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nickel

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Η έκφραση Follow the money έχει την ιστορία της, την οποία θα βρείτε με λίγα λόγια στη σχετική σελίδα της Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_the_money

Πιο γουστόζικο (και ντετεκτιβίστικο) είναι το κείμενο στο αγαπημένο μου βιβλίο του William Safire (Safire's Political Dictionary), το οποίο [κείμενο] και αντιγράφω ολόκληρο εδώ με δυο διορθωσούλες:

follow the money

A rule for finding guilty parties by pursuing their financial trails. The phrase became a rallying cry for reporters investigating corruption in high places years after the Watergate scandal. It was popularized in the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, based on the 1974 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters (so closely joined at the keyboard that they sometimes were referred to as Woodstein) who broke key elements of the Watergate story. In the film, the words are uttered by “Deep Throat,” the long-anonymous source now known to have been FBI associate director W. Mark Felt, in a meeting with Woodward (played by Robert Redford) in an underground parking garage in Washington, D.C. The money trail in this case began with some $5,500 in consecutively numbered $100 bills possessed by the men who had been arrested on June 17, 1972, while breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the capital’s Watergate complex. The money was traced from the burglars to contributors to the Nixon campaign, with detours through banks in Florida and Mexico, and, most damagingly, to the Committee to Re-Elect the President, whose chairman, former Attorney General John Mitchell, had approved the break-in.

Most movie-goers assumed that the memorable line appeared in the Woodstein book; not so. It comes from the screenplay written by William Goldman, and was not a phrase spoken by the real Deep Throat. Asked about the provenance of the quote by NPR commentator Daniel Schorr, Goldman said: “I can’t believe I made it up. I was in constant contact with Woodward while writing the screenplay. I guess he must have made it up.” Following the linguistic trail, Schorr proceeded to query Woodward, who then went back through all his notes of all his interviews. Unable to find the phrase in his records, Woodward passed the buck back to Goldman, telling Schorr that he was inclined to think the screenwriter had made it up.

There the matter lay until 1997, when Stephen Lesher, who had covered the Justice Department for Newsweek in 1973, suggested in a letter to this lexicographer that follow the money probably should be credited to the late Henry Peterson, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, who headed the Watergate investigation prior to the appointment of Archibald Cox as special prosecutor. A principal source for many reporters, Peterson told Lesher that “from day one” he had instructed his chief lieutenants, Earl Silbert and Seymour Glanzer, “to follow the money. If they followed the money, they’d get to the bottom of the case.” Lesher continued: “If Peterson used the ‘follow the money’ expression with me, who was new to the story, he certainly must have used it with other reporters who, like Woodward, had been there from the start.”

Money trails also are of international importance. Criticizing major newspapers for revealing a hitherto secret anti-terrorist program for tracing international bank transfers in 2006, Stuart Levey, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said “It’s one thing to say you are following the money. It’s quite another to tell people exactly what they’re looking at.”

In non-political usage, in commenting on news personality Katie Couric’s decision in 2006 to leave NBC’s Today show for a much larger salary as anchor on the “CBS Evening News,” one network insider was reported saying: “In the television business you’ve got to follow the money.”
https://books.google.gr/books?id=Dt3QCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA257

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