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David Cay Johnston
Verified
Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, DCReport
Rochester
Beats
Biography
David Cay Johnston is an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times. He is a former president of Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE). Johnston taught the business, tax, and property law of the ancient world at the Syracuse University College of Law for eight years and since then has taught legal principles and theory to prelaw students. However, he is not a lawyer. Johnston has lectured in every continent except Antarctica about journalism ethics and techniques; tax and regulatory law; and Donald Trump, who he has covered since 1988. He is a frequent and UNpaid guest on CNN, MSNBC, DemocracyNow!, Law & Crime; and other cable and broadcast shows. In 2017, Johnston and David Crook started DCReport.org, a nonprofit and ad-free online news service that covers what politicians do, not just what they say. At 19, Johnston became a San Jose Mercury staff writer, quickly making Page 1 and at 21 solving the first of several murder cases. When he left that paper at age 24 he was still its youngest staff writer. After The Mercury (1968-72), a University of Chicago Urban Journalism Fellowship ( 1973), the Detroit Free Press Lansing bureau (73-76), the L.A. Times in San Francisco and LA (76-88); The Philadelphia Inquirer (88-95) and The NYTimes (1995-2008), Johnston became a columnist, writing for Reuters, Tax Analysts (Tax Notes Magazine), Columbia Journalism Review, The Daily Beast, Investopedia, The Nation, and Al Jazeera America. He wrote six cover stories for Newsweek under two owners. He has also taught reporting and news writing at the University of Southern California and magazine writing at UCLA Extension. Johnston has never applied for a job, but rather was recruited by every news organization and university that employed him since 1968. Johnston authored two investigative trilogies: 1) Perfectly Legal” on taxes; “Free Lunch” on subsidies, and “The Fine Print” on monopolies (2003-2012). 2) The Making of Donald Trump, It’s Even Worse Than You Think and The Big Cheat (2016-2021). The first two books in each trilogy were NYTimes and WSJ bestsellers. Perfectly Legal won the 2004 IRE Investigative Book of the Year award and was awarded a rare medal. The Making of Donald Trump won the 2016 British political biography of the year award and was translated into 11 languages including Mongolian. His first book was Temples of Chance (1992) about the spread of casinos and Donald Trump’s incompetence and dishonesty. He also edited the 2014 anthology “Divided: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality.” Johnston has exposed spies and foreign agents; cults; electricity and petroleum pipeline price manipulations; saved taxpayers more than a quarter of a trillion dollars as calculated by staff of Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation; exposed a fake state investigation into the deaths of blue-collar workers in the 1971 Port Huron tunnel explosion; exposed fraudulent bestsellers by C. David Heymann and James Mills; and saved hundreds of millions of dollars from being diverted from charities by the late Baron Hilton, the late Kecks Brothers (as in telescope) and others. The only time in American history that a broadcaster was forced to shut down over news manipulations resulted from Johnston’s 1973-76 exposes of WJIM-TV and owner Gross Telecasting, an extraordinarily profitable six-station chain. His NYTimes reporting exposed so many tax dodges that he has been called “the de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.” The Washington Monthly called him “one of America’s most important journalists” and The Oregonian rated his work the equal of the three original muckrakers, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair. The Pulitzer Prize judges one year described Johnston’s “exquisite command” of American tax law. In addition to his 2001 Pulitzer, he was a finalist on 200 and a double finalist in 2003. Johnston was the first journalist to systematically investigate the LAPD, exposing its massive (and worldwide) political spying, failure to solve crimes, and brutality. He also exposed wrongdoing at the three of the largest United Ways (LA, New York and Washington, D.C.). He wrote the Columbia Journalism Review guides on how to cover the police and co-wrote its guide on covering nonprofits. Johnston trained the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s launch staff in 1988. After he found and confronted the leader in a black-on-white 1980 thrill killing in Southern California he won freedom for Tony Cooks, an innocent man sentenced to life in prison by a judge who was ordered by an ill-informed appeals court to impose sentence on a man whom the judge believed to be innocent. Cooks won acquittal at his fifth trial based on evidence Johnston uncovered and that ran in the features section of the LATimes. Presidents Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush changed their tax policies based on Johnston’s reporting. Congress, the Oregon legislature and other bodies changed laws and rules after Johnston exposed harms both physical and economic. Johnston was born on the last doubling birthdate of the 20th Century -- 12-24-48 – in San Francisco. He grew up on his grandmother’s orange ranch in Orange, Calif., until age eight and then his parents moved to Northern California. He regards Santa Crux as home and after all but one semester at Soquel High School he received a night high school diploma from Santa Cruz High. When he was ten years old Stanford University tested him and asked his parents to put him into a study program there. They declined. Over eight years Johnston attended seven colleges including San Francisco State, Michigan State, and the University of Chicago under the War Orphans Act because his father was a disabled WW2 veteran. Johnston never qualified for a degree because he skipped most general education requirements in favor of upper division, masters and doctoral level studies in economics, land use, Black studies, law, journalism, and management theory. Johnston is the father of eight grown children and five grandsons. Among them are an artist and writer; a lyricist; two lawyers; a banking executive; a business owner; a retail manager; and a truck driver. Since 1982 he has been the husband of Jennifer Leonard, the mother of his two youngest children, and the CEO of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, which she has grown from $32 million in 1993 to more than $600 million while giving away nearly $600 million.
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Company Info
DCReport
DCReport is published by the nonprofit Next Echo Foundation. We are a unique, not-for-profit service that provides reporting, information, and perspective on the policies, politics, national and local events that affect our everyday lives and futures. DCReport is participatory civic media in action, propelled by the belief that we ust democratize the stories and the storytellers for our national narrative. We are founded on core investigative journalism principles of research, fact-checking, and reporting in plain English how you and your family are affected by what happens in Washington, D.C. and in government and policy at state and local levels. We will never tell you what to do; we will equip you with facts and perspectives so you can decide and make your voice heard despite official barriers to citizen involvement in decisions by our government. DCReport was co-founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, author of seven books including The Making of Donald Trump, and most recently, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family, and David Crook, a veteran journalist who was the founder and editor of The Wall Street Journal Sunday. DCReport remains steadfastly neutral and uncompromised, and we never sell, rent, or share any information about our readers and subscribers. Your tax-deductible contributions allow us to continue our work.
Rochester, , United States
Founded: 2017