Rory Appleton first began writing for The Fresno Bee in 2014, while he was still an undergraduate at Fresno State, studying journalism. He contacted the newspaper and proposed to the editor that the Bee's video-game coverage was lacking—in fact, it was nonexistent—and so his first job there became: video-game columnist. As time went by, the Bee began giving Appleton more work—first on the night shift, covering crime and breaking news, and then, after he graduated in 2015, a full-time job as a general assignment reporter. He wrote restaurant reviews and stories about marijuana legalization, human trafficking, forest fires. Finally, in February this year, the Bee's editor, Joe Kieta, gave Appleton his current beat: politics.
It was a natural fit for Appleton, a fourth-generation Fresnan with blue eyes and a brown helmet of hair that he regularly swipes at, like a distracted bear. His father, Ray Appleton, is a well-known conservative talk-radio host in the area; their local congressman, Devin Nunes, has been an occasional visitor to Ray's home, where Rory would see him at Christmas parties. Nunes, who rose to prominence in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election, had a long-running relationship with the Bee: The paper was among the first to print his name, in the late '90s, when he first ran as a 23-year-old for the board of trustees of the College of the Sequoias. Since then, the Bee's editorial board had endorsed the congressman in every race he'd ever run.
But by the time Appleton took over the politics beat, the paper's relationship with Nunes had deteriorated. Nunes hadn't spoken to the Bee since the beginning of 2017, after it had run several op-eds critical of him and some of his more conspiratorial actions in his role as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he spent much of the first two years of Trump's presidency seemingly attempting to redirect the House's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. For Appleton, though, Nunes relented, agreeing, in February, 2018, to a 20-minute, magazine-style Q&A with the Bee in the lobby of Fresno's local Fox affiliate.
Appleton huddled with his editors to draft a list of questions: about immigration, school shootings, water, taxes, and the controversial memo Nunes had recently released accusing the FBI and DOJ of being biased against Trump. In Appleton's telling, Nunes gamely sat and answered questions until the very end, when a staffer seemed to give a signal. In response to Appleton's final question, about town halls, Nunes's tone changed. "Your paper is a joke to even bring these issues up or raise these issues," Nunes said. "You know—it's actually sad. I actually feel bad for the people who work at the Bee, because sadly it's become just a left-wing rag." Appleton later told me Nunes's attack felt premeditated: "He was trying to get something in there no matter what."
Shortly after the interview, Appleton, whose son had just been born, went on paternity leave, but the Bee continued to cover Nunes. Lewis Griswold, among the first reporters at the Bee ever to cover Nunes, went to the congressman's neighborhood—in Tulare, south of Fresno—to ask his neighbors how they felt about Nunes's ascendance to the national political spotlight. Then, in May, the Bee's investigative reporter, Mackenzie Mays, wrote a story about a lawsuit against a winery that Nunes was financially invested in: An employee who had worked on a charity cruise on a boat owned by the company alleged that she'd witnessed the winery's guests do cocaine and draw straws for sex workers. (The case was settled for an undisclosed sum. Nunes was not aboard, or implicated in any way.)
Things escalated between the Bee and Nunes from there. By the time Appleton returned from leave, Nunes made it clear to the paper's reporters that he would no longer speak to the Bee under any circumstances, and over the summer he and his campaign further heightened the rift between the two institutions when Nunes began airing attack ads against the Bee. (Nunes, through a representative, declined to comment for this story.) Appleton's mother also works in radio, at Fresno's local iHeartMedia channels; the Nunes campaign bought ads on several of her stations, as well as on Appleton's father's show, some of which excoriated the Bee. Soon Nunes also began airing television ads alleging that the Bee worked with "radical left-wing groups to promote numerous fake news stories about me" and accused Bee reporters of "creeping around my neighbors' and relatives' homes." In June, the Bee responded with an editorial headlined: "The real 'fake news' is Devin Nunes' ad about The Bee."
