LOS ANGELES, Calif. — The Humanity in Journalism podcast today released its latest episode, "Debanking: How Coverage Becomes Consequence," featuring Nick Anthony, policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives. The episode, hosted by Jessica Wiederhorn, founder of The Media Integrity Project, examines debanking; the process by which individuals and businesses lose access to banking and financial services and the role that press coverage plays in triggering it.

The episode is available now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Most people have never heard of debanking. Fewer still know that a news article can help cause it.

In this episode of Humanity in Journalism, Nick Anthony explains how the modern banking system has been turned into an arm of law enforcement, where banks monitor press coverage, flag customers based on reputational risk, and close accounts without explanation, often before any legal finding of wrongdoing. Anthony draws on his research into the Bank Secrecy Act, Operation Chokepoint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's documented pressure campaigns against entire industries to show how financial exclusion has become a policy tool and how journalism fits into that picture.

The episode covers:

•       What debanking is and how it works, including the informal "three strikes" rule that leads banks to close accounts with no court case and no legal finding required

•       How banks monitor press coverage and use reputational risk assessments to flag and exit customers

•       The Bank Secrecy Act's $10,000 reporting threshold and how tens of millions of reports are filed annually while producing only a fraction of actionable investigations

•       Operation Chokepoint and its successor, the informal Operation Chokepoint 2.0, in which federal regulators pressured banks to cut off politically disfavored industries

•       The role of transnational repression, in which authoritarian governments label dissidents and human rights activists as terrorists, triggering account closures in the United States

•       What journalists can do better when covering debanking cases, including the critical distinction between what a debanked individual knows and what they are speculating about

•       Practical steps individuals and business owners can take to protect themselves from financial exclusion

The episode reflects the core mission of Humanity in Journalism: to examine journalism not only at the level of what is reported, but at the level of consequence; what a story does to the people inside it, the institutions it touches, and the public policies it shapes.

About Nick Anthony

Nick Anthony is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives, where his work focuses on monetary policy, financial privacy, and the civil liberties implications of financial regulation. He is the author of Digital Currency or Digital Control: Decoding the CBDC and the Future of Money, a fellow at the Human Rights Foundation, and the maintainer of the Human Rights Foundation's CBDC tracker, which documents central bank digital currency development globally. Anthony has testified before Congress and his work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, and numerous other publications.

About Humanity in Journalism

Humanity in Journalism is a podcast from The Media Integrity Project that examines the decisions behind journalism that rarely make it into the story itself and how a journalist thinks through a piece, what they weigh, whose voice they center, and whether they stop to consider the lived consequences for the people they write about. The podcast features open, reflective conversations with journalists, policy experts, and the people inside the stories, exploring how reporting choices shape narratives and lives.

New episodes release every other Tuesday. Humanity in Journalism is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Learn more at humanityinjournalism.com.