Confessions of a Former Hack

Morning editorial meetings at what I’ll call “The Publication” often began the same way. I’d rush to my work-issued laptop, spilling coffee along the way, and log into Zoom at the last minute. My scrambling was the result of a poor night’s sleep and a sickness that lasted from the moment my alarm went off until I fell asleep, though my slumber was occasionally interrupted by waking up, remembering what I did for a living, and asking, “What have I done?”

When the members of the editorial team turned on their cameras and appeared in a Brady Bunch-style grid, the nausea and tightness in my chest would worsen. Then, we’d review the pitches.

Writers pitched articles about gothic Pride prom, a feminist outer space art exhibit, the “whiteness” of eating chicken, and a musical depicting a gay Judas pining for Jesus. After the editorial meeting, I spent my remaining hours writing and editing articles meant to showcase “institutional capture” in higher education – the progressive left’s takeover of, or influence on, policy initiatives, curricula, leadership positions, and campus culture. As far as The Publication’s like-minded readers were concerned, we succeeded in convincing them that the kids and their professors aren’t alright. The content I published, however, took quotes out of context, argued with strawmen, and mocked ideas and the people who supported them. I generally flouted the principles of journalistic ethics and good rhetoric. In short, I was a hack.

Johannes Vermeer, A Lady Writing, oil on canvas, ca 1665.

For the five months that I worked for The Publication, I engaged in hackery for the same reason that I suspect other writers do. Having reached my late twenties, my career wasn’t where I thought it would be. If I just hold my nose, I thought, better opportunities will present themselves. On days that seemed like I exclusively edited stories about campus drag shows, I dreamed of joining the realm of serious journalism and conservative commentary: coverage of family-friendly policy initiatives, reflections on political theory, and arts criticism.

I quit hackery too early for better opportunities to materialize. Though the gig was short, my time as a hack represents the low points of my career and character. But my lowest moments led me to my highest calling – or, rather, the highest calling. I received gracious responses from the subjects of my hack jobs and learned how to love erstwhile enemies.

As a hack, I couldn’t love my neighbor as I loved myself if that neighbor was a progressive. I was in the business of insulting progressives, and I used my dream of “making it” in a tough industry to justify becoming someone who could be paid to write almost anything. When I joined The Publication, I was a struggling army wife living in rural Oklahoma. Military families move about once every two years, usually to installations far away from the journalism industry’s hubs. At twenty-seven, a smattering of freelance articles was all I had to show for my writing career. I wanted to write full time and would eagerly click on job postings only to see the dreaded location requirement: “In-person in [insert coastal city here].” The Publication was a rare opportunity to work remotely for an organization headquartered in the greater DC area.

My struggles speak to larger trends in journalism that have already been rehashed so many times that I’ll give them brief treatment here. Journalism is an industry affected by elite overproduction – that is, a growing number of college-educated professionals are clamoring for scarce job openings in professions deemed “high status.” Local news outlets are shutting down, and our august national publications are also seeing declining engagement. Given the popularity of social media and streaming services, we’ve lost our taste for print, and we’re losing our ability to follow the longform arguments that characterize that medium.

These factors leave applicants asking, “How is there a proliferation of publications yet few well-paid opportunities to write?”

Some outlets have kept business booming by capitalizing on the appetite for frivolity and sensationalism. On the two main sides of the political aisle, outlets follow a cycle of one side instigating the Discourse of the Week, the other side responding to the Discourse, and the instigator responding to the response. They might not admit it, but each side needs the other to maintain its image as an embattled truth teller.

In this media landscape, a progressive who wanted to review operas at the Metropolitan ends up scouring pop culture for instances of alleged bias. A conservative who wanted to follow in the footsteps of Russell Kirk or Roger Scruton ends up scouring social media for foot-in-mouth moments from accounts with few followers.

To be clear, there are outlets that formed out of legitimate concerns over mainstream media narratives and institutional capture more broadly. By offering dissenting views on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender identity, and other controversial topics, these outlets provide ideas for achieving true racial justice or helping gender-distressed children through non-medicalized means. I would go on to write for some of these outlets, and I consider their editors among my mentors. Moreover, I don’t believe that everyone at The Publication shares my cynical outlook, and I occasionally admire its content for championing the “canceled” or uncovering a university’s profligate spending.

