He was glad the election was over. "I'm relieved I'm not appearing in campaign ads," he said. He was still reckoning with the proper response to what Nunes had done. "When your character has been assassinated by a politician like that, how do you rebuild that trust? How do you repair what Nunes told them about us?" His days were consumed with thinking about how to signal to the reader that the Bee was an institution they could believe in. That the information the paper reported could be trusted. "But you know what? It was time to do that anyway."

All over the country, local papers were having similar conversations. Steve King, the notoriously racist House member from Iowa, had barred The Des Moines Register from covering his election-night event; one of his sons, who was working on his campaign, called them a "leftist propaganda media outlet." Even national outlets like CNN were having to explain to their viewers what it was they did and why. "Now @CNN is contacting all 100+ of our former staff and interns asking for dirt on me," Rep. Jim Jordan tweeted this summer, after being implicated in a sexual-abuse scandal at Ohio State University. "Getting desperate! How can you ever trust such #fakenews?" How do you communicate to people that you're doing your job when politicians keep telling them that the very act of doing that job is desperation or propaganda? The Bee was going to have to solve this problem or die trying.

Kieta gave me an empty office to sit in for the afternoon. Mackenzie Mays walked by. "I'm trying to figure out if a sexually violent predator can run for office," she told me. I said my questions could wait until she had a minute. After a while she came back. She was still looking into the sexually violent predator hypothetical: Could one of these guys come out of prison and then treatment, having served his time, and onto a political ticket? She had questions in to the state of California.

What drew her to the work? What kept her doing it? She asked me if I had seen the Bee's mission statement, which hangs awkwardly, unromantically, in a stairwell between the first and second floors. "It says we're advocates for the community," Mays said. It was corny, she knew, but she loved that mission statement. "I mean, there's no way to talk about this without sounding so cheesy." She loved being a journalist. "I feel really lucky that I get to write for a living," she said. "You gain these people's trust, and that they let you in and tell you really vulnerable things."

Before the Bee, Mays worked at the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in the state where she'd spent most of her life. The former publisher there used to say: "Journalism should be mostly about sustained outrage." Mays always related to that. "Especially in a place like Appalachia, where you feel like you're carrying such a load, because it's always misrepresented by journalism. It doesn't take long to get defensive of the community you work in." She said she'd only been in Fresno for a few years, but she already felt that way about this town, too. Defensive. Protective.

"Oh," she said. "Did I tell you I met Nunes for the first time last week?"

It was in a diner, right before the election, she said. He was having a small breakfast for supporters of his campaign. She went to cover it. Eventually, she managed to get in front of Nunes. He greeted her politely, shook her hand. "And I say, 'Hey, I'm Mackenzie,' and he's still nodding and normal, and then I'm like: 'I'm with The Fresno Bee. I tried to talk to you in the past, so I thought I'd come here.' And he just smirked and just turned around in the middle of my sentence and just walked away. And he was out of there within minutes."

Mays said she didn't know if he recognized who she was. "Did he realize when I said who I was that I'm the person that wrote those stories? Or that I'm the person in the pamphlet he sent out? I don't even know if he knows that." He'd mentioned her in ads, in his mailer, spent the summer assailing her reporting. Did he have any idea who it actually was he was attacking—that she was an actual person, with a husband and parents and a career she was devoted to? She thought she might never know.

A little while later, when we left the little office Kieta had given me, she went back to turn off the light I'd left on, so as not to waste more electricity than anyone there in the newsroom had to.

"You're welcome," Mays said, watching me write this detail down.

Zach Baron is GQ's staff writer.