Last October, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski uncovered deleted Reddit posts that showed former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner discussing his Totenkopf shortly after Platner claimed that he had only recently learned that the tattoo on his chest resembled the Nazi symbol. It was a classic Kaczynski story, surfacing embarrassing details from a politician’s digital past that then spread far and wide. Kaczynski does this sort of thing so often that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he is the source of much of what we know about various candidates running for election this cycle, whether it’s Democrat Abdul El-Sayed pledging to defund the police or Republican Mike Collins’s ties to a white-nationalist influencer (his son-in-law). “Generally, if you see him showing up on caller ID, you know it’s not a good thing,” says a political strategist who has dealt with Kaczynski for over a decade. “But he stabs you in the front rather than in the back.”

Kaczynski has been so successful for so long that many wonder why other reporters don’t try to imitate him. “That sort of reporting is a dying art, and I don’t really understand why — it seems like a gold mine, honestly, for reporters,” says the strategist. But maybe it’s not so simple. “The reality is it seems pretty straightforward and yet very few have been able to emulate it,” says Jeff Zucker, who hired Kaczynski when he was head of CNN. Kaczynski’s singular talent has made him a hot commodity among news outlets, but he recently decided to stay with CNN for the next few years.

His continued success comes despite — or perhaps because of — the deterioration of internet search. His team, which today consists of Kaczynski and CNN reporter Em Steck, has responded by building proprietary tools to sort and filter data — by name, date, phrases — in a way that YouTube and Twitter and Google used to just do themselves, as he notes in a recent post on X. These obstacles come at a moment when there’s more information on the internet than ever. “Everybody now has this enormous digital trail — social media, old websites, videos, podcasts, message boards, public records, archived pages,” says Kaczynski. “I’m trying to stay ahead of people by building tools to compare this stuff. So maybe that gives me a competitive edge, but is it good that search doesn’t work? Probably not, right?”

Kaczynski started his career in his basement, where, as a 22-year-old college student, he’d dredge up old C-SPAN footage exposing the hypocrisy of 2012 presidential candidates — like Newt Gingrich offering........

© Daily Intelligencer