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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged corruption

1. April 20, 2011 06:49 PM

   Barron’s On a Deadly Russian Tax Heist

   Bureaucrats and thugs laundered hundreds of millions through Credit Suisse

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bill Alpert has a must-read story in Barron's this week—a wild tale of overt Russian corruption involving a $230 million tax scam, a suddenly wealthy tax official, an elaborate money laundering scheme, and a body count: Interior Ministry police claim the complex scam was pulled off by a sawmill worker and a burglar, both currently serving five-year sentences, in cahoots...

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2. June 7, 2011 12:41 AM

   Audit Notes: Sun-Times Daley Probe, CanadaCare Myths, Off the News

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Chicago Sun-Times has a dandy investigation today reporting that the son of former Mayor Richard Daley made skads of money when the city signed a deal for wifi service in the city's airports. To make matters worse, the Daley administration denied for years that Patrick Daley had any financial stake in the deal. Unfortunately for them, the Sun-Times's Tim...

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3. May 22, 2012 05:58 PM

   Audit notes: Facebook disclosure, Facebook value, soft corruption

   By Ryan Chittum

   Business Insider's Henry Blodget, who knows a thing or two about analyst/IPO scandals, writes that Facebook and/or its bankers could be in trouble for not disclosing material information to the public about its financial health. Reuters has been reporting for several days that analysts at three of Facebook's bankers cut estimates for the company during the roadshow leading up to...

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4. March 23, 2012 07:35 PM

   Audit Notes: N.J., Paragon of Clean Government; Algae Fuel, Fees, The Rich (UPDATED)

   By Ryan Chittum

   Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil just guts a Center for Public Integrity report card on state corruption. It found that New Jersey was the least corrupt state in the country—a result that should have flagged to CPI that something had gone awry with their survey. That flagged it for Weil, at least, who looked into the methodology CPI employed: For example, O’Dea...

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5. November 29, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: WaPo on Avandia, giving away the store, plutocrats

   Report shows how drug research is corrupted by corporate money

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Washington Post's Peter Whoriskey has another outstanding story in his series on the Avandia drug scandal at GlaxoSmithKline and what it says about the corruption of our system for testing the safety and efficacy of drugs. Years ago, the government funded a larger share of such experiments. But since about the mid-1980s, research funding by pharmaceutical firms has exceeded...

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6. March 2, 2012 10:47 AM

   Checkbook Journalism’s Slippery Slope

   Murdoch's scandals show why paying for news is a bad idea

   By Ryan Chittum

   Combine the culture of checkbook journalism with the culture of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and you get one of the biggest media scandals of all time. Paying for news is at the root of News Corp.'s hacking and bribery scandals, and the reaction by tabloid hacks to the revelations about The Sun is revealing about the journalistic environment that gave...

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7. November 14, 2011 07:35 PM

   Insider Trading in Congress

   A new book puts faces on data suggesting members enrich themselves with nonpublic information

   By Ryan Chittum

   If I could short Congress, I would right now. Last night's 60 Minutes report, based on the work of conservative scholar Peter Schweizer, shows how powerful members of Congress benefited by insider trading, which happens to be perfectly legal if you're a congressperson. We've known for a while that Congress has almost certainly been enriching itself by buying or selling...

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8. July 5, 2011 08:07 PM

   News Corp. and Murdoch Swamped By Hacking Scandal News

   Revelations come fast and furious in the twenty-four hours after a Guardian bombshell

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Murdoch hacking scandal has metastasized twenty-four hours after The Guardian's bombshell that News Corporation's News of the World tabloid had hacked into a missing 13 year old girl's voicemail, deleted messages, interfering with the police investigation, while giving Milly Dowler's parents false hope that she was still alive. The drip drip drip of increasingly damning news has become a...

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9. April 23, 2012 06:38 PM

   The Times’s Extraordinary Wal-Mart Investigation

   By Ryan Chittum

   David Barstow's epic Wal-Mart investigation in the Sunday New York Times has already lopped $10 billion off the company's market value ($8 billion if you assume Wal-Mart would have been down 1 percent like the rest of the market today). Rest assured, though, the reverberations from this piece have just begun to be felt in Bentonville. The Times gives Barstow...

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10. July 8, 2011 11:37 AM

    The Audit TV: Murdoch Hacking Scandal

    By Ryan Chittum

    The News of the World hacking scandal is like the Super Bowl of media criticism or something. I talked to the CBC about News of the World and News Corporation last night. I can't embed it, but you can watch that interview here. This morning (um, at 5 a.m. Seattle time), I talked to Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and Juan...

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