree of hypocrisy became apparent. I honestly couldn’t tell you how much fossil fuel money is sloshing around the Washington media ecosystem because none of it is really all that transparent and it’s not my job to track it. But a lot of the “energy and environment” writing in D.C. is paid for with the assistance of oil companies. Like, the most popular D.C. energy podcast is proudly “presented” by Chevron. Punchbowl News, a hyper-niche Congress news site widely popular in D.C., has enjoyed oil sponsorships at the top of its tip sheet emails for years, and held an ExxonMobil-sponsored event at the last Democratic National Convention. Even now, the American Petroleum Institute is funnelling seven figures into podcasts like The New York Times’ “The Daily” to beg lawmakers for faster government permits.