More forensic accounting journalists needed

Former newspaper reporter and editor Del Marbrook writes that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch‘s bid to acquire Dow Jones & Co., the owner of The Wall Street Journal, should be a wakeup call to the journalism world that it needs more forensic accounting experts as journalists.

Marbrook wrote, “But if the press doesn’t tell it any better, and the people don’t get it any better, we’re doomed as a democracy. What we’re in for is a kleptocracy in which a predator class rules and steals and abuses, while the rest of us lick its boots. We’re already a long way down that road.

“Americans like to know how things work. That’s why the television CSI franchise is so popular. We like to think we can solve mysteries and punish bad guys. So what we need is more business crime scene investigations. But who will do them? Who will pay for them? And what will the medium be? The ideal medium is the Internet. It can be modified, corrected, supplemented almost at will. So we have the medium, but we don’t have the message, and we don’t have the means to finance the message.

“We desperately need a generation of journalists trained in forensic accounting to tell us what’s going on. We need to understand what globalization means to us, how it affects taxation, jobs, education, our national priorities, our ideals. We need to understand how immigration, for better or worse, is part of globalization. We need to understand how international trade organizations affect our sovereignty. We need to know the ramifications of the North American Union, which the the two Bush administrations and the Clinton administration have been working so hard to lay on us. We need to understand these issues as well as we understand baseball and football and basketball.”

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