Then, one day in September, a glossy mailer arrived in many of Nunes's constituents' mailboxes: 38 pages in the style of a tabloid magazine that purported to expose "the dirty little secrets of the Valley's propaganda machine." The Fresno Bee was pictured on the mailer's back cover as a rusty, sinking ship surrounded by drowning cartoon bees holding up placards that read SOCIALISM and RESIST. Inside was a candid photo of Mackenzie Mays, the reporter who had written the story about the winery, and testimonials from local figures in favor of Nunes and against the Bee. In the newsroom, Bee reporters adopted one of the Nunes epithets—"CREEPING BEE REPORTERS"—and began affectionately referring to Griswold as the paper's "creeping correspondent."
Recently, I called Ray Appleton to ask what he made of what was happening between Nunes and the Bee. He'd just finished his radio show when I called. He talked about how proud he was that his son had gotten a job at the Bee. Just the other day, George W. Bush's former attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, had been on Appleton's show, Ray told me, complimenting Rory's writing. "He's very good at what he does," the elder Appleton said.
He also told me that Nunes was a close friend—they were in regular touch, he said. "Like during today's show, he texted me 11 times, just to help me out on a couple things."
I asked him if it bothered him that Nunes would no longer return calls from his son or the Bee. "Well, yeah, Devin doesn't talk to them because every time he talks to them, they change it," Appleton said, calmly.
"And they lie through their fucking teeth about what they talked about."
For those who do not work in journalism: This is a tough time to work in journalism. The president is in open, constant war with the press, who are often in constant war with each other, debating how best to cover a president who disdains their coverage. The economic model—printed advertisements, printed classifieds—that used to underpin everything, from alt weeklies like The Village Voice to august papers like The New York Times to, well, GQ, got upended by the Internet; whatever comes next, business-wise, is still the subject of fierce, ongoing debate. In June, five journalists were killed in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland; their co-workers immediately went back to work, covering their deaths. In October, CNN received multiple mail bombs, allegedly sent by a right-wing terrorist. Reporters—especially female reporters and reporters of color—regularly face torrents of abuse online and, in some places, in real life. The pay sucks, like it almost always has. Layoffs are a constant. There are no jobs.
And yet, the newspapers and the magazines and the websites still do the work every day. There's never been more news. To the extent that you know your local school board is corrupt or that your city's subway expansion plan is millions of dollars over budget or that your local power plant is dumping coal ash into your water supply, it's usually because of a reporter. You may think this stuff just comes drifting in on the air, or the Internet, like water flows when you turn on the tap, but no: Reporter. Newspaper. Journalism.
In October, the University of North Carolina's School of Media and Journalism released a study that estimated that a full 20 percent of all local newspapers have gone out of business or merged since 2004. Since then, an additional 1,300-plus communities in the United States have found themselves without any news source about their own city, town, or county. "Our sense of community and our trust in democracy at all levels suffer when journalism is lost or diminished," the authors of the report wrote. "In an age of fake news and divisive politics, the fate of communities across the country—and of grassroots democracy itself—is linked to the vitality of local journalism."
What fills the void left behind by dead newspapers? The fake news that Facebook can't or won't rid itself of. The Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest owner of individual television stations in the country, which forces its anchors to read scripts about so-called media bias or to air "must-run" segments in defense of gassing asylum-seeking migrants at the border. Fox News or MSNBC, going 24 hours in the homes of your increasingly agitated parents and grandparents. It's not that local newspapers like The Fresno Bee are perfect—far from it. It's just that they...contain news. Lose them and you lose the basic building blocks of any political or social conversation, which are facts. Information. Knowledge. Are your schools good or bad? Does your air have poison in it? What exactly does Devin Nunes do every day in Washington, when he's not in Fresno? You either know or you don't.
The question I had, going up to the Bee for the first time, was basically: What is it like to do this job at this time? Their congressman is running ads against them. They're worried about the future of journalism and the future of their jobs. They've got a bunch of yellow safety vests hanging in the newsroom for covering wildfires. They're trying to write about water and food and transit and politics: all the things that will ultimately determine the fate of the state. How do they do it?
