The DSR Network Best of Need to Know: Lunacy! Corruption! War Crimes! Incompetence! (But shhhhhh. Don’t say it too loud.) (04/05/26)
Sep 7, 2026
Dan Froomkin, journalist and PressWatchers publisher, and Jeff Jarvis, digital media scholar and author, join a sharp discussion of journalism’s failures in the Trump era. They examine how outlets miss the broader corruption, normalize potential war crimes, amplify extremism, and dodge the word fascism. The conversation also considers voter-moving scandals, market reactions, and whether independent media can fill the gap.
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Corruption Disappears Without Connected Coverage
- Scattered corruption stories fail to show that illegality and self-enrichment define the administration’s governing model.
- Individual deals disappear when journalists do not aggregate them or show why institutional accountability has failed.
Follow The Money With A Living Spreadsheet
- Follow money across incidents instead of treating each transaction as an isolated news event.
- Jeff Jarvis proposes a continuously updated spreadsheet tracking corruption’s cumulative dollar value and historical scale.
The Press Rarely Adds Up The Grift
- Political journalists often avoid arithmetic that would expose how policy transfers wealth to connected elites.
- The discussion contrasts a $4.5 trillion billionaire tax cut and $1.5 trillion defense demand with ordinary people losing services and security.