Uncovering wrongdoing before it becomes a crisis

Financial reporting is crucial to a fair and functioning democracy, said Laurie Hays, senior executive editor for Beat Reporting at Bloomberg News at a talk Tuesday at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard.

Janell Sims of the Shorenstein Center writes, “Highlighting several stories recently published by Bloomberg, Hays argued that the stories they publish illustrate their commitment to transparency and transformation in the economic sector.

“In 2011, Bloomberg reporters uncovered a story about secret loans from the Fed that gave billions of dollars to banks, all the while undisclosed to Congress. The story received a special citation at the 2012 Goldsmith Awards.

“The 2011 story Consider the Koch Brothers revealed that a unit of Koch Industries ‘paid bribes to win contracts’ in other countries, and ‘falsified data about emissions of benzyne, which is a known cause of cancer.’

“‘The world needs financial journalists to uncover wrongdoing before it becomes a crisis,’ she said. While it’s not always easy to foresee a catastrophe before it unfolds, Hays explained that at Bloomberg reporters work to flag crises ‘before they get out of control.'”

Read more here. You can also listen to the speech here.