Big Dirty Money by Jennifer Taub

Author:Jennifer Taub [Taub, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

JOURNALISTS ON THE BEAT

Investigative journalists—working on their own or closely with government and corporate insiders—are critical to ferreting out and halting white collar crime in action. Without Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, Theranos would still be in Walgreens offering inaccurate blood tests. Without Woodward and Bernstein, Nixon might never have resigned. The tradition of course goes back much further. Without Ida Tarbell’s muckraking serial, published as a book in 1904, the government would not have broken up Standard Oil.

Now more than ever, during this elite crime spree, we need more journalists on the beat. Yet the industry is under economic threat. Print journalism has struggled since the rise and ubiquity of the internet and social media. And investigative journalism requires both time and deep expertise, but it is so easily and quickly reproduced by summarizer and aggregator sites that make money faster and cheaper without having to pay the fact finders who do the digging and original reporting.

Economic threats are not the only ones in town. Physical threats to journalists are all too common across the globe. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, fifty-six journalists were killed throughout the world in 2018.28 Many more have been imprisoned in retaliation for their writing. Here in the United States, we have been spared this epidemic, until recently. Freedom of the press is more than words on paper, enforceable in our courts. We are proud of these words in our Constitution and in the Supreme Court decisions that give them effect. But words alone do not stop fists or bullets.

Physical violence against journalists is becoming alarmingly common here. In May 2017, in the lead-up to a special congressional election, tech millionaire and Republican candidate Gregory Gianforte body-slammed reporter Ben Jacobs at a campaign event. This did not stop voters from electing Gianforte to Congress the very next day. Less than a month later, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor assault, but was not sentenced to any jail time.29 Jacobs agreed not to sue the congressman in exchange for an apology and a $50,000 contribution to the Committee to Protect Journalists. In a statement to the court, Jacobs said, “In recent years, our discourse has grown increasingly rancorous and increasingly vile. This needs to stop.”30

In late June 2018, Jarrod Ramos shot and killed four journalists and a sales assistant in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Maryland. His motive? Seven years earlier, the community newspaper had reported on Ramos’s harassment of a former high school classmate. He had already pleaded guilty, but the judge suspended his jail time. For years, Ramos sent threatening tweets to the journalists he would later murder.31 And in October 2018, Cesar Sayoc, a zealous Donald Trump supporter, sent sixteen packages containing pipe bombs to journalists and politicians whom Trump had repeatedly and publicly deemed his enemies. While the explosives were shoddily constructed, experts said they could have detonated, with potentially devastating effects.32

But the leader sets the pace. Donald Trump ran his first presidential campaign vilifying the press, and he has continued to attack the media throughout his presidency and current campaign.

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