The problem with my content at The Publication is that I made poor attempts at truth-seeking and fairness. I knew from my time as a community college writing and rhetoric instructor that content meant to inform or persuade must accurately represent the opposing side’s view and respond to that side’s strongest argument. Instead, the articles I wrote and edited dedicated more space to The Publication’s view; pared down lengthy statements to a single weak quote; and featured grotesque AI-generated images that, despite our stated commitments to intellectual freedom and debate, foreclosed any opportunity for them to have a good-faith conversation with us. The images burned bridges because they suggested that it wasn’t just the ideas I found odious. I hated the people who held them.

I learned during my first week at The Publication that building bridges between ideological opponents, or progressives and conservatives, wasn’t the point. My first week of work coincided with the end-of-year push, and I heard frequent references to something called “the numbers.” As I understand it, the fundraising department sets the number of articles to be published annually. In the few remaining weeks before the New Year, we needed to reach that number. I naively wondered why this department had any say in editorial matters, but a colleague told me that our articles were a fundraising tool for our publisher, a large conservative nonprofit that provides training in media, campaigning, and grassroots activism. I remember pitches for nuanced articles getting rejected lest we had to field complaints from readers – a task endured by all publications but presumably made worse when the readers practically paid our salaries. Our task was not to challenge readers but to convince them that the absurdities we covered were commonplace, in the hope that they’d reach for their wallets.

While our status as a conservative nonprofit understandably restricted our coverage, catering to the whims of the donor class resulted in content that failed to present a consistent conservative vision. For example, I noticed a tension between The Publication’s support for social conservatism and neoliberalism. Articles criticizing the vice of sports gambling were out of the question. (We were told that, in a free market, even indebted college students are free to gamble with money they don’t have.) Nor could we publish articles expressing sympathy toward union activity. I once reviewed a pitch that implicitly criticized a group of graduate students for trying to unionize. The pitch linked to an article about their efforts, so I clicked on it to read their grievances. Graduate students wanted to unionize, in part, because they received a mere five days of paid parental leave. I’m sorry to say that I did nothing to stop the pitch’s approval beyond a message to a colleague: “Aren’t we supposed to be pro-family?”

My experience tells me that former hacks rarely discuss such machinations because they fear ending up on a proverbial blacklist that could hurt their employment prospects in a tight-knit network of media outlets, think tanks, and advocacy organizations. For this reason, the first public criticism of The Publication that I encountered came from an outsider. A University of Michigan professor wrote about finding himself in The Publication for his social media activity. According to an article on his Substack, he had reposted a study with a premise that admittedly sounded like the product of the Grievance Studies Hoax – a series of fake studies intended to show the humanities in crisis and published by unwitting academic journals.

The study reposted by the professor found that pet owners are slower to adopt dogs that have names associated with the African American community. Asked his opinion by one of The Publication’s freelance writers, the professor sent a long, thoughtful paragraph in response. He made good points: there’s extensive literature on bias toward names in housing and employment applications, the literature shows a causal relationship between the name on an application and its acceptance or rejection, and pet adoptions are a surprising area to see discrimination because the bias elicited by these names cannot apply to dogs. But he felt that the article’s reduction of his statement to a one-line quote didn’t capture his perspective. His Substack article continued to argue that his treatment was the rule rather than the exception, suggesting that professors’ beliefs determine whether articles about them are sympathetic portrayals or hack jobs. The Publication was fishing for funding with outrage bait, and one of his examples was something that I wrote.

Even worse, he shared a survey of professors covered by The Publication, 40 percent of whom said they received threats after becoming the Character of the Day. I read the professor’s account while working at The Publication and thought, My God, he’s right.

The professor’s criticisms surfaced what I had buried deep within my psyche, forcing me to acknowledge that my careerism couldn’t completely explain my unease. Sure, there was a mismatch between what I wanted to write and what I was writing. But my unethical practices were making me sick. That I caused these professors distress filled me with shame. I equated being a bad journalist with being a bad person and resigned myself to a lifetime of hackery because I didn’t deserve to do edifying work. What helped me leave The Publication was the realization that I could do so and be forgiven.

Gracious responses came from academic organizations that I covered in articles exaggerating their bias and influence. By my conspiratorial tone, readers might have thought that these organizations formed a secretive tribunal in front of which every academic must appear to secure jobs, receive grants, or publish papers. A leader of one organization sent a tactful email explaining why he thought that my article was inaccurate, yet he agreed to keep sending me statements should I seek his organization’s perspective in the future. Another organization’s leader met with me over Zoom, and we hardly touched on the person’s problems with my article. Despite our divergent worldviews, we focused on what we had in common: we were cat owners, aspiring authors, and outsiders in our industries.

