Alain de Botton,The News: A User’s Manual;Dean Starkman,The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism

Reviewed by: Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

In origins, tone, focus, even format, these books might appear too dissimilar for a shared discussion. One is rooted in the empiricism of journalism and the sensibility of the social sciences, the other in prosaic conundrums explored with the impressionism of poetry. One relates cautionary tales about institutions and individuals producing the news, while the other purports to proffer a helping hand to the baffled news consumer. One author is an experienced hard-nosed newsman, the other a much-lauded stylist who writes on subjects ranging from philosophy and religion to architecture and travel. One book takes the familiar physical form of an octavo tome (this one 6-by-9 inches), sure to fit snugly in a shelf of typical dimensions; the other, neat and squat, with its studied layout, sprinkling of illustrative photos, font variations and other visual devices, invites the reader to look and hold.

The easiest justification for a paired review is that both works pertain to journalism and each is masterful in its own way. Yet beneath the obvious differences run some parallel purposes and convictions. Both books turn a critical lens on standard protocols of contemporary journalism; each articulates expectations for news that go well beyond satisfying curiosity or sustaining an industry; and each argues for alternatives to conventions that fail to serve those higher goals. Ultimately, both convey the message that that the news doesn’t have to be the way it is; there are better ways, some even tried and tested, others perhaps aspirational but, in the views of the authors, absolutely feasible.

Dean Starkman, author of The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, has an impressive newspaper background that includes reporting for the Wall Street Journal, tracking financial news for Columbia Journalism Review, and editing the annual anthology The Best Business Writing. After years as a media critic, he recently returned to reporting about Wall Street and finance for the Los Angeles Times. His book examines business reporting in the United States from the 19th century through the 2008 fiscal collapse in meticulous but never superfluous and often riveting detail. Roughly the first half illuminates historical trends, pioneers, and pivotal moments in the field, and the second half scrutinizes antecedents, repercussions, and coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis—spotlighting individual journalists whose efforts revealed systemic corruption in the financial system through a ruinous run of veritable piracy, while indicting the business press writ large for mostly getting things wrong when they mattered most.

The concern for one category—business news—might seem narrow, but in fact The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark is an expansive tour de force that goes far beyond dissecting a particular genre of news. Indeed, more successfully than any other work I can think of—and I’ve been inhaling studies of media and mass communication for a good four decades—this book melds thorough historical research, astute social science analysis, sharp-edged reporting, keen judgment, and lucid writing into a discerning chronicle of U.S. journalism culture that anyone who cares about serious news should read. A particular strength is the earnest engagement with social theory that journalists-turned-critics typically fail to understand and therefore spurn, misconstrue or elide; at the same time, the journalist-author’s fluency with the craft of factual storytelling ensures a truly compelling read.

Starkman finds Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory especially useful in understanding what he sees as the main fault line running through the development of professional American journalism—the tensions between what he calls “access” and “accountability” approaches to news. He documents how coverage of the big business stories of every era has swung between the two, sometimes vigorously exerting the watchdog function undergirding democracy, other times abdicating what he sees as journalism’s central responsibility to hold the powerful to account. He also emphasizes the necessity of accountability reporting while problems are building and underway; when it came to the subprime mortgage debacle, a great deal of journalistic understanding arrived as an aftermath rather than in mid-morass. However, Starkman highlights the exceptions—those canaries in the coal mine and a few brave yapping terriers—demonstrating ways he believes the business media overall should operate.

Scholars and pundits who proclaim that journalism’s progressive mission is inevitably doomed in today’s digital age might see Starkman’s plea for the high road as an old-fashioned exercise in nostalgia; but for those of us who still subscribe to that mission, it comes across as a clarion call to surmount the tendencies of our times and reinvent the best of traditions within a new context. He is not naïve about the difficulties of this quest, as access journalism has always been the path of least resistance, whereas accountability journalism requires time, resources, and dedication and entails risk and stress. But in Starkman’s view, the hard way is the only way—the whole point of journalism.

Although the latter half of the book is most germane to contemporary journalistic challenges, the historical retrospective is instructive as well. Starkman reaches back to the emergence of U.S. financial markets in the mid-19th century, largely due to the growth of the railroads, which called for a peculiar new type of specialization in the news. He explains how the exigencies of financial reporting, situated in a subculture with its own rules and language, and speaking mainly to and for elites, bred a perilous insularity, a tendency that persists to this day despite periodic countervailing movements.