When I got there, after a luxurious drive north from Los Angeles, and a restful night of sleep at the local DoubleTree hotel, and a few hours wandering around the Bee's newsroom, taking occasional notes and going out for snacks, their question for me was: How do I get a cushy job where I write one of these features every once in a while, like you're doing right now, loitering in our workplace on a Monday for hours, asking us about our feelings, instead of doing what we do, which is reporting out four or five stories a week about people who have decided to hate us, for a readership that increasingly tells us they don't care if we live or die?
Fresno is located so centrally in California that it's isolated: three hours from everything. Over time, the region has embraced this fact as fundamental to its identity. Fresno takes pride in being quieter, and more conservative, than San Francisco and Sacramento, 190 miles or so to the north, and Los Angeles, 220 miles to the south. The city first began life as one man's farm, in 1867. In 1872, the Central Pacific Railroad built a railway station there; the town was formally incorporated 13 years later. It's been a hub ever since.
Today, Fresno County is part of the most agriculturally productive area in the country. The road up from Los Angeles is dense with farms and almond processing plants and trucks carrying fruit and vegetables north and south. The gas stations smell of dirt and agriculture. The town itself is flat and still crisscrossed by railroad tracks. From the window of the office of The Fresno Bee's editor, Joe Kieta, you can see the proposed right-of-way for a new high-speed rail. "Every time somebody from outside comes in here and writes a story," Kieta said to me, when we first met, "I ask everyone: 'Is the word dusty in there?' Because that's the first thing people will say."
Kieta has a round, friendly face, slicked-back hair clustered high on his forehead, and an air of genuine befuddlement as to how his newspaper got here. One day in October, he was in his office, which was unusually neat by editor standards, wearing a tie and a striped shirt. Kieta took over the paper in February, after its editor of many years, Jim Boren, retired. "I wasn't coming in here to fix something that was broken," Kieta told me. Though the newspaper's print circulation was down, its web audience was larger than it had ever been in the paper's history: "Nearly two million people engage with The Fresno Bee's digital content each month," said a representative for McClatchy, the company that owns the Bee. Kieta was mostly just trying to expand it further.
I was not the first outside reporter to show up at the Bee. Nunes's attacks on the paper had become a national story. Vice News had come and done a segment on the Bee, interviewing Kieta and Mays; now Nunes was using a soundbite of Kieta's Vice interview in his newest round of attack ads. Kieta said sometimes he'd just be driving around and there it was, the sound of his own voice: "It's just freakish," he said. "I never thought I would be the focus of a campaign ad."
It was a little over a month before the election, and Nunes was in the tightest race of his political career, against a Democratic challenger, Andrew Janz, who was showing unexpected life in a traditionally rock-solid red Central Valley district. Kieta thought this probably had something to do with the ads. "Instead of attacking his opponent, he's going after us." It wasn't hard to locate the source of the template Nunes was using. "Politics since the 2016 election has gotten very strange across the country," Jim Boren, Kieta's predecessor at the Bee, told me. "And I think we in the San Joaquin Valley reflect a lot of what's going on nationally." Steve Bannon, when he was still a member of the Trump administration, told The New York Times: "You're the opposition party. Not the Democratic Party. You're the opposition party. The media's the opposition party." As the midterms approached, Trump had only doubled down on that strategy. " 'Enemy of the American people'—when the president of the United States says that, it resonates with people," Kieta said. He gestured out at his newsroom: Reporters blearily on phone calls or drifting toward the coffee machines, navigating the balky PCs and empty cubicles that have been the standby of most newspapers in this century. "We are not people to be afraid of. I mean, take a look at us."
In an effort to combat the shadowy impression of the paper and of journalism in general propagated by Trump, Nunes, and others, the Bee had begun experimenting with providing additional information about how their stories were reported: who they called, who was willing to speak to them and who wasn't, how they wrote the story. "We have to do a better job explaining about how we go about our work," Kieta said. "I think if somebody spent a week in here watching us do our jobs, they then would have greater trust in what we do. So how do we do that at scale?" On a recent feature on Nunes by Appleton, the Bee had included a box noting how many people Appleton had contacted for the story and who didn't respond. It also ran Appleton's extended bio, so that readers could see where the information was coming from: a fourth-generation Fresnan who'd graduated from Fresno State and won several California News Publishers Association awards. Other than that—which was part of a larger experiment that would hopefully outlast, and transcend, Nunes's fixation on the paper—Kieta said everyone was doing their best to tune the ads and the mailer out.
