As we can see from this week’s CBS “60 Minutes” segment The Whistleblower and the Washington Post’s article The Drug Industry’s Triumph Over the DEA, investigative journalism continues to have a significant impact on public perception and people’s careers. Hopefully it will also have an impact on future laws.
In case you missed it, the Washington Post and the CBS newsmagazine both did stories on Oct. 15, 2017 about Tom Marino’s role helping drug distributors pass a pharmaceutical-friendly law that allowed drug makers to distribute more painkillers to places that were already in the midst of the opioid crisis. This law also simultaneously curtailed the Drug Enforcement Agency’s efforts. Finally, to add insult to injury, Marino was paid $100,000 from the pharmaceutical lobby for his egregious work advocating for this law.
After these stories broke there was widespread outrage around Marino’s role as the chief architect and sponsor behind the law, as well as his nomination to be the drug czar. He had been nominated by President Trump to be the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. On Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017 he withdrew from consideration.
This story is especially important because we’ve lost more than 200,000 lives to the opioid epidemic. This is a staggering number of people and the ripple of effect of these deaths will be far reaching for many decades to come. Families have been destroyed. Children are often the biggest victims, losing parents to death or growing up in a chaotic environment where one or both parent’s top priority is drug-seeking. (For more on this, NBC has done a couple of powerful recent stories.)
Other big investigative stories in 2017 that hopefully will impact change include:
- Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades – The New York Times’ and the New Yorker’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first broke the news in the New York Times on Oct. 5, and Ronan Farrow reported the story in the New Yorker on Oct. 10, 2017.
- Swedish Double-Booked Its Surgeries, and the Patients Didn’t Know – Seattle Times reporters Mike Baker and Justin Mayo broke this story on May 28, 2017.
- 780M pills, 1,728 deaths – Eric Eyre of Charleston Gazette-Mail, Charleston, WV. Eyre won a Pulitzer prize for his “courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest overdose death rates in the country.”
- Suffering in Secret: Illinois hides abuse and neglect of adults with disabilities by Michael J. Berens and Patricia Callahan of Chicago Tribune. This article focused on official neglect and abuse that led to 42 deaths at Illinois group homes for developmentally disabled adults.
Clearly, investigative reporting is expensive and time consuming, however, as we can see it is important and can impact change. Newspaper advertising revenue and operating budgets may have declined, but these stories still need to be told. While some may deride the news media, these stories are powerful examples of how they continue to play a role in keeping the American public informed and hold government officials, executives and board of directors accountable.
For more on investigative journalism, please check out these articles