The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman
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The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman
Read Online and Download Ebook The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman
In this sweeping, incisive post mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He locates the roots of the problem in the origin of business news as a market messaging service for investors in the early twentieth century. This access-dependent strain of journalism was soon opposed by the grand, sweeping work of the muckrakers. Propelled by the innovations of Bernard Kilgore, the great postwar editor of the Wall Street Journal, these two genres merged when mainstream American news organizations institutionalized muckraking in the 1960s, creating a powerful guardian of the public interest. Yet as the mortgage era dawned, deep cultural and structural shifts―some unavoidable, some self-inflicted―eroded journalism's appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006.
Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches―access reporting and accountability reporting―which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls "CNBCization," and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite.
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman - Amazon Sales Rank: #606663 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.70" h x .90" w x 5.60" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman From Booklist Where was the business press, that part of the media presumably most in tune to American banking and commerce, when the financial crisis of 2008 was brewing? Why didn’t more business reporters sound the alarms? Journalist and media scholar Starkman draws a parallel between the recent crisis and that of 1929, when the business press was similarly myopic in its perspective. Starkman traces the early history of the business press, detailing the economic and social forces that resulted in the development of two different approaches, accountability and access. The early muckraking strain of journalism carried into the 1960s as the two approaches merged for a while, and the media took on the role of watchdog. Starkman details the impact of the trends of corporatism and growth of the Internet on American journalism and how the media lost sight of its role as watchdog just as the mortgage crisis began to unravel the financial sector. With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy. --Vanessa Bush
Review
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark, given its in-depth analysis across the landscape, steeped in history, and Starkman's keen understanding of the business of journalism, can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.
(Alec Klein, director of the Medill Justice Project and award-winning investigative reporter formerly with the Washington Post)
Starkman is literally a reporter's reporter. As such, he gets to the bottom of the story of how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years until it was too late, and he does so with prose that is intelligent, engaging, and erudite. I recommend The Watchdog without reservation.
(Eric Alterman, Brooklyn College, and media columnist, The Nation)
Here is the missing piece in the financial-crisis mystery: how did our vaunted business-journalism sector manage to miss the problem with mortgage-backed investments? The answer, as Dean Starkman shows us in this amazing autopsy, is that the business outweighs the journalism and that it is getting worse, not better, as we go forward.
(Thomas Frank, author of Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right)
Journalism was complicit in the predation and corruption that brought down world financial markets and wrecked the lives of millions. Obsessed with shallow scoops, giddy from the laughing gas of access, financial journalists abjectly failed to connect dots, and left abusive, reckless, and criminal corporations free to drag the global economy into the abyss. Dean Starkman is the author we have been waiting for to tell this story. He not only puts forward a keen, subtle, and fair account of the journalistic default, he names names.
(Todd Gitlin, author of Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives)
With American journalism at sea, here comes a navigator who really knows its mission, the riptides it is facing, and the ports it must reach. Starkman tells it all with the heart, clarity, and dry wit that redeem business journalism even while showing how it lost its anchor and compass.
(Jim Sleeper, former editor and columnist at Newsday and the New York Daily News)
Journalists did not miss the subprime lending that spun into the devastating financial collapse of 2008. Excellent reporting was available, from the Financial Times to the Los Angeles Times to a small alternative publication, Southern Exposure. Yet Dean Starkman shows that even reporters who were on top of things buried the lead: the story was not new financial instruments, risky investments, or high-pressured Wall Street. The story was corruption. There were old-fashioned, greedy villains. Old-fashioned moralizing was called for. It would have had the advantage of being both true and fascinating. So how did so many fine journalists miss the big story? Read Starkman's powerful and disturbing analysis of how business journalism came to write for an audience of investors, not citizens. You may not share his every judgment, but this account has the advantage of being both true and fascinating.
(Michael Schudson, Columbia Journalism School, author of The Power of News)
As fair and balanced as a solar-plexus punch can be.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.
(Booklist)
Compelling... Starkman offers an excellent and clear theoretical explanation for some of the problems with watchdog journalism generally.
(International Journal of Communication)
Detailed and fully satisfying...
(Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books)
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark adds greatly to our understanding of business journalism and the country's most recent financial meltdown. Starkman writes that it is intended for lay readers, but journalism students and historians will find much value here as well.
(H-Net)
About the Author
Dean Starkman is based in New York and covers Wall Street as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. A reporter for two decades, he worked for eight years as a Wall Street Journal staff writer and was chief of the Providence Journal's investigative unit. He has won numerous national and regional journalism awards and helped lead the Providence Journal to the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations.
