Charles Fishman is the author of The Wal-Mart Effect. He is an investigative journalist who has devoted his career to examining, understanding, and explaining large corporations and their impact on the American and global economies. Fishman was educated at Harvard University and has written for and worked as an editor at The Washington Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the News & Observer, and Fast Company magazine. He won the Gerald Loeb Award for his investigation into and reporting on Wal-Mart for The Wal-Mart Effect.

Fishman employs multiple tonal registers throughout The Wal-Mart Effect. He incorporates his first-person point of view into his reportage in order to humanize himself as an author and journalist and to engender trust with his reader. However, Fishman doesn’t solely rely upon his point of view when presenting his findings. Instead, Fishman at times employs a more removed, analytical stance in order to present complex statistical data or economic analytics. At other times still, Fishman allows his authorial identity and lens to slip to the margins of the page in order to create room for his subjects’ stories. In these ways, he marries a range of tonal registers in order to present well-rounded, comprehensive information and to allow his reader to make their own conjectures about his journalistic findings.