Criminal elite and presumption of guilt

The criminal elite who stole their wealth and used it to take a place atop society have a disadvantage when it comes to the press and the public: They suffer from the presumption of guilt. When the press accuses them unjustly of something, no one makes a big deal out of it, because we all assume they're guilty of something else anyway. When MFD wrote yesterday that the wife of little ODS godfather Pavel Dlouhý received suspicious payments from a fishery, no one (including MFD) worried much about the facts. Jan Macháček of Respekt even said the couple should be arrested on the spot. But then today MFD provided additional information suggesting that Dlouhý was not so dumb after all as to direct illegal payments into his own wife's bank account. Everything was aboveboard, he said, and technically it probably was. But we all know he's guilty of something else anyway. And he knows we know it, so he won't file a libel case, because that would merely call more unwanted attention to his completely legal financial transactions.