[1] He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Columbia Journalism Review, Metropolis, The Washington Post, and Harper's Magazine.

He is a prominent figure in the disability rights movement; Hockenberry sustained a spinal cord injury in a car crash at age 19, which left him with paraplegia from the chest down.

[2][3][4] Hockenberry was born in Dayton, Ohio,[5] and grew up in Vestal, New York and East Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[9] Hockenberry started his career as a volunteer for the National Public Radio affiliate KLCC in Eugene, Oregon.

During his 15 years with NPR, he covered many areas of the world, including an assignment as a Middle East correspondent, reporting on the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and 1992.

[citation needed] He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, I.D., Wired,[20] The Columbia Journalism Review, Details, and The Washington Post.

[citation needed] In a New York Magazine exposé, published December 1, 2017, journalist Suki Kim accused Hockenberry of sexually harassing her and other women he had worked with on The Takeaway.

[25] A short documentary film was made, also called Million Dollar Bigot, completed on July 13, 2005, featuring Hockenberry as well as many other disability activists.

[26] Hockenberry wrote in the January 2008 Technology Review magazine that on the Sunday after the September 11 attacks he was pitching stories on the origins of al Qaeda and Islamic fundamentalism.

Instead, a PR executive called Hockenberry's hotel room in Saudi Arabia and read him a statement about how GE didn't see its "valuable business relationship" with the Bin Laden Group as having anything to do with Dateline.

[31] He had left New York Public Radio the previous August, but NYPR president and chief executive Laura Ruth Walker said, "[H]e was not terminated for sexual misconduct.”[32] In a lengthy essay titled "Exile" that was published in the October 2018 issue of Harper's, Hockenberry discussed his "personal and public shame" regarding the episode.