less than a week after election day, david martosko, the aggressive, cigar-biting american. political editor of dailymail.com, found himself at the center of an uproar inside the beltway. Speculation abounded regarding the president-elect’s cabinet picks, and one report placed Martosko, quite unexpectedly, on the short list for press secretary. Given his campaign moniker: “trump’s de facto communications director,” provided by washington post reporter jenna johnson after martosko criticized her coverage of trump, the story seemed to many a moment of cosmic irony.
By then, Martosko had earned a reputation as a journalistic anti-hero. during the 2016 campaign, he was perhaps the most prolific reporter covering a man who mocked the media. There was his constant stream of scoops from inside the trump world and exclusive interviews with the often-criticized presidential hopeful for being comfortable. There was the moody tweets of him berating other journalists who, in his opinion, were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Like Donald himself, Martosko excelled at aspects of his work while ignoring certain codes of conduct, such as when he made multiple trips on Trump’s private 757 instead of the press plane, then bragged about it to his friends. colleagues. If Donald Trump had a journalistic soulmate, it would probably be David Martosko.
So, when the perspective of the offbeat daily mail reporter-editor looking down from the White House podium first surfaced in November, it drew reactions ranging from laughter to disbelief in the media of d.c. press corps. some found the rumor of his consideration for the job so outlandish that they assumed it was a sham. “No one would be surprised if Martosko himself raised the idea of his running for press secretary,” says Betsy Rothstein, the media reporter for the daily caller. in fact, she tells her, “that would be vintage martosko.”
The rumors were true, says Martosko, but he didn’t get the job. It went to Republican National Committee spokesman Sean Spicer, whose combative press conferences have catapulted him into a unique form of national celebrity. But Martosko’s tactic angered other journalists. “Once you go to work or seek to go to work for this administration, you don’t come back,” says a fellow White House reporter. hosted a cable news show after a stint in the White House), and others, like Jay Carney and the late Tony Snow, left journalism for the boardroom, Martosko’s abrupt coming and going was an anomaly. “For a long time there has been a revolving door between the press and the White House,” says Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of Columbia Journalism Review. “but I don’t remember very well a scenario that goes in this direction: someone trying to get into an administration and then immediately backing out.”
as for martkosko, he doesn’t see the ethical problem. “It was an honor to be asked for a meeting,” he says by email to Politico magazine, the first official comments from him since being considered for the White House press secretary job. “I considered it a point of patriotism to say yes, and I would have had the same response for any president-elect. … Personally, I think being considered for a job like this shouldn’t affect his professional impartiality, and he hasn’t!”
It could be argued, however, that relentless and rowdy martosko reporting, often punctuated with capitalized words in its headlines, has changed in recent weeks, morphing from a form of unapologetic access. from journalism to the rather mundane analysis of press conferences and Sunday talk shows. In the first 30 days of the Trump administration, Martosko has seen his path to Trump insiders blocked. Suddenly, the guy who was ridiculed for being a licker to make it big on the road lately has been, well, just another guy. “As Trump has added new staff and divvied up responsibilities from others, and as veterans approach their jobs with new levels of seriousness, it is naturally more difficult to get people to speak officially,” Martosko writes in an email. “I think a lot of journalists in washington are seeing the same thing.”
Mingling with the crowd was not part of Martosko’s playbook in 2016. At a press conference in May that escalated into one of Trump’s trademark anti-media tirades, the candidate singled out several reporters, including Martosko. After sarcastically slamming CNN correspondent Jim Acosta as “a real beauty” and denigrating the media as “losers,” he made sure to pat Martosko gently, insisting he wasn’t one of the bums he snuggled up to. referred. “It’s not you, David, actually,” Trump said.
That special glow of favorite boy has faded since the oath. There have been no real scoops on his name and rarely a quote from a White House source. Martosko hasn’t produced the same caliber of guilty pleasure click bait he’s known for, like this headline from September: “miss universe ’embarrassed’ by donald trump accused of threatening to kill judge and abetting bid of assassination in his native venezuela.” and while he is known for defending steve bannon on twitter, he has also been outspoken about the war on facts that trump aides have launched, not to mention mocking the president for hanging a photo of his inauguration that was inscribed with the incorrect date of his swearing in, and the administration’s reminder of broken campaign promises, including trump’s promise to release his tax returns.
This could all be seen as revenge by Martosko for being overlooked. Or, oddly enough, maybe it’s part of a lengthy audition for the press secretary job in case Spicer leaves the job open in the future. At the very least, Trump appreciates a wild card, not to mention someone who has a flair for unpredictability and is willing to go on the offensive. And Martosko is certainly taking the offensive. Spicer’s first results have not been good, and Martosko has not contained the schadenfreude of him on Twitter:
sean spicer just spelled the apostrophe in “ja’ron smith” as “the little thing that goes up before the r”
– David Martosko (@dmartosko) January 6, 2017
sean spicer is reading press releases for the press corps at their briefing. I don’t get it.
