7/13/2023 0 Comments Rebecca jarvis![]() ![]() Growing up, Jarvis had her eye on a journalism career, partly because it was the family business-her mother, Gail MarksJarvis, is a personal finance columnist for the Chicago Tribune-but she wasn’t sure it would work out. And if things don’t add up, you need to keep pressing.” “I think it’s also really important that even when somebody offers an audacious goal to the world, the kind of goal that we all want to support, you still have to ask questions. “For me it drives home the value of always asking questions and always pursuing the truth,” Jarvis says. ![]() But as a reporter, she’s less drawn to understanding Holmes as a person than she is to understanding the larger implications of the company’s implosion. “People still feel that she’s an enigma,” Jarvis says. ![]() The opacity of Holmes’s psychology and motivation is part of why Jarvis thinks the Theranos story has become a phenomenon, spawning multiple books, podcasts, and film projects. (Beth Dubber/©Hulu/Courtesy Everett Collection) But she was impressed by creator Elizabeth Meriwether’s approach, which involved reinterviewing many of Jarvis’s sources and trying to understand why Holmes did what she did.Īmanda Seyfried as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the television adaptation of Rebecca Jarvis’s (AB’03) podcast The Dropout. Jarvis, who served as an executive producer on the show, didn’t know what to expect when Hollywood came calling to adapt her reporting. This spring The Dropout became a TV miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes. Jarvis aired the revelatory 2017 deposition with the Securities and Exchange Commission in which Holmes finally admitted under oath that many of Theranos’s claims about its technology were untrue. While the broad arc of Theranos’s rise and fall was already common knowledge when The Dropout premiered, the podcast brought new texture to the story. The latest episodes cover Holmes’s and coconspirator Sunny Balwani’s fraud convictions. The Dropout, over the course of 27 episodes to date, follows Holmes from Stanford University freshman to billionaire entrepreneur to disgraced ex-CEO. In 2019 Jarvis finally did put out a story on Theranos-though probably not the one anyone had originally envisioned-in the form of a podcast. Jarvis, AB’03, occasionally found herself wondering whether the attention was justified: “I mean, if you want to call it Spidey sense-it was one of those things where you just think, there has to be something more here.” Over the next two years, that much-hyped start-up, Theranos, and its charismatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes, became media darlings. At the time, “it wasn’t a gigantic red flag, but it was a reason we ended up not covering it on World News.” “I couldn’t find anybody independent to tell me that it worked or to explain it to me,” recalls Jarvis, the chief business, technology, and economics correspondent for ABC. Intrigued, Jarvis started looking into the company. ![]() The company’s supposedly revolutionary technology promised to upend the blood testing industry, making the process easier and cheaper for patients. Nearly a decade ago, journalist Rebecca Jarvis was working on a series about health care costs for ABC World News with Diane Sawyer when she got a pitch about a buzzy new Silicon Valley start-up. ![]()
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