"I'm trying not to take it personally," Lewis Griswold told me. "I understand that, hey, they have made a calculated decision to come after the Bee. I would also like to point out that nobody from Nunes's office has called to check any facts with me or get my side of the story." The work was otherwise exactly the same as it was before Nunes had started critiquing them. "We're reporting news the same way we always did," Griswold said. "Calling people and getting their reaction. Going out in the field."
In his office, Kieta told me that to the extent that he had any real concerns, they were safety related. "It has gotten personal," Kieta told me. The newsroom was already a little bit on edge since the Annapolis killings, and even more so after the CNN attacks. Over the summer, Kieta had held an active-shooter drill for his staff. The guy who came to train them pointed out the back exit that they might use to flee. He taught them how to lock down the building, if that became necessary. And he told them what to do if the shooter got in.
"I think the first step was run," Kieta said. "And then hide. And then fight."
The more I talked to the people at the Bee, the more I realized that it wasn't just Nunes—that there was something deeper, and maybe even more ominous, going on, in terms of how the powerful people in Fresno had begun to deal with their local paper. Mackenzie Mays, now the paper's dedicated investigative reporter, came to the Bee from Charleston, West Virginia—she and her husband moved out here three and a half years ago. Her first beat was education. Things got weird in a hurry. She has long blonde hair, freckles, and a faint southern accent. California was far away, but Fresno wasn't so different from the town she'd come from: conservative, overlooked. We were sitting in an abandoned office off the main newsroom, with Christmas lights slung around a dormant computer monitor. It was October. "I've been through a lot in the last few years," she said.
In 2017, she wrote a series of stories that the paper called "Too Young?" about the region's disproportionately high number of teen parents and the state of sex education in Fresno's schools. In the course of her reporting, she interviewed Fresno Unified School District's school board president, Brooke Ashjian. In 2016, the state had passed a law, the California Healthy Youth Act, that compelled state school districts to teach "medically accurate" sex education and recognize different sexual and gender orientations in their instruction. In August of that year, Mays had asked Ashjian for his thoughts about the law. As she later reported, he had told her: "My biggest fear in teaching this—which we're going to do it because it's the law—but you have kids who are extremely moldable at this stage, and if you start telling them that LGBT is okay and that it's a way of life, well maybe you just swayed the kid to go that way."
This led many in the region to call for Ashjian's resignation; he responded by claiming that he had been misquoted and commenced a series of attacks on Mays herself. Over multiple Twitter posts sent from an account that appeared to be his, Ashjian referred to Mays as a "ministress of propaganda," "Mackenzie 'fakenews' Mays," and "#mysoultroll." Ashjian also questioned the Bee's reporting practices—Mays had surveyed students about the sex education they were getting, with the permission of the school district—and went on a local radio station to compare Mays's reporting to the behavior of a child predator. Then he published her work number on what appeared to be his Facebook page and went on Twitter again, responding to another user's comment by saying, "We need to send someone to the reporters [sic] house to find out why the puff piece????" (Mays said she filed a police report in response to the tweet. Ashjian, who is on the school board as a trustee until the end of 2018 but is no longer president, declined to comment for this story.) Other social-media users located her brother, who Mays says is gay, and "tried to use that against me somehow," she said. One account used her photo as theirs. Most of them commented about her appearance in one way or another. One persistent critic attempted to start a rumor suggesting that Mays, who is married, had an affair with a source.
"Everybody attacks Mackenzie," Rory Appleton told me. For many of the Bee's critics, Mays—young, pretty, and hard-nosed—had become the target of choice. Nobody, from Kieta to Mays herself, believed this was happenstance. "The criticism that I'm getting is different than the male reporters in my newsroom," she said.
