Allow me to start with a story about the worst mistake I ever made as a journalist. A mistake that made me an enduring target of Seattle’s alt Left.

It was 2018 and Seattle was in the middle of a nationwide search for its next police chief. The Black Lives Matter movement was in full swing and the police department was in its sixth year of federally mandated reforms.

Mayor Jenny Durkan, a former United States Attorney, was tasked with finding a chief who could win over the community, as well as the agency’s beleaguered rank-and-file.

Having covered City Hall for eight years by that point, it seemed obvious that Interim Police Chief Carmen Best would get the job – how could she not? A black woman who was more than qualified and already beloved by officers.

But this is Seattle after all, where the obvious choice is rarely the path of those in power.

On May 25, 2018, a search committee tasked with selecting three candidates for Mayor Durkan to choose from scheduled a press conference to announce the finalists. I wasn’t scheduled to work that day but wasn’t about to miss such an important story. I went to the press conference on my own time.

What happened next would become a controversial moment – not just for the city, but for me personally.

Carmen Best didn’t make the cut.

The room was in shock (and so was Best, who later wrote a book that detailed the moment).

At the press conference that day were supporters of Best – prominent community members who made their displeasure known.

“Jesus take the wheel,” I heard one of them say. “We’re going to burn this motherfucker down.”

I whipped around in my chair and saw Reverend Harriett Walden, considered by many to be a respected voice on criminal justice issues. I couldn’t believe it! Reverend Walden! She must be pissed!

I grabbed my phone and sent out a tweet that quoted Reverend Walden as saying, “we’re going to burn this motherfucker down.” To me, the statement demonstrated the outrage some community members felt over Best’s exclusion.

Except – and this is a big “except” – Reverend Walden wasn’t the one who said it.

Walden vehemently denied that those words came out of her mouth. She was mortified by the accusation.

I thought I was being gaslit. Surely I heard what I heard!

For at least a day I stood by my reporting, despite calls for me to lose my job and worse. I was called racist more times than I can count. Nikkita Oliver, a former mayoral candidate and activist, led the mob (the tactics were so vicious and personal that three years later I recused myself from covering Oliver’s campaign for city council. How could I cover a candidate who thought I was a racist?).

A couple days later, a staffer with the Community Police Commission, who was sitting next to Walden during the press conference, sent me an email that changed everything. She had said those words – not Walden.

I was sick. So sick in fact that I threw up.

I called my news director, who’d already been bombarded with calls and emails to fire me. I told her that we needed to issue a retraction, which we did. Then I got on the phone and called Reverend Walden to apologize. She was gracious – more gracious than I deserved. I felt horrible and despite my best efforts to be professional I couldn’t hold back the tears. I cried and cried and cried and, in that moment, Walden treated me like a daughter, not the reporter who’d just spent two days spreading misinformation about her.

I was grateful for her kindness.

But despite Walden sending out a public statement offering her forgiveness, the attacks only intensified. The mob tasted blood and wouldn’t be satisfied until they got a pound of flesh.

FOX 13 was flooded with calls and emails. Some even demanded I be charged criminally (with what, I don’t know) or pay Walden reparations.

Luckily for me I had an exceptional news director – Erica Hill. She knew my character and knew I made the mistake in good faith. She even offered to give me a few days off to regroup and said she’d personally respond to any nasty emails. Bosses like her are rare, I’ve come to realize.

The Walden tweet launched me into a period of intense and often unhinged scrutiny. I became a favorite target of the city’s alt-Left – even more so when I started hosting a political show in the summer of 2019. At the time, I was given carte blanche to speak forcefully about failures of the city’s progressive leadership.

I was labeled anti-homeless, despite my father’s ultimately fatal battle with addiction and homelessness. The Twitter mob accused me of hating poor people, despite my own struggles with poverty. I was called right-wing, despite my obvious moderate tendencies and outspoken distaste for former President Donald Trump. I was physically attacked at protests and rarely felt safe in the field.

While it was difficult and often got to me more than I let on, I didn’t let it alter my voice. I cared too much about the challenges facing the city and had no intention of letting my foot off the gas.

But when I chose to leave FOX 13 in November to launch the [un]Divided Podcast, much of the hate once focused on me migrated.

At KOMO News, reporter Jonathan Choe became a new favorite target of both the virtual mob and the real-life mob. While he’d been on their radar for a while, things intensified in recent months. He was harassed and even assaulted at protests. He was deemed anti-homeless for his persistent coverage of Seattle’s worsening crisis on the streets.

But his coverage was making a difference. On more than one occasion, homeless camps he featured would be cleared by the city in a matter of days. In a February 2 episode of [un]Divided, I praised Choe’s bravery in the face of constant pushback. After all, I knew better than most what he was going through.

“Despite the threats that he gets, despite the harassment that he gets, he’s out there doing his job,” I said.

I knew how critical the work he was doing was – and how rare. Seattle has too few reporters brave enough to expose the homeless crisis for what it is: a moral failure and a public safety nightmare.

And now the city has one less.

Choe was forced out of his job at KOMO News this week after posting a video montage of a Proud Boys rally in Olympia. The video looked like a promo for the alt Right. I messaged Choe privately to express my confusion over it.

It was no surprise that within hours of Choe posting the video, which has since been deleted, the Twitter-mob was in full swing.

Brett Hamil, a comedian and Socialist who dabbles in political cartoons, urged followers to give Choe the same treatment they’d spent years giving to me.

