Judd Legum
Judd Legum runs Popular Information, an independent newsletter that uses accountability reporting to track how political and corporate power is exercised. His coverage focuses less on daily political process and more on the money, data, and documents that show how policy decisions, corporate strategies, and media narratives shape public life. Instead of a conventional politics beat, he treats corporations, tech platforms, government agencies, and newsrooms as interlocking centers of power and returns to them in sustained investigations.
Corporate power, technology, and policy
Legum’s most consistent thread is the way corporate power and emerging technology intersect with public policy and everyday costs. He reports on cases like a lawsuit accusing gas stations of using AI to inflate prices, treating algorithmic pricing as a political and regulatory problem rather than a niche tech story. He tracks how large insurers are accused of false advertising and mistreating wildfire victims, and how local governments respond through litigation.
His work on Medicaid spending for Amazon and Walmart employees connects labor economics, social programs, and corporate business models, quantifying how policy choices subsidize low wages at major employers. He returns often to companies in gambling and prediction markets, covering lawsuits that describe DraftKings and FanDuel as “digital heroin,” and documenting how platforms like Polymarket pay influencers to spread election misinformation.
Across these pieces, he follows regulatory filings, lawsuits, budget documents, and corporate statements to show how profit strategies translate into political influence and social risk.
Legum’s archive is organized around themes like “Corporate Power,” where he repeatedly surfaces hidden giveaways to politically connected firms, zero-tax bills for highly profitable corporations, and quiet moves by regulators that benefit donors and business partners. He treats tech figures such as Elon Musk as political actors, reporting on issues like a proposed autonomous vehicle framework, a voter registration site that doubles as a surveillance tool, and an AI supercomputer that relies on foreign hardware with security implications.
The reporting style is direct: he isolates one policy or corporate decision, explains who benefits and who pays, and shows how those choices fit into a broader pattern of power.
Media narratives and information ecosystems
A second strand of Legum’s work scrutinizes how major media outlets and platforms construct and spread political narratives.
He has published detailed pieces on a viral petition involving 9/11 families and New York politics, showing how coverage inflated support numbers and then resisted correction. He follows that kind of story through multiple updates, documenting both the original misreporting and the subsequent attempts by outlets to downplay or obscure their mistakes. His reporting on Meta training AI systems using content from far-right outlets frames platform decisions as an information infrastructure issue, emphasizing how training data choices can tilt political discourse.
He also investigates how prediction market firm Kalshi embeds itself in cable news, tracing financial deals with CNBC and CNN and showing how a commercial product becomes a recurring “expert” frame in coverage.
Legum devotes significant attention to the way newsrooms handle stories about war, budgets, and Trump-era slush funds, pointing out instances where major outlets accept low-ball government cost estimates or mischaracterize the status of controversial spending pools. He has written about Pulitzer-winning news organizations quietly publishing large volumes of gambling-related content that serves commercial interests more than public understanding. In these media pieces, he tends to reconstruct the chain from original claim to headline to amplification, then contrast that with primary documents or data.
The result is coverage that treats the media industry itself as a power center subject to the same accountability lens as corporations and politicians.
Crime, public safety, and political rhetoric
Legum’s crime reporting is data-heavy and explicitly focused on the gap between rhetoric and reality.
He has written about violent crime trends in cities frequently attacked in speeches, showing that crime has plummeted in places described as “crime-infested” and that 2024 was the safest year since the 1960s by key metrics. He dissects shoplifting statistics and longstanding surveys from retail groups, demonstrating how selective numbers and framing can feed narratives about a supposed national crime wave. Pieces on cash bail reforms and FBI crime reports explain how policies and measurement choices interact, and why widely held beliefs about rising crime are not supported by available data.
In coverage of actions by federal authorities, Legum has detailed episodes like the takeover of local police departments and the branding of crime data as “fake news,” treating these as examples of how power can be used to redefine public safety for political ends. He connects crime debates to electoral politics and media coverage, but his emphasis stays on statistics, documents, and specific policy moves rather than partisan positioning.
Taken together, this work positions him as a reporter who can quickly puncture crime narratives with data while still explaining the political strategy behind them.
Investigations, documents, and long-form explainers
Legum structures much of his work as investigations that unfold over time and are grounded in primary material. He has reported on Coachella performers whose financial ties help fund MAGA-aligned political efforts, mapping the path from celebrity culture to campaign infrastructure.