In the midst of this, Mays continued to report. She told me about covering a school board meeting at which Ashjian was present, and attempting to interview him again. Her editors, in part out of concern for her safety, attended the meeting with her. "I wish they taught you in journalism school how to walk into the room with that kind of fear in your back," Mays said. "Even e-mails—if someone wants to meet me for coffee and I don't know who they are, there is something in the back of my mind like: 'I don't know this person. What are their intentions?' I never really worried about my safety before all of this."
Mays acknowledged that some of the social-media stuff had caused her stress: "It's a really sick feeling to wait and wonder what's next. I don't know how to explain it, but you're kind of on edge all the time. I've had to think, 'Are they going to cut my head off and put it on a naked body in a photo?' They can do whatever they want. It's a lie. So they can lie however they want to, and it sucks."
"But," she said, smiling, "I haven't had to run a correction about any of my coverage about any of these people."
Ashjian, the now former school board president, is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump—the Bee reported that he read the Pledge of Allegiance at a Trump rally in Fresno. "I think we would be pretending if we acted like this fake-news accusation wasn't happening at the same time that the president was very angry toward reporters," Mays said. "I don't think it would be far-fetched to say that some people would be emboldened to attack the press because of the president, and I don't see that as any sort of political viewpoint. I really don't. In this case, you had someone at a local level who happened to be a huge supporter of the president, who was viciously attacking a local reporter."
In February, when Kieta took over, he took Mays off the school beat and made her the paper's investigative reporter. In May, she reported about the winery linked to Nunes, after which she was criticized on Ray Appleton's show. She saves the worst of the e-mails and the voicemails and the tweets she receives, as potential evidence in case something happens. In the mailer Nunes had sent out, she was, conspicuously, the only Bee reporter actually pictured. Mays showed me a photo that she said was posted to Facebook on Halloween of a member of the staff of the conservative Business Journal dressed up as what appeared to be Mays: blonde hair, glasses, a copy of The Fresno Bee, and a black shirt with orange lettering that read: FAKE.
Somewhere in the course of telling me about this, Mays started quietly crying. "I'm so embarrassed that I'm crying right now," she said. I'd asked about Annapolis: how she reacted. And so her mind went to that: "My mom calling me when it happened, or my husband telling me to go take my business cards out of the front of my car because I would do that to park. And then that whole year of me being enemy number one for wanting to tell the truth and do my job. And for [the shooting] to sort of cap it off. You know, I just felt like it was this unspoken thing, that I should be worried. And there's no way to be upset about it without feeling weak or mad that I'm crying right now because I'm a woman, and I don't want to cry." She took a deep breath. "It's just ridiculous. I totally did not see that coming."
Her first reaction, after wiping away the tears, was to size me up. "You're going to put this in your piece, aren't you?" she said. I told her the truth: I wasn't sure. Mays is formidable in the way of many investigative reporters I've met over the years: not the type of person you would be happy to hear from if there was a possibility you had done something wrong. Even as she was crying, she was methodically ticking off the facts of her reporting and the response to it. Finally, I told her I'd only write about this if I could figure out a way to make it clear that she was experiencing less of a moment of weakness and more of a moment of anger.
It was the week after the final Brett Kavanaugh hearings, where the question of gender and power was front and center. By the time I got home, still unsure about what to do, I had an e-mail from her:
The thing about covering the town you live in is that you've got to live there, too. One night Rory Appleton invited me over for dinner. He lives with his wife, Aleksandra, who is the Bee's education reporter, and their infant son, Rowan, in an apartment complex north of downtown Fresno, not far from the wealthy suburbs that make up much of Devin Nunes's base. We sat in their carpeted living room—Rory, a self-described nerd, had Game of Thrones banners up. Aleksandra, who is dark-haired and slight and goes by Aleks, had Hunter S. Thompson books stacked on the mantel, below the TV. Rowan climbed around. He showed me his singing octopus. He was born last December, with kidney issues so severe that he spent much of his first few months in and out of the hospital. Everyone in Fresno, including the political establishment Rory covered, was very solicitous of their son, he said. "But if I call you between the hours of ten and six, you don't pick up." Same with Devin Nunes himself. "If I ran into Devin on the street, he'd be warm. 'Hey, how's the family?' But then there's this war."
