Muckrakers ☕ 🪶
"I went out to Hollywood chasing my dreams. Dusty Oklahoma was all I'd ever seen."
—Leon Russell, "Home Sweet Oklahoma"
> newsworthy | your body has a story to tell
Before the first story was dry, I already wanted to prove myself with another.
I never thought I was good enough to be a journalist. I wouldn’t call myself one even two years after being paid to be one.
I often shook quietly with anxiety. My mind raced.
But I was always hungry for the next story.
- I once spent four months persuading a local coroner in phone call after phone call to admit that he had dug up the wrong body from a Kentucky cemetery. The story won a national Emmy.
- I've seen the room where Tupac was autopsied in Las Vegas.
I helped expose a secretive, high-altitude surveillance program that was being conducted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department over Compton, California.
The mayor of Compton hadn’t known about the program and was furious.
Compton is the hometown of some of the biggest-ever rappers. That story won a regional Emmy.
I helped expose a secretive, high-altitude surveillance program being conducted over the U.S. border with Mexico by the Texas National Guard and Texas state police.
I obtained 3,000 pages of internal records from the Mall of America in Minnesota that detailed a secretive surveillance program there. It targeted shoppers who might be terrorists but ensnared everyday people.
Along the way, I couldn't make myself stop drinking. I hid the severity for years. I denied that the binges were slowly killing me.
My body had a story to tell. But I wanted another drink.
- next time "We experience guilt over our love of true crime."
- listening Pissed Jeans "The Bar is Low"
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