![[Shanoff] Pablo Torre on the NBA’s Clippers report: “The sensation that I have felt personally is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability.”](https://external-preview.redd.it/qRQnXPh5wuMovv-WcZRweuXkHMOWqKLCC8ZL9J5Bkos.jpeg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6331fe79df27c6f30d8115dbb4bd16bb98714972)
[Shanoff] Pablo Torre on the NBA’s Clippers report: “The sensation that I have felt personally is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7562990/2026/09/04/pablo-torre-steve-ballmer-clippers-nba/
I really hope that people don’t think that the only way that you can trust reporting like this is if the entity or the institution that you’re investigating takes their hand and raises it and says, ‘Yes, the journalist was right.’
But I also hope that people can evaluate the work on its merits and learn to trust that our process is rigorous in ways that are bordering on unhealthily obsessive, which is a separate problem, but hopefully one that they can trust.
The sensation that I have felt personally and have felt in our audience — such that I can get a sense of what has been a head-spinning day — is that people have been almost delighted that maybe we can hold the richest people in the world to something resembling a standard of accountability.
I think that is what I feel most acutely: That maybe that’s possible. That maybe a collection of documentary evidence and human sources who are brave enough to talk to a journalist, and months of research that have been vetted legally and otherwise, can combine to create something like consequences at a time at which those extraordinarily wealthy people seem to be able to avoid them.
I think that we have the ability to do something that the rest of our culture is yearning for, which is make people who are too rich to care about anything resembling the public interest worry that maybe they need to tell us the truth.