Earlier today an OP mentioned the 1976 murder of reporter Don Bolles
in Arizona who was an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic and was working on crooked land deals, crooked dog tracks etc. involving big-wigs, politicians and others. It was long ago for my memory but something struck a memory in my brain that there was more to the story and maybe it had relevance to things today. So I looked back and did find what struck my memory.
You would normally have thought that the paper he worked at would be outraged by his murder and would embrace any and all efforts to find out every detail. You would be wrong. However a reporter named Don Devereux dug in to what happened to Don Bolles:
"Devereux also alleged that Bolles' travails at the Republic involved conflicts with the paper's upper management, who are known to have confiscated Bolles' reporting files immediately after his murder. His notes related to the Mafia and its connections to state officials and corruption were allegedly destroyed. Bolles' editor at the paper, Tom Sanford, said to be his only ally therein, followed up on Bolles' murder despite being forbidden by his superiors to work (or even speak) with the IRE team investigating the mob and Emprise; the resulting IRE series was not published in the Republic. Sanford spoke with Roberts as part of his own investigation of the murder and thereafter made plans to speak with Bolles' second wife to reveal his findings. Just hours after that phone call, Sanford was found dead in a field of a shotgun wound and his demise was ruled a suicide. The shotgun had no fingerprints and, despite a bottle of whiskey being found in his car, his blood showed no signs of alcohol consumption.[17][18][19]"
The supposed suicide of Tom Sanford was most of the part that tripped the memory for me. So many whistleblowers and people with things to expose the rich and powerful just turn up as "suicides" and we are told to "move along".
The group of 38 reporters from 28 papers and TV stations that continued the work of Bolles about corruption in Arizona issued in 1977 a 23 part written series of their findings. You would think The Arizona Republic would cover it. You would be wrong. They refused.
I put this up not only for the memory of Don Bolles and his editor Tom Sanford but to also show how there really was a time when journalists weren't just talking heads on cable spouting accepted narratives. Also to show that the intimidation and corruption in media in the last decades of the 1900's was already well underway and here we are now.
So I guess it should have come as no surprise to me this week when I heard MSNBC daytime shows Chris Jansing and then Katy Tur have on guests who claimed to be journalists and basically pushing the line that Bondi is being honest about there not being any Epstein "list" or incriminating evidence of big shots doing horrible things. It was so canned and implausible and it received zero push-back from either host. In fact they used the pronouncements as a foundation to more or less proclaim the Epstein matter over.
People like this who suck in the accepted narrative and then go spew it on programs like this should never use the word "journalist" to describe themselves. By doing so they demean the memory of people like Don Bolles, Tom Sanford and so many others.
So that's how it goes and it mistakenly passes for journalism if you don't use critical listening/thinking these days. But I'm just an old man who forgot to remember to forget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Bolles
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