I didn’t talk to Sarah Ellison for this, and I feel like I have to state that because the way the reporter wrote it, it looks like I did. But the bit about the Richard Mack story is at least 98% accurate. (There were two reporters, not three.)
I haven’t been talking to reporters generally (though I get requests almost daily, re: Jared and Trump) because I’m not usually inclined to be a source on anything, and I can’t really speak to anything other than how Jared manages a newspaper. I know Ivanka, but not well, and generally like her. I think she has a great work ethic and seems to be a nice, compassionate person, but I loathe her father who I think is the opposite, except maybe to his children. And I have nothing to say about Jared and Ivanka’s marriage because I don’t think it’s my place to speculate and I didn’t know them well enough socially to speak to it in any case.
But since it’s out there, about the “Big Dick Mack” story:
I knew going into the Observer job that Jared would at least try to be heavyhanded with the paper in certain ways because previous editors (except Kyle Pope, who I didn’t speak to beforehand) had told me that and had plenty of war stories to back it up. But it wasn’t surprising. Owners do that–it’s just a matter of when, how and to what degree. So when I interviewed with Jared, I asked him point blank how many stories he’d killed at the Observer in the last year and made it clear that I wouldn’t buy it if he said zero. He said he’d killed two. I told him that if I took the job, I could probably live with two but with the caveat that they weren’t that important and if we got to three I’d probably have to resign. (I know there are purists who’d say two is two too many, but with the possible exception of Nick Denton, I can’t think of any owners or publishers who have never, ever killed stories.)
So there were many, many occasions where Jared would go down the road of trying to kill a story–call me, ask me to take it down, try to stop reporting, etc.–and didn’t. We would have a conversation, sometimes an argument. If I couldn’t talk him off the ledge, I would ask him if the story in question was one of his two. He would always say no.
Except once. I did kill one Observer story that was an item about a twentysomething buying an apartment. My logic at the time: if there were going to be two dead stories, over the life of my tenure, I’d rather one of them be a small item next to nobody cares about (except Jared), and then I figured it’d buy me leverage on some trickier stuff we had in the pipeline. And the reporter who did the item owed me for some recent major fuck ups–one of which was not calling Kushner Co for comment on an item about Kushner Co, but writing that they had declined to comment–so admittedly, I probably didn’t feel as bad as I would have normally about making that item one of the two.
So during one of our weekly meetings, Jared told me he had a story he wanted us to pursue and that it was very important to him. I should mention that Jared actually didn’t pitch specific stories on a regular basis, just made broad generalities about what and who should be covered more or less and I took the advice or left it, depending on whether I agreed. He would pitch specific editorials for the editorial page (which he more or less controlled anyway as head of the editorial board) but this was the only time during my tenure he pitched an actual story for the paper.
Here I think it’s important to say something that’s not always apparent to people who don’t work in journalism: Nearly all sources are biased and nearly all sources have an agenda–it’s just a matter of degree. There is very little inherent incentive to talk to a reporter unless you just enjoy seeing your own name in print.
So of course I knew Jared had an agenda with the subject in question, and I asked directly what it was. Apparently Richard Mack had been on the other end of some transaction nearly gone wrong and it had rubbed Jared the wrong way. I asked what the story was, and if the tip he’d given me had checked out, it would have been a good story–and a nearly perfect Observer story. And if the story checked out, if it was real, Jared’s agenda wouldn’t have been a good reason not to pursue it.
So I agreed to put a reporter on the story with the caveat that it had to 100% check out, because if Jared was willing to tell me about it, he’d probably told other people and if there was even one tiny inaccuracy, no matter how small, the guy would probably have a case for defamation.
Jared was sure it would check out. “Just talk to anybody in the industry,” he said.
So we did. I assigned the story to Dan Geiger, our commercial real estate reporter. I told Dan what Jared’s agenda was and told him to dig, but if there was nothing there, to just tell me and we’d be done. So Dan called everyone within a 100 mile radius of the subject and came back after a few days and told me he couldn’t find anything beyond some vague reports that the guy could be kind of an asshole. And if “being kind of an asshole” were the bar for negative reporting on commercial real estate people, we’d run out of space in the paper, and possibly on the internet.