Outside childcare for Rowan was too expensive, so they'd developed a system, Rory and Aleks told me. One of them worked from home on Thursday, the other on Friday. They alternated taking vacation days on Tuesdays. And then the rest of the time was covered, hopefully, by Rory's siblings. It was what they could manage. Over the summer, when the shootings happened at the Capital Gazette, they'd had to ask themselves if they could both continue working at the Bee. "Can we work in the same place when this kind of thing is possible?" Rory said. "If something happened to both of us, our son would have nobody." They sit near each other in the newsroom. "But covering crime," as Rory has, "you realize that kind of thing can happen to anybody." They both decided to stay.
Aleks had made chicken in a slow cooker, for tacos, and we gathered around Rowan's high chair as she gave him some. Rory asked me how my conversation with his father had gone. He looked nervous. I told him what his father had told me, how obviously proud he was of Rory.
"My son and I are very close," Ray Appleton had said when we spoke. "I'm thrilled that he got a job at The Fresno Bee. I'm glad that he was able to launch his career there." Then I'd asked the elder Appleton about the Bee itself. "A dying entity," he'd said. I'd asked what he thought might replace the Bee if it actually died. "Oh, come on," he'd said. "It's a stupid question. You know it's a stupid question. Obviously, there are many sources to get news."
Are there? I'd asked.
"There are television stations," Ray Appleton told me. "There's my radio station. It has a market ten times the size of the circulation of the Bee."
The truth was, it was confusing talking to him. I kept trying to figure out the source of his anger at the paper, and how it related to his pride in his son, and how the two feelings could exist so intensely and simultaneously. It was like talking to two different people entirely.
Rory was wincing and nodding. "We don't talk about it that much," he said.
Aleks offered me a glass of wine. I asked them how they were holding up, after the year the Bee was finally on the verge of surviving.
"This year, in terms of being a journalist, was really hard," Rory said. He'd written more than 150 stories about the three congressional races he was covering. Because of Rowan, he hadn't really slept since January. "It's harder and harder to be a newspaper journalist," he said. When he started at the Bee, "there were all these jobs I wanted to climb to. And they go away and they don't come back." And the job he was doing now was only getting more difficult. "How can we hold these guys accountable when they won't talk to us?"
Rory said things were great when he was in the newsroom doing his job, but at home the long-term realities about the work had a way of settling in. "The best thing you can hope for is survival at this point," he said. "No raises. You're not going to climb." He fantasized about not having to choose between Rowan's medical bills and a down payment on a house. Maybe he could become a teacher. "People love teachers. When's the last time you heard the president say something bad about teachers?"
Then again, he'd actually tried something else first. He'd gone to culinary school. He didn't like it, in the end. "I've tried other things. I'm not very good at them. This is my thing. I just love to do it."
He reached out to clean Rowan's face, green with avocado.
Aleks said that she was actually having a really good week. "I'm writing two stories I really like." For her, that was the hook: the pleasure in seeing things turn out. "I'm writing sentences that I think are good. When a story is clicking and everything is going well? It's really more of a feeling than a philosophy. When it's like that, I love it."
That wasn't always the way she felt, she said. When work went poorly, she'd sit in the offices of the Bee and ask herself: "Why on earth am I here instead of playing with my baby?" But that feeling happened enough to keep her doing it.
Rowan was nodding happily in his chair.
Anyway, Aleks too had tried to take another path, she said. She'd been an English major and thought about teaching that. Then she began studying for the LSAT. The first two times it came around, she just straight up skipped the exam. On the morning of her third and last opportunity to take it, she woke up so physically ill she couldn't move.
"My body wouldn't let me become a lawyer," she said.
Why does anybody do this job, if it's this bad—this taxing, this dangerous, this unloved? After the midterms, in which Nunes defeated Janz by a comfortable five and a half points, I went back up to Fresno. The reporters at the Bee thought this was particularly ridiculous, that I even had the time and inclination to return to ask them more questions about why they did what they did, but they humored me. They are journalists, too. They understood what I was up to, often sooner than I did.