– David Martosko (@dmartosko) January 18, 2017
Losing credibility is like a spinal cord injury. It takes 1 second to break. it takes forever to recover. you’re still never really whole again.
– David Martosko (@dmartosko) January 22, 2017
Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer. oh me. god. better than larry david as bernie sanders. better than hot chocolate in December.
– David Martosko (@dmartosko) February 5, 2017
perhaps martosko, fanning the flames under spicer and increasing his tenacity online, is just biding his time.
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You don’t hear of many 46-year-old rising stars in any profession, least of all in the young man’s political reporting game. But that’s Martosko, whose big personality and huge audience (approximately a third of the 243 million unique visitors per month on dailymail.com come from the US) have quickly and unorthodoxly elevated him to rarefied airs within of the political press.
Part of this fame is due to his ability to insert himself into a story. many of the top google results for his name are not links to articles by him, but reports about him, including “stiff-armed clinton campaign reporter on coverage group” and “e-mail editor Daily: ‘Many of the reporters who cover Hillary are ‘fanatics.'” Over the past year, Breitbart has added to his work incessantly, liberal blogs like Wonkette lambasting him with unsavory nicknames like “shit-in-boss.”
More than breaking news or coverage of campaign events, which accounts for the bulk of his work, Martosko is best known for what might be called gonzo-meets-sensationalist journalism. Take, for example, the time he was kicked off the press bus from Clinton in New Hampshire, only to find a rental car and chase after his motorcade. Clinton had called his van the “scooby van”. martosko submitted a story: “scooby hits the road at 92 mph! The Secret Service takes Hillary out to dinner in the pouring rain after a secret house party in the afternoon.” (Clinton Field denied speeding.) To his followers, it’s the quintessential Martosko story: He went to the ends of the earth to report the story (What was the story again? ?) for democratic operatives, this kind of shenanigans led them to provide a code name for martosko: #creepolla.
“Our audience loved the intersection of politics and entertainment, so I worked it and worked it every day,” Martosko tells me.
others disagree. “He didn’t exactly get up and cheer during trump rallies, but he didn’t agree with how uncritical he was [of trump] in articles about him,” says a national political reporter. “On twitter he could be an attack dog on behalf of the trump administration.” But while some of his colleagues privately describe him as a Trump apologist, he has his defenders. “as lenient as martosko was in his coverage of trump, i don’t think he’s ever crossed that line by putting out a trump campaign press release or serving as his media super pac, like breitbart,” says a reporter on the right. tilted dc publication.
In fact, those who have worked for or alongside Martosko describe the man in very different ways. to some, he is a misunderstood and brilliant loner. to others, he is a fickle troll. everyone agrees that he is colorful. “As a character, I love him. As a person, I don’t,” Rothstein says.
martosko certainly stood out in the election campaign. a recovering alcoholic, he has been known to write stories with a cigar in hand. (He avoids alcohol, along with coffee and mushrooms, the former for taste, the latter due to a deadly allergy to mushrooms, but smoking is happily allowed.) The daily mail doesn’t have a Washington’s physical office, so when he’s not on the road, one of his favorite places to work is the heated, smoke-friendly patio at Morton’s in downtown D.C. or he works from a home office consisting of ikea furniture, a gas fireplace, a cigar humidor, and a coat rack on which he hung all his press credentials upon returning home.
He was at times a strong advocate of newsgroup etiquette, according to several reporters who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. In the final weeks of the general election, Breitbart reporter Joel Pollak caused a stir when he wrote an article, since edited, that included a description of how the traveling press reacted to a Trump speech between campaign stops. From that day on, Martosko made announcements over the public address system, reminding newcomers: “what we say here, who we see here, stays here,” a version of the warning read aloud before each AA meeting.
at the same time, however, martosko’s disputes on twitter with other journalists are innumerable. he often comments on other reporters’ tweets, calling out what he sees as a liberal bias. Even though Martosko deleted the entire Twitter archive of him, wholesale, after Election Day, traces of tit-for-tat can still be found online. Last September, Martosko tweeted about Clinton’s appearance at a campaign event, “She sounds bored / half awake / uninterested… not the kind of performance that strikes fear into our enemies. where’s the caffeine? A pair of Reuters reporters argued with Martosko after the tweet, before Clinton’s roving press secretary, Nick Merrill, tweeted for Martosko to “delete his account.” unlikely to happen. “This seems as good a time as any to return to my one rule of twitter: curse me and you’re blocked or muted, depending on my mood,” he tweeted on Nov. 14. On Wednesday, he made a bizarre comment to NBC News’ Katy Tur, sharing a story about a naked man who bit someone at his network’s Washington offices. “hi @katyturnbc… are you okay? :-)”
There’s a reason no mainstream journalists chose to speak to me on record for this story, beyond the fact that reporters tend to feel uncomfortable calling their colleagues. “I don’t think anyone is afraid of [david], but on the campaign trail most reporters would avoid him, because you get the sense that the guy has a lot of personal animosity,” says an experienced campaign reporter. that reputation darkened in the weeks after the election. More than the commotion Martosko caused by reporting on Trump while he was being scrutinized as a possible cabinet candidate that drew widespread scrutiny, it was the nature of the working discussions that put him under fire. last month, the page six column of the new york post reported on a memo, allegedly written by martosko and shared with trump, suggesting that white house journalists should be screened of drugs regularly. For Martosko, this twist in the news was a moment where maintaining reality goes awry, one he’s not looking forward to revisiting. “It is not my role to speak or write about the content of those meetings, or any contact I had with the transition, or anything like that,” he says by email, regarding the details of his meetings with “several important people.” . /p>
Well-intentioned or not, martosko’s next-level sarcasm can come across as condescending when you’re on the receiving end. “I find his tweets incredibly arrogant, the way he advises the media on how to report correctly,” says Rothstein. “Has she been in the media for how long, five minutes?”
