Grace Panetta is the journalist for these times

Business Insider political reporter’s work cuts through the noise when the noise is strongest

Since the start of the previous calendar year, America has witnessed an attempted overthrow of an incoming Administration and contentious political moments over issues like voting rights, the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic future of America.

I’ll be the first to admit that watching or reading political journalism typically raises my anxiety level, and this is especially true regarding cable news. I’m often reminded of a 2018 TEDx Talk that former professional wrestling promoter Eric Bischoff gave about some rather interesting similarities between the news media and professional wrestling.

My news diet consists mostly of CNN, local and network news from each of the three full local news operation stations in my area (as I live in the Champaign-Springfield, Illinois DMA, these are CBS affiliate WCIA, NBC affiliate WAND, and ABC affiliate WICS), left-wing websites like DailyKos and Jacobin magazine’s website, local newspapers in my area, and online news outlets like HuffPost and Business Insider. You’re probably thinking, given the rest of my media diet, how Business Insider ended up in my news diet, but they have an awesome political reporter named Grace Panetta.

A few days ago, Business Insider published Panetta’s article about how the U.S. Congress could insert itself into potential challenges to this year’s midterm election results. I encourage everyone to read the entire article, but Panetta did an excellent job including past examples of Congress involving itself in contested elections of its own members and explaining how challenges to contested U.S. House and U.S. Senate races in Congress work.

The article about challenges to election results in Congress that Panetta wrote is just one example of her thoughtful, in-depth style of journalism. There’s this article by Panetta and Sonam Sheth about a draft executive order by Donald Trump in the final weeks of his presidency that would have authorized the Armed Forces to seize voting machines used in the 2020 presidential election, in which Joe Biden defeated Trump; Trump never issued the executive order in question. There are many other articles that Panetta has written that are must-reads, and I’ve bookmarked the Business Insider page containing Panetta’s articles, although I reached my free five-article-per-month limit while writing this story. I also follow Panetta on Twitter, and she is one of the nicest journalists on Twitter.

If there were more journalists like Grace Panetta, society would be far better off.