Their kindness – along with the safety net of the military’s health care and housing benefits –enabled me to give my two weeks’ notice without having another job offer. A few months later, I still owed an apology to the person I had wronged the most. At The Publication, I told a one-sided story about Mark Ramseyer, a Harvard Law professor whose academic journal article on Korean prostitutes supplied to the Japanese military received a nearly two-year delay by its publisher. The controversy supposedly lay in his reasoning and use of sources, but the scholars who contested Ramsayer’s article might also have taken issue with its revisionist history. So heated is the topic that sharing Ramseyer’s version of events is an imprisonable offense in some nations.

Because I failed to communicate clearly with my editors, Ramseyer’s statement was unintentionally excluded from my article. I remember at least a week passing before a short excerpt from his essay-long statement was added in a correction. Ramseyer’s statement alerted me to the ways in which fraudulent primary sources, the culture wars, and a chilling effect imposed by the threat of imprisonment complicate research on the topic. Even after the correction, the damage was done. Readers of my article would likely draw one of two false conclusions: Ramseyer was a sloppy scholar or a liar.

Ramseyer responded to my overdue apology by wishing that reconciliations like ours happened more often. We corresponded over email and eventually met face-to-face. In June 2024, I attended a conference on Harvard’s campus, and I used a lunch break to chat with Ramseyer while seated at an outdoor table. He was busy preparing for an overseas trip and on his way to a meeting, but he patiently listened as I shared the details of my conference and career aspirations. My husband was exiting the army, so we had recently moved close to my in-laws in Central Florida. Ramseyer knew that I was seeking employment and asked, “How can I help?”

Not once did he mention the article.

Roughly a year and a half has transpired since my last hack job. I’ve recommenced freelance writing, a relatively humble career but one that doesn’t incentivize performative hatred. As I discover new publications, I’m also noticing an interesting development in the journalism industry.

New outlets are returning to old forms and avoiding the bad incentives of digital culture. Fairer Disputations, an outlet I’ve contributed to, suggests in its name the scholastic disputation, a medieval approach to argumentation. The scholastic disputation varied over its history, but it consistently drew on the principles of good rhetoric. Writing in The American Historical Review, historian Alex J. Novikoff identifies the disputation’s tendency to clearly present arguments and define terms; to use a “dynamic and persuasive” dialogue format; and to reject “altercations” in favor of “productive conversations” that “yield a common inquiry after truth.”

Similarly, Fairer Disputations hosts symposia on questions that normally leave ideological opponents at an impasse: Is the Western world repaganizing? Are children best served when raised by their married biological parents? Do Catholic feminists and radical feminists differ in their core assumptions? The interlocutors in these debates show that a well-reasoned, courteous conversation is possible so long as a publication seeks the truth rather than clicks.

The significance of new outlets goes beyond resurrecting old forms of debate. The cultivation of virtue is central to publications such as Fairer Disputations, Cluny Journal, and others (Cluny Journal is an experimental project named after a medieval monastery that hosted disputations). Saint Thomas Aquinas said it best when he described the distinctly Christian virtue of charity in Summa Theologica, itself an example of the scholastic disputation. On charity as a kind of friendship, Aquinas writes that “not every love has the character of friendship, but that love which is together with benevolence, when, to wit, we love someone so as to wish good to him.” Furthermore, “the friendship of charity extends even to our enemies, whom we love out of charity in relation to God, to whom the friendship of charity is chiefly directed.” In outlets like Fairer Disputations and Cluny Journal, the kind words exchanged by interlocutors evidence their genuine goodwill toward each other. Some go so far as to establish “friendship” between the two sides of a debate. Contributors to these outlets seem to understand that it’s not enough to act courteously toward interlocutors to score rhetorical points. We must love them because God loves them.

As a hack, I saw love in the responses from Ramseyer and others I wronged. They encouraged me to write better and love better, and I found outlets where I could do so. I now focus on issues impacting senior citizens, including eldercare; the pressure on women, and more recently men, to get plastic surgery as they age; and hosting boarders in our homes to keep lonely senior citizens company. In my weaker moments, I’m angered by some of the perspectives I find in my research. The call to virtue then takes over, though I’m still putting charity into practice. I consider whether writers are responding to precarity in the journalism industry by adopting extreme positions or communication styles. These are writers with whom I might share tactful correspondence or invite into disputation. If I treat them graciously, we might establish the foundation for friendship.

I know all too well that each person deserves love, even if that person is a hack.