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Canwest News Service
Mark Pittman, the award-winning reporter whose fight to make the U.S. Federal Reserve more accountable to taxpayers led Bloomberg News to sue the central bank and win, died on Nov. 25 in Yonkers, N.Y. He was 52.
Pittman suffered from heart-related illnesses. The precise cause of death wasn't known, said his friend William Karesh, vice-president of the Global Health Program at the Bronx, New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
"He was one of the great financial journalists of our time," said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. "His death is shocking."
A former police-beat reporter who joined Bloomberg in 1997, Pittman wrote stories in 2007 predicting the collapse of the banking system. That year, he won the Gerald Loeb Award from the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the highest accolade in financial journalism, for "Wall Street's Faustian Bargain," a series of articles on the breakdown of the U.S. mortgage industry.
Pittman's push to open the Fed to more scrutiny resulted in an Aug. 24 victory in Manhattan Federal Court affirming the public's right to know about the central bank's more than US$2-trillion in assistance to financial firms. He drew the attention of filmmakers Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, who featured him prominently in their documentary about sub-prime mortgages, American Casino, which was shown at New York City's Tribeca Film Festival in May.
"Who sues the Fed? One reporter on the planet," said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg News. "The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it. Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit-default swap was. He dragged us kicking and screaming."
James Mark Pittman was born Oct. 25, 1957, in Kansas City, Kan. He played linebacker on his high school football team and took engineering classes at the University of Kansas in Lawrence before graduating with a degree in journalism in 1981. He was married soon after to Vicky Holloman and had a daughter, Maggie, in 1983. The marriage ended in divorce.
Pittman's first reporting job, covering the local police department for the Coffeyville Journal in southern Kansas, paid so little he took a part-time job as a ranch hand across the Oklahoma border in Lenapah, according to an interview he gave to Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review's The Audit, a business press watchdog.
"In a time when too much journalism is timid or co-opted," Chittum said in an email, "Mark personified the whole 'afflict the comfortable' tenet of the business. Mark's passing is a huge loss for journalism at a time when we can least afford it."
Pittman spent a year in Rochester, N.Y., with the Democrat & Chronicle newspaper and 12 years at the Times Herald- Record in Middletown, N.Y., where he met his second wife, Laura Fahrenthold-Pittman, in 1995.
Along with his wife, Laura, and 26-year-old daughter Maggie, Pittman is survived by daughters Nell, 10, and Susannah, 8, from his second marriage; his father Warren Pittman; mother Donna Pittman-Nealey; and brothers Barry Pittman and Craig Pittman.