He has examined a $1.7 trillion military budget to identify slush funds benefiting Trump’s allies, and tracked donations that precede favorable regulatory or legal decisions, such as a multi-million-dollar gift followed by government support in a lawsuit. His investigations into ICE’s handling of detainee medical care rely on timelines of decisions and internal communications, documenting how an abrupt change produced a prolonged health crisis.
Stories about Social Security sabotage plans and other internal memos show his use of leaked or obtained documents as central evidence rather than as color.
Popular Information publishes several times a week and has produced more than 1,500 editions in its first eight years, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Legum writes most editions himself, often in collaboration with a small team on larger investigations.
He occasionally uses digests like “PopInfo Weekly” and pieces like “Passing the mic” to highlight prior reporting and introduce new readers to key investigations, but the core format is long-form explainers built around original research.
His prior experience running a major progressive politics site and working in presidential campaign research informs a style that is comfortable with detailed policy, opposition research techniques, and the mechanics of political communication. The overall profile is of a journalist who is not filing incremental beat coverage, but instead producing document-driven stories that trace how decisions made by powerful institutions reverberate through politics, media, and everyday life.
4 more politics journalists.
A.D. Quig
A.D. Quig follows money and power through Chicago and Cook County government, showing how political decisions, taxes and public spending affect residents and businesses. At the Chicago Tribune, she covers city and county politics, municipal finance, tax policy, budgets and the structures shaping mayoral and council authority. She joined the Tribune in 2022 after covering politics for Crain’s Chicago Business and The Daily Line. Her work examines council power, ethics rules, police leadership, tax incentives, public agencies and pandemic aid. She has reported on data center tax breaks, property tax errors, federal relief spending and the fiscal effects of major development proposals. Quig combines insider government reporting with public accountability journalism. She uses public records, data and budget documents, follows committees and staff negotiations, and explains complex decisions in plain language with precise numbers and a direct link to everyday consequences.
Adam Daly
Adam Daly covers politics for amNewYork with a focus on the inner workings of city and state government and the low-profile forums where power is exercised and negotiated. He reports on commissions and panels that shape how New York is governed, treating charter reform and government efficiency as central political terrain. His coverage of moves to replace an Adams-era charter commission with a new government efficiency panel foregrounds mandate, authority, and what “efficiency” means in practice for agencies and services. He tracks who gains and loses influence when one commission supplants another and which constituencies are being answered to. Daly explains dense procedural questions in clear, reader-facing terms, using specific institutional details and occasional wordplay to connect jargon-heavy reforms to public spending, service delivery, and mayoral power.
Adam Pack
Adam Pack covers Capitol Hill through power struggles, investigations and ideological fights, focusing on how Congress intersects with Donald Trump’s agenda. He is a politics writer on Fox News Digital’s Capitol Hill team, covering Congress, federal elections, legislative battles, election rules, war powers, primaries and intraparty fights. He previously wrote for the Daily Caller News Foundation. His reporting examines deadlines, vote counts, bill language, campaign spending, court rulings, oversight reports, culture clashes and emerging issues such as AI-backed political groups. He has covered FISA reauthorization, defense spending, the SAVE America Act, housing policy, redistricting, candidate absences, primary spending and disputes over sex, gender, religion and race-based caucuses. He reports primarily through news features and investigative-style pieces built around documents, committee reports, court records, unearthed video and specific legislative details. He often co-writes complex Capitol Hill stories and publishes “FIRST ON FOX” exclusives.
Adam Sullivan
Adam Sullivan is a veteran politics reporter for WCAX who connects elections and party disputes to everyday life. He covers statewide races, party primaries, federal representation, political rhetoric, extremism, and accountability across the Upper Valley and neighboring states. His reporting includes Becca Balint’s victory over Molly Gray in the Democratic U.S. House primary to replace Congressman Peter Welch. He also reports when political controversies affect public safety, political culture, towns, and institutions, including a New Hampshire Libertarian Party post endorsing violence against elected Democrats. Sullivan follows cultural stories with civic consequences, such as Noah Kahan’s appeal to fans to stop stealing a Strafford road sign linked to his music. He writes straight news centered on concrete events, official reactions, political context, community impact, and what comes next.