David Cay Johnston
On April 16, 2008, David Cay Johnston came to campus as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series. During his visit, Mr. Johnston met with small groups of students and faculty throughout the day. In the evening, he gave an enlightening and provocative presentation titled, “Perfectly Legal: Inequities in America,” to an audience of nearly 400 students, faculty, alumni, and guests from the community. Johnston was presented the Accounting in the Public Interest Award by the Center for Accounting Ethics, Governance, and the Public Interest. The award was given in recognition of Mr. Johnston’s “ongoing investigative reporting about our tax and legal systems and for his commitment to social justice and the public interest.”
Johnston, long one of America’s top investigative reporters, engages audiences with his tales of the people who are reshaping our economy and his plain English explanations of complex government policies and economic concepts and how they affect your pocketbook. Johnston reported on various tax issues and policies for The New York Times from 1995 to 2008. In 2001, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the U.S. tax system. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three other times since 2000. He is now examining how “deregulation” has reshaped the American economy.
During 12 years at The Los Angeles Times, 1976 to 1988, Johnston was the first reporter to seriously examine the Los Angeles Police Department, exposing its brutality, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness and he once hunted down a murderer, winning freedom for an innocent man who was tried five times for the same crime. While at The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 through 1994, he broke the story that Donald Trump had a negative net worth. His book on the casino industry, Temples of Chance, accurately predicted the spread of legalized gambling and how regulation would protect not gamblers, but casino owners.
Johnston began his journalism career in 1968 at The San Jose Mercury News, where he covered student radicals, black politics, and land development. As an investigative reporter at The Detroit Free Press in 1973 to 1976 his pioneering investigation of news blackouts and manipulations resulted in government forcing new ownership in six broadcast stations.
Johnston studied economics at the University of Chicago. He also studied at Michigan State and San Francisco state and four other colleges.
Johnston lectures on topics such as how large corporations get away with not paying taxes and how government policy helps the well-connected benefit at your expense. His 2004 best-selling book, Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich--and Cheat Everybody Else, won a medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors as book of the year. It is used as a text as schools from Harvard to the University of Southern California. Congress enacted five laws addressing abuses exposed in Perfectly Legal. His most recent book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), is about how government economic policy violates Adam Smith’s teachings.