I believe this is a true story, although one's memories are always subject to mythology: At some point in the late '90s, I gave Jake Tapper his first major writing assignment in national media, when I was an editor at a long-since-deceased New York pop-culture magazine and he was a junior staff member at the Washington City Paper. I don't remember anything about the story we did together — no doubt he was paid a hilariously large freelance fee, at least compared to the way the business works today — but I certainly remember thinking that this young man had ambition, considerable talent and the kind of internal engine that was going to take him places.
To be clear, I claim zero credit for anything Tapper has done since then, and I didn't predict he would become one of the most recognizable faces, and most respected hosts, in cable news. Many of the people who yearn to sit in the anchor's chair aren't willing to do the work of learning to be reporters first. He was, and he did. Not long after that magazine article, Tapper joined Salon as our Washington correspondent. I had nothing to do with that; I already worked here, on and off, but almost entirely on the culture desk. By the time Jake moved on, partway through the George W. Bush era, he had established himself as a D.C. reporter with deep connections and abundant insight into the murky inner machineries of the nation's capital.