There were the obvious reasons that cause mission-driven people to do mission-driven things, and less obvious reasons, too. Joe Kieta said: "I guess I'm just a nosy guy." He grew up reading newspapers, in Solon, Ohio, and worked at his high school paper. He'd had opportunities to do different things in his career, he told me. He'd also had to lay off co-workers and friends, more than once. He was candid about not knowing exactly what the future held for him: He's 47, miles from retirement. Maybe at some point he'd think about Plan B—so many conversations between journalists in 2018 seem to revolve around Plan B. But right now he was just engaged with the work. "I do think there is a future in what we do, because it is essential," he said to me. "When faced with a future of no news? Then maybe it will be valued."
He was glad the election was over. "I'm relieved I'm not appearing in campaign ads," he said. He was still reckoning with the proper response to what Nunes had done. "When your character has been assassinated by a politician like that, how do you rebuild that trust? How do you repair what Nunes told them about us?" His days were consumed with thinking about how to signal to the reader that the Bee was an institution they could believe in. That the information the paper reported could be trusted. "But you know what? It was time to do that anyway."
All over the country, local papers were having similar conversations. Steve King, the notoriously racist House member from Iowa, had barred The Des Moines Register from covering his election-night event; one of his sons, who was working on his campaign, called them a "leftist propaganda media outlet." Even national outlets like CNN were having to explain to their viewers what it was they did and why. "Now @CNN is contacting all 100+ of our former staff and interns asking for dirt on me," Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted this summer, after being implicated in a sexual-abuse scandal at Ohio State University. "Getting desperate! How can you ever trust such #fakenews?" How do you communicate to people that you're doing your job when politicians keep telling them that the very act of doing that job is desperation or propaganda? The Bee was going to have to solve this problem or die trying.
Kieta gave me an empty office to sit in for the afternoon. Mackenzie Mays walked by. "I'm trying to figure out if a sexually violent predator can run for office," she told me. I said my questions could wait until she had a minute. After a while she came back. She was still looking into the sexually violent predator hypothetical: Could one of these guys come out of prison and then treatment, having served his time, and onto a political ticket? She had questions in to the state of California.
What drew her to the work? What kept her doing it? She asked me if I had seen the Bee's mission statement, which hangs awkwardly, unromantically, in a stairwell between the first and second floors. "It says we're advocates for the community," Mays said. It was corny, she knew, but she loved that mission statement. "I mean, there's no way to talk about this without sounding so cheesy." She loved being a journalist. "I feel really lucky that I get to write for a living," she said. "You gain these people's trust, and that they let you in and tell you really vulnerable things."
Before the Bee, Mays worked at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in the state where she'd spent most of her life. The former publisher there used to say: "Journalism should be mostly about sustained outrage." Mays always related to that. "Especially in a place like Appalachia, where you feel like you're carrying such a load, because it's always misrepresented by journalism. It doesn't take long to get defensive of the community you work in." She said she'd only been in Fresno for a few years, but she already felt that way about this town, too. Defensive. Protective.
"Oh," she said. "Did I tell you I met Nunes for the first time last week?"
It was in a diner, right before the election, she said. He was having a small breakfast for supporters of his campaign. She went to cover it. Eventually, she managed to get in front of Nunes. He greeted her politely, shook her hand. "And I say, 'Hey, I'm Mackenzie,' and he's still nodding and normal, and then I'm like: 'I'm with The Fresno Bee. I tried to talk to you in the past, so I thought I'd come here.' And he just smirked and just turned around in the middle of my sentence and just walked away. And he was out of there within minutes."
Mays said she didn't know if he recognized who she was. "Did he realize when I said who I was that I'm the person that wrote those stories? Or that I'm the person in the pamphlet he sent out? I don't even know if he knows that." He'd mentioned her in ads, in his mailer, spent the summer assailing her reporting. Did he have any idea who it actually was he was attacking—that she was an actual person, with a husband and parents and a career she was devoted to? She thought she might never know.
A little while later, when we left the little office Kieta had given me, she went back to turn off the light I'd left on, so as not to waste more electricity than anyone there in the newsroom had to.
"You're welcome," Mays said, watching me write this detail down.
Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.