My first job out of college was at the Middletown Times Herald Record in upstate New York. As a young reporter, you are assigned to work Saturdays, and it was your job to scrounge up a story to fill the hole for “live” news.

One Saturday, the only thing going on was that the Air Guard unit at Stewart was honoring this lady who written an ode to the C-5A transport plane. So, I wrote about the lady’s poem about C-5As. I wrote 10 column inches about that poem, because the hole was a 10-inch hole.

I covered the county jail in Goshen, where inmates would constantly call me – collect – with tips. Sometimes they shed light on abuses and dangerous conditions, but mainly they complained about the food and bedding.

(“My thoughts: Maybe you should have considered this BEFORE doing your crimes.”)

Then it was on to Daytona Beach, where I learned that a lot of what was considered deviant criminality in upstate New York was just normal behavior there. (I concluded that Daytona was home to criminals who lacked the initiative to drive the additional seven hours to Miami.)

I played on the Daytona Beach Police softball team. My best sources were cops and prosecutors in the state attorney’s office.

An aside, but one of the worst things that’s happened in modern journalism is that far, far too many reporters come up having never covered cops and courts at the local level. You learn a ton about life.

I was lucky enough to cover NASA and the military space program for four years at the Orlando Sentinel. I saw 25 space shuttle launches and almost as many landings. Maybe the most fun beat I’ve ever had.

I covered state government in Tallahassee for a dozen years for the Associated Press and the Palm Beach Post, and had the honor of working for managing editor Tom O’Hara.

As editors at other papers searched for gimmicks to win readers, his philosophy for putting together the front page was this: We will put the most important at the top, then the second, and on, until it’s filled up.

I didn’t come to DC until I was in my 40s, and started as an editor at NPR. I learned so much about radio (to this day I wince when I hear “phone tape” on the air) and simple writing. But I wanted to be a reporter again, which led me to National Journal and the White House beat.

All of those jobs were at mainstream, traditional media. HuffPost is my first at someplace that brands itself as progressive – which allowed be the on the cutting edge of journalists to point out Donald Trump as an autocratic threat.

Trump is not “conservative” or “liberal” or any of that. He is a conman and, now, a criminal who is moving us every day closer to an autocracy.

That’s not bias. That’s 40 years in this business, 30 of which were watching small “d” democracy work within the norms established over two centuries.

People like Ms. Leavitt keep tossing around “objectivity” as if that means reporters are not permitted to use their expertise and their experience to describe what’s going on.

When I covered the final days of Ted Bundy in Florida, I came to the story knowing virtually nothing about him. The more I learned, the more I concluded that this was a terrible, and dangerous, human being. My stories reflected this.

When I covered criminal trials, being an “objective” reporter did not mean that if I wrote 400 words of the prosecution’s evidence, I had to balance that with 400 words of the defendant saying “nuh-uh, did not.”

Trump attempted a coup. He withheld top secret documents at his country club in defiance of a subpoena. A jury of his peers found he jammed his fingers up a woman’s vagina against her will.

Today, he is using his office to enrich himself – the definition of corruption – more than any previous president did, in fact, more than any previous president likely ever dreamed of doing. And it's not even close.

These are all facts. Indisputable. I’m not being “biased” to point them out.

Every story I’ve written at HuffPost, I’ve read through and asked myself: Would Tom O’Hara let me this run as is on the front page of the Palm Beach Post. And if the answer is no, I fix it so that it meets that standard before I file.

Ms. Leavitt may not like my questions. That’s fine. I have a right and a responsibility to ask them. This is still America.

@svdate I’m pretty sure NATO promised not to encroach on Russia’s western border…how did that hold up

@svdate "I've been a scumbag longer than you've been alive" isn't quite the comeback you think it is.

@svdate Hey man — she's giving you a free resume update. Getting labeled a "dangerous journalist" by this White House? That's a badge of honor right there. If they ever start praising you though, watch out — that ain't flattery. When Trump's gone, that praise is gonna stick to your

@svdate Doesn’t matter how long you’ve been a journalist. When the U.S. press secretary’s comeback is ‘your mom did,’ the bar’s officially underground and says everything about the level of incompetence and unprofessionalism in this administration.

@svdate Wait, you've been asking stupid questions for dozens of years?

@svdate

@svdate Can you ask Trump why he wanted to tell everybody with that AI video that he is full of shit? 💡👍 Love to hear the word salad answering that one! 🤫 If he is going to kick you out, make it memorable for all! 🙏🏼✌️👆

@svdate Ageism is cool

@svdate I tossed out an ad hominem on your mom last night bro. She liked it.

@svdate @PressSec be like:

@svdate Well...I guess we got there sooner than anticipated. https://x.com/ddtmatter/status...

@svdate calling the President a “conman” and saying it’s your “responsibility as a journalist” just disqualified you. She nailed it and you’re butthurt. cry harder 💦

@svdate Oh you thought the Huffington Post needed discrediting? Don't worry, it was already there.

@svdate This is why you are labeled a hack... You were all in on Trump/Russia collusion when it was a complete fabrication. https://x.com/svdate/status/13...