What Happens When You’re Mistaken for America’s Leading Conspiracy Theorist

Alex Susong Jones—“Susong is Anglicized French, or so I’m told”—was born in Greeneville, Tennessee, to a newspaper family. His grandmother founded the Greeneville Sun; his father became its publisher. “It was something I grew up in,” Jones said the other day. “Eight years old, melting pig iron for the letterpress machine—OSHA would have had a fit.” When Jones grew up, he covered the newspaper business for the Times (byline: Alex S. Jones). He won a Pulitzer, wrote two books, became the inaugural host of NPR’s “On the Media,” and then took a job at Harvard, as the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. “Soon after I started there, I got a call in my office,” he said. “This was shortly after 9/11. The voice on the other end goes, ‘I’m glad I’ve found you. Finally, someone who’ll tell me the truth.’ I thought, Wow, how nice that someone feels that way. And then the guy starts rambling about how George W. Bush had blown up the World Trade Center. I went, ‘Hang on, what the fuck are you talking about?’ ”