“Jonathan Choe has so many eyes on him right now,” he tweeted. “It took years for Brandi Kruse to (rightfully) receive this level of scrutiny, and then she had to bug out and do a vanity crowdfund podcast. Keep it up.”

(Never mind that my decision to leave FOX 13 had nothing to do with social media outrage and that Hamil himself uses Patreon to “crowdfund” his political cartoons).

Twitter users posted KOMO’s phone number and email addresses for management. KOMO staffers anonymously leaked their displeasure to local bloggers. It took less than two days for KOMO to relent. KOMO News Director Philip Bruce wrote me in an email:

“KOMO did not direct or approve Jonathan Choe’s decision to cover this weekend’s rally, nor did his work meet our editorial standards. We have decided to end our employment relationship with him effective today. We cannot comment further on personnel issues.”

But if KOMO thought that would quiet the mob, they were of course wrong. Because the mob is never satiated.

“Have you seen Choe’s other content that somehow wasn’t abhorrent enough for them to fire him?” one Twitter user lamented.

“They like the implicit stuff that they can pretend isn’t too bad. The stuff that embarrasses them and gives away the game they don’t like,” wrote another.

Let me state a few things clearly: First, Choe’s coverage of the Proud Boys rally was worthy of criticism. Second, I don’t put too much weight on KOMO’s decision to part ways with him, considering he had an upcoming out in his contract and was actively trying to leave the station anyway.

But whether he already had a foot out the door doesn’t change one simple truth: Seattle’s media landscape is not better off without him.

Seattle’s deepening crises are as much the media’s fault as the politicians. A healthy society requires competent leaders and competent leaders require a robust free press holding them accountable.

There can be no doubt that Choe was holding them accountable, even in the face of unrelenting harassment and hate from outside and, as it turns out, inside his own building.

Like I mentioned, KOMO staffers expressed their displeasure with Choe’s coverage by leaking anonymously to alt-Left bloggers. This, more than any aspect of his departure, has me worried about what’s left of the Seattle media.

As controversial as my commentaries were at times, I was always proud of the dialogue I could have about them with my former colleagues. It was not a rare event to have one of my coworkers ask me about something I said. When I would tweet something controversial, our digital manager Tyler Slauson would come over to my desk. “Beeeeeeeee-kayyyyyyyyyy” he would say in a playful but disapproving tone. One of our exceptional producers, Bhavisha Patel, always read my commentaries before I taped them. I valued her opinion because I knew we agreed on so little. It was her task to make sure my logic was sound, even if she didn’t agree with the overall message. And things went the other way, too. During the pandemic I’d send out messages about our coverage of certain things. Like reminders not to tell people to get the vaccine. That isn’t our job, I’d argue. Ours was a newsroom, at least at the time, that understood we could be most effective by embracing diversity of thought while still holding each other accountable to shared standards.

When I decided to leave FOX 13, there is one comment that still stands out to me.

Jesse Jones, famous for his consumer advocacy segment Get Jesse, wrote on Twitter: “I don’t always agree with you, but damn, you say something. And that’s what’s truly missing in our market. Unique voices are important and they are leaving fast.”

His words put a finger on what I’d been feeling for so long – and what I’d been increasingly disappointed with.

Some of the most hurtful attacks I’ve received came from fellow members of the media. At first, I thought they simply looked down on me because I had a platform to share my opinion. But that wasn’t it. After all, there are plenty of opinion writers in the city. They don’t get attacked with the vigor that I do.

No, it’s because my opinions don’t align with the prevailing worldview. Right, or perceived Right, is wrong in Seattle. And the mainstream media operates the same way.

There are countless examples of this.

Like when reporters were accosted by a right-wing lunatic at what started as an anti-lockdown protest outside the state Capitol. Every major news outlet covered it with the disgust that it deserved, as did I.

But when my news crew was attacked and had to seek refuge in a fire station during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest? The local media couldn’t care less. They were too busy framing the protest as a peaceful gathering inflamed only by the actions of police. One city council member even argued that my security guards were to blame for escalating things with their mere presence. Did other media outlets challenge that narrative? Of course not. Ask yourself this and try to answer honestly: If a reporter were treated in such a manner at a right-wing rally and Republican politicians blamed the reporter for their own attack, would the media have stayed silent?

The answer is a resounding no. And that tells you all you need to know.

Jonathan Choe’s coverage of the Proud Boys rally fell short of journalistic standards, but many in the Seattle media have fallen short of those standards at nearly every major protest or riot for the past five years. They have downplayed and made excuses for reckless and criminal behavior in a way that would never be tolerated if those same actions were carried out by the Right.

The double standard is alarming.

Stack Choe’s favorable coverage of the Right next to 50 other reporters who’ve offered nothing but favorable coverage of the Left. Yet Choe is the only one labeled a villain and a hack.

In my book, obsequence to the Right and obsequence to the Left are two pages out of the same chapter. Neither are particularly good journalistic qualities, but in Seattle it can be argued that coddling the Left is more damaging considering the Left is in power (you know, power? The thing journalists are supposed to challenge?).

Like me, Choe’s place may not be in the current mainstream media environment. And that’s fine. The mob will simply move onto someone else, and then someone else, and then someone else. Before long, Seattle’s establishment media will run out of journalists who are willing to push back against the prevailing narrative.

That should scare the hell out of all of us.