Back in the early 2000s, when we were outraged by the excesses of authoritarian dilettantes George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a friend suggested I start a blog. I had been a lawyer, but was eager to change careers. Having studied the rise of the Christian right as a college student in the 1980s, I was now watching their aspirations unfold in real time. I wanted to investigate, expose, weigh in on all the things other people were missing. I was accustomed to writing fast. I was built to blog.
I never ended up starting my own blog, but was the very fortunate beneficiary of a serendipitous series of events that made it possible for a person with no entry point or foothold in journalism to find her way into it. Another friend told me about the group blog The Gadflyer (since, sadly, defunct), making its mark in the burgeoning progressive blogging space. They took a chance on me, and I wrote persistently about the Christian right, its assaults on secular law and governance, and the D.C. money and power politics driving it.
The revolution in digital media made my two decades of reporting on the Christian right possible. Not only because it offered expansive space beyond the coveted, exclusive pages of print magazines, but because the best digital journalism — and here I’m talking about reported, edited, fact-checked journalism, although opinion writing is also an essential part of the equation — demands a long-term commitment to the bit. It depends on a reporter consistently drilling down into an important corner of the political world, and continually exposing and contextualizing that world for readers. This type of journalism is fundamentally different from the other kind of online journalism that was born alongside it in the 2000s. Both appear in the digital form, more nimble than print, but that other kind, which still plagues us today, is the inside-the-Beltway, gossip-driven, anonymity-granting, driving-the-day coverage that thrives on access and adrenaline rather than illumination and insight.