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Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful. The Big Short Meets All the President's Men By takingadayoff Where were the Woodward and Bernstein of the financial meltdown? Why did a crisis that was a decade or more in the making, not make the news until it was too late? Dean Starkman asks where the watchdogs were and why weren't they barking like crazy until after the crash.There are no simple answers. In the first part of the book, Starkman looks at the last century of reporting. The first major investigative reporting, or muckraking, of the 20th century was in 1903 when Ida Tarbell broke the Standard Oil antitrust story. There were other stories between that and Watergate, and a few since then. But the reader gets the impression that these were exceptions in journalism and that the norm was the cozy relationship between JFK and the press, for instance, and the self-censorship that reporters employ during wartime and other times of perceived crisis.Startkman points out that not all journalism has to be investigative to be good. There is accountabilty reporting, which is investigative reporting by another name, and access reporting, which is cultivating sources to get leads. Although that sounds like the opposite of reporting, Starkman points out that both types are vital. He points to a recent-ish example of access reporting getting the scoop -- when a friendly reporter asked presidential candidate John McCain how many houses he had and McCain couldn't remember, that was as revealing a tidbit as any undercover reporter searching for scandals could have dug up.So, why no Tarbells and Woodwards on the financial beat in 2007? Starkman points out that there were reporters telling many parts of the crisis story, but that the changing nature of news media was partly to blame for keeping the reports to a dribble rather than gushing forth. The reaction of print media to the internet meant news staffs were being cut and the remaining reporters had to do twice as much work. Newspapers and magazines, both digital and print, felt the need to increase output of content, faster. More stories, shorter stories, quicker stories, and less time and money for long term projects resulting in long-form stories.Starkman finds plenty of villains and heroes in financial crisis reporting, and he saves his most scathing comments for Rupert Murdoch, who bought the Wall Street Journal in 2007, and whose ideal newspaper is the (U.K.) Daily Mail, an entertaining (in small doses) paper that deals in gossip and sensationalistic stories that are completely fact-free.The Watchdog That Didn't Bark gets into the financial weeds as well as the journalism details. You can't breeze through this book, but once you read it, you'll never read a newspaper the same way again.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. What Was the Business Press Doing Before the Meltdown? By Peter Richardson Dean Starkman's new book addresses the business press's failure to warn of the most catastrophic financial crisis in eighty years. His analysis leaves little doubt that beat reporters were focusing on the wrong things, responding to the wrong incentives, and writing the wrong kind of stories for their work to perform its watchdog role.Starkman stages his analysis deliberately. Almost half the book is a history of American business reporting and capsule biographies of its most notable practitioners, including Charles Dow, Edward Jones, Clarence Barron, and B.C. Forbes. Starkman also traces the history of investigative reporting, giving pride of place to Ida Tarbell's muckraking stories on Standard Oil during the Progressive Era.Along the way, Starkman introduces a distinction between what he calls access and accountability journalism. Access reporting, which is relatively quick and easy to produce, focuses on business stories that help investors reach their financial goals. Orthodox in its assumptions about markets, it relies heavily on scoops from major players and tends to portray them positively. Accountability reporting, in contrast, may target those movers and shakers in an effort to expose mischief. Its audience isn't investors but the public at large, and its sources are more likely to be disgruntled employees, customers, or competitors. Accountability reporting is slow, expensive, and risky. It often embarrasses important people and makes continued access to them difficult. Occasionally, it creates legal challenges for the news organizations that produce it. For all these reasons, accountability journalism is easy to cut or forego, but it's the only kind of reporting that could have prevented the fraud and negligence that cratered the global economy.Starkman argues that both kinds of journalism are necessary, but only one is in danger of extinction. The business world will always have its access reporting, which targets a motivated audience and is profitable to produce. But far from exposing faulty lending practices and unregulated derivatives trading, that reporting effectively masked those problems with its business-as-usual approach.Starkman has made an important contribution to our understanding of America's media ecology. There's more work to do, starting with the journalists themselves. Felix Salmon, a financial blogger at Reuters, has defended the business press's failure to warn the public of the financial meltdown. "If you want public-interest journalism, if you want to interest the public, you don't want to put it in the business section," Salmon said. "The business section is the first section that they throw away." Perhaps Salmon is right that the business press should remain a watchdog-free zone. If so, Dean Starkman's work can be safely ignored.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Great Insight Into the Press Coverage of Wall Street By Christine S. Richard The Watchdog That Didn't Bark gives readers a sweeping history of how financial journalists have covered (or not covered) everything from the rise of Standard Oil to the tottering housing and derivatives markets that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Ultimately, this engaging book is an examination of a singular issue -- the tension between so-called "access" journalism and "accountability" or investigative reporting. It's an important topic and one that Starkman is in a unique position to analyze as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who went on to write about financial journalism for the Columbia Journalism Review. If Starkman hadn't written this book, it's hard to believe anyone else would have tackled the topic; critiquing your peers and your profession may be the ultimate in "accountability" reporting. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to understand what drives the press coverage of Wall Street.
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The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman
The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia Journalism Review Books), by Dean Starkman