martosko, in fact, has been in the media for only six years. Before journalism, he spent time as an opera director, singing telegram boy, and longtime public relations for Berman and Company, where he often defended corporate clients in the food and beverage industry against claims made by consumers and activists. As part of that job, Martosko once had an affair with actor Jeremy Piven, who dropped out of playing him in a David Mamet play after claiming that sushi gave him food poisoning. Martosko responded in a statement to the press: “If piven weighs around 160 pounds, he would have to eat at least 3.4 pounds of tuna for sushi, that is, 108 pieces of tuna sushi roll, every week for his whole life to be able to eat. introduce any new health risk from mercury.”
Martosko’s most infamous job involved him posing as a drug-smoking communist to infiltrate animal rights groups, a stunt that led to a lawsuit and an investigation of mother jones in 2013. Martosko, so impressed with reporting that it sullied his name, later offered investigative reporter Kate Sheppard a job. (she refused).
In 2011, Tucker Carlson hired him away from Berman to run his fledgling Daily Call as executive editor. Shortly after arriving, there was a wave of staff departures. But Martosko is generally credited with enhancing the rigor and reputation of the newspaper he calls, which, when he arrived, had lax editorial management and a bureau culture akin to that of a national satire. . “It was a frat house, and David was trying to run it,” recalls Patrick Howley, a reporter for daily calls then and now an op-ed contributor. Howley points out a series of greats for D.C. Names including Matt Boyle, whom Martosko advised on the Daily Caller as proof of his editorial strength. “David has been a big part of the conservative history of new media,” he adds.
but it was not until trump that martosko began to be attacked by clinton campaign officials in wikileaks emails and his name spread for presidential appointments. “trump has had many winners and losers in the media; david is clearly one of the winners,” says charles johnson of gotnews.com, who is no stranger to controversy, as gawker called him “the worst journalist on the web”. For radical and fringe journalists like Johnson, Martosko is something of a role model whose rise to prominence draws applause. “If you think about it, [David] was basically a nobody, and a few years from now, he’s the political editor of the largest English-language publication in history,” Johnson says.
It would be hard to argue that the martosko portfolio has been full-blown conservative hacking. his signature on dailymail.com runs the gamut from friendly cover fire (“final tally shows trump lost the popular vote by 2.8 million, but beat clinton by 3 million votes outside of california and new york” ) to stiff checks (“photos of trump’s ‘record crowd’ that allegedly broke the arena record set by zz top 42 years ago show the arkansas venue was actually half empty”). he even wrote a story about the rejection of trump’s immigration ban from new york mayor bill de blasio, who isn’t exactly friendly to conservative publication reporters, and has criticized the trump administration on things like tiffany trump’s voter registration in two states.
martosko maintains that he has no ideological orthodoxy. “I didn’t cover the trump campaign as a fan,” Martosko says by email. “The same thing happens with his presidency. my team and I will report the good and the bad because that’s what our readers expect from us.”
According to Martosko, his longevity, not any kind of partisan leaning, is the reason he gained so much access during the campaign. “I interviewed Donald Trump often in the early days before he announced he was running because he was accessible and eager to speak to an audience as large as DailyMail.com,” he says.
in other words, martosko got there early and jumped on trump, while rising, improbably, like a runaway balloon that never came back down to earth.
but in trump’s america, where the media has been labeled the public enemy no. 1, martosko is, like it or not, still part of the horde. for now. All but one political journalist I spoke with, many of whom cringed at the idea of Martosko at the podium three months ago, said they’d take him in a heartbeat over Spicer. At least Martosko has a sense of humor.
but if the president called again, this time with a formal offer, would martosko accept it?
“I left everything behind pretty quickly,” he says. “I really have one of the best journalism jobs in washington.”
correction: an earlier version of this article said that the pollak story included snippets of a conversation between reporters covering trump. According to Pollak, his story included a description of how the traveling press group reacted to a triumphant speech, not parts of any conversation. this article has been updated to reflect this.
An earlier version of this article previously stated that Chris Moody was mentored by David Martosko on the daily call, he did not work under Martosko.”