![]() In October, CNN received multiple mail bombs, allegedly sent by a right-wing terrorist. 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. 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. 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. "And they lie through their fucking teeth about what they talked about."įor those who do not work in journalism: This is a tough time to work in journalism. "Well, yeah, Devin doesn't talk to them because every time he talks to them, they change it," Appleton said, calmly. I asked him if it bothered him that Nunes would no longer return calls from his son or the Bee. "Like during today's show, he texted me 11 times, just to help me out on a couple things." He also told me that Nunes was a close friend-they were in regular touch, he said. 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." (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. 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. Things escalated between the Bee and Nunes from there. 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. 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. Since then, the Bee's editorial board had endorsed the congressman in every race he'd ever run.īut by the time Appleton took over the politics beat, the paper's relationship with Nunes had deteriorated. 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. 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. 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. Finally, in February this year, the Bee's editor, Joe Kieta, gave Appleton his current beat: politics. He wrote restaurant reviews and stories about marijuana legalization, human trafficking, forest fires. 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 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. ![]() Rory Appleton first began writing for The Fresno Bee in 2014, while he was still an undergraduate at Fresno State, studying journalism. ![]()
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