I went back to Jared and told him the story didn’t check out, thinking that would be the end of it. But he countered that the reporter wasn’t trying hard enough or wasn’t good enough. And I actually laughed.
Dan Geiger is arguably the most aggressive real estate reporter in the industry, and was absolutely the most aggressive reporter in the Observer bullpen at the time. At one point during my tenure there, Dan had a call with a source that went on at very loud volume for about two hours that started out with the source refusing to talk at all, Dan pressing him for information–cajoling, flattering, being aggressive–and by the end of hour two the guy was telling him everything and Dan was just typing furiously with a big smile on his face. When he hung up, the bullpen gave him a round of applause.
In my view, if Dan Geiger said there was no story there, there was no story there because if anyone would have found it, it would have been Dan.
But Jared insisted that it was a reporting problem and wanted to put another reporter on it–“someone more aggressive”. Which, HA. He insisted that there were lots of people willing to talk and we just weren’t approaching them. I asked him who he was talking about and he rattled off some names, every single one of whom Dan had already called. I asked Jared how he knew that these people would talk, and he said they had already–to him.
And maybe they did, but I had the feeling it was more a scenario of Jared complaining about the subject and the sources in question just nodding in agreement. I have seen a lot of people suck up to Jared–as suck-ups do to anyone with power and money–and it seemed plausible that what Jared perceived as a shared opinion or information was really just sycophantic affirmation. But I agreed to put another reporter on it, with the caveat that if it didn’t check out this time, the story had to be dead. Permanently. I wasn’t going to cycle through every reporter we had looking for something that wasn’t there. And Jared agreed to that. I also just wanted to make doubly sure. Even in retrospect, I think Jared really thought there was a story–something he’d heard third-hand rang true to him.
If it isn’t apparent, at this point, a not insignificant part of my job consisted of negotiating with the owner, and for the most part we always figured out a way through. Anytime you have a publication that reports on rich and powerful people, and the owner is himself or herself rich and powerful, there’s probably going to be some level of conflict because at some point, you’re likely covering people the owner considers friends or colleagues. Or enemies. Or, I don’t know, his father-in-law. I don’t think the way to handle that is, as one of my political reporters once suggested, to tell the owner to go fuck himself at the mere request, though I understand (and sympathize with) the impulse sometimes. I thought it was my job to lobby, argue, and persuade the owner to do things that were good for the paper. And if all else failed, to put my foot down, always at the risk of losing my job, and just say no. But I didn’t think we were quite to the direct insubordination point yet. I thought there was still some room to persuade.
So I put Foster Kamer on it, with Dan. Foster is aggressive in an entirely different way, and has good gut instincts about where to find incriminating evidence. Once again, I was transparent about Jared’s interests and asked Dan to debrief him, which he reluctantly did. Foster went to some of the same sources and got the same results. He told me point blank that the story was bullshit.
Again, I thought the story was over. Jared insisted that the sources in question had talked to him, and that Foster and Dan just weren’t asking them the right questions. It then occurred to me that Jared had no idea what this kind of reporting looked like, and he also probably had no idea that these people he thought shared his opinion or had some information were possibly just patronizing him. So I asked him who he thought his number one source would be–the person most likely to talk–and he told me. And he told me that he would call him personally. Thinking I’d call his bluff on that, I said I would take him up on the offer. Let’s call the guy! Or better yet, meet in person with Dan and Foster there!
To my surprise, he agreed (maybe calling my bluff). So I debriefed Dan and Foster. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that Jared got to see them do their jobs the way it’s supposed to be done–as in, they asked the guy straightforward, direct questions. As it turns out, that made Jared uncomfortable because he thought they were being “too” aggressive with the source. And that’s finally what killed the Big Dick Mack story.
In retrospect, I should have put my foot down the first time Dan came back with nothing, but I wanted to be able to say that we pursued it in good faith the same way we would any good Observer story, and in good faith, we came up empty. And Dan and Foster have my undying gratitude for pursuing it to the best of their abilities, which in both of their cases is a very high bar. I am sorry their time was wasted and bear responsibility for that.
Several weeks after Ken Kurson took over at the Observer, my now husband (still then a commercial real estate editor at the Observer) came home and said, laughing, “you’ll never believe the conversation I had with Ken today: he came over and said he a really great story for me… About a guy named Richard Mack.”