The first significant challenges to this inward-looking order came from the muckrakers of the early 20th century, and here Starkman focuses on Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil as emblematic of the rise of accountability reporting. Yet the mainstream of business reporting still revolved around insider access until well into the 20th century. In this account, modern accountability reporting emerged in fits and starts, partly building on innovations introduced under Leslie Bernard Kilgore’s editorial reign at the Wall Street Journal in the decades following World War II. Kilgore advanced what Starkman describes as a “revolution,” deploying resources for in-depth reporting and valuing long-form narratives that made complex stories relevant and understandable and elevated the Journal from a minor publication into an indispensible read. As Watergate and other journalistic exposures helped push modern investigative methods into the main currents of U.S. reporting, the business press likewise expanded its investigative ambitions: If not consistently barking, it nevertheless showed capabilities of being an able watchdog. “By the time the mortgage era arrived after 2000, accountability reporting was a powerful, professional, independent, and, importantly, finally, mainstream tradition in American journalism,” Starkman writes (p. 137).

So where were the watchdog ethos and investigative activism during the subprime mortgage fiasco? What Starkman calls the “CNBCization” of financial reporting, characterized by an insider orientation and an intense emphasis on speed, intervened. Accompanying the dramatic expansion of stock market investing into America’s middle class in the 1990s, CNBC was among the most heralded of the new outlets, sections, and programs proliferating to meet a presumed need for more business coverage. The upsurge, misleadingly styled as the democratization of financial knowledge, actually worked more to obfuscate and camouflage. And just as new financial gimmicks were turning traditional banking on its head, political and economic forces were combining to vitiate government regulation—a necessary handmaiden, in Starkman’s view, that together with assertive journalism might have kept some of the financial system’s greed and venality in check. In the case of the Wall Street Journal, of course, new regimes and then the purchase by Rupert Murdoch helped demolish much of the aggressive long-form journalism on which that paper’s reputation once stood.

One way to explain the difference between the two divergent approaches to journalism, Starkman writes, “is that access reporting tells readers what powerful actors say while accountability reporting tells readers what they do” (p. 10). His overall indictment of business journalism for failing the accountability test over the past two decades is carefully qualified, and he reviews a great many cases of important work on the part of news outlets, teams, and individuals, but few rise to his highest standards. He singles out three journalists as exemplary—Mike Hudson, who worked for regional newspapers and as a freelancer, Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, and Richard Lord, reporter for an alternative paper in Pittsburgh. Working separately, in articles and books, the trio revealed systemic corruption in the mortgage chain, from predatory on-the-ground lending through arcane financial configurations that ultimately fed into global money markets. And they were able to do so, he concludes, because all three were very much outsiders in the traditional world of business journalism.

Book reviews necessarily oversimplify an author’s accomplishments; suffice it to say that Starkman’s book will leave any reader far the wiser and perhaps inspire and motivate young journalists hoping to do good work in a media landscape now swamped by the passing fancies, personalities, catastrophes, and trivialities of the moment. Alain de Botton’s The News: A User’s Manual has more mundane goals, promising to help all of us deal more intelligently with those dominant preoccupations of today’s never-ending gusher.

Yet de Botton, best known as the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life, also echoes Starkman in calling for distance and fresh eyes in unraveling the news. Noting that the news process itself renders the mechanics of journalism “almost invisible and therefore hard to question” (p. 11), he reminds us that news is not simply an unfiltered report but a crafted product involving judgments and priorities that consumers ought to question.

Organized around six categories of news—political, world, economic, celebrity, disaster, and consumer—The News thus would have us question how journalism helps create our political and social realities. As such, the book is a critique of news; unlike Starkman, however, whose driving impulse is to restore the centrality of accountability as a pillar of democracy, de Botton rides the impulse of self-fulfillment. The news, he suggests, should help enrich us and gratify our deepest needs.

To this end, he offers a succession of recommendations as to how news should be delivered and understood. Although he does not explicitly address news professionals, much of his advice would best be directed to producers of news. He says political news should do a better job of monitoring systemic ills, not just specific individuals who happen to hold power; global news should convey rich sensory experiences and humanize other nations and cultures; economic news must portray human realities and investigate milder alternatives to the harshness of prevailing market capitalism, while consumer news should direct us to acquisitions that actually contribute to a fulfilled existence.

As for the media user subjected to seemingly infinite supplies of largely random information, de Botton advocates drawing lessons at every opportunity. He makes an unusual argument on behalf of celebrity news, but of a different sort, that would call attention to mature role models whose examples encourage others to realize their own talents and foster our appreciation for kindness and respect. Disaster news, in his view, has a far more important function than pandering to vicarious interest; tragedies resulting from human misdeed Illustrate the common human propensity for bad and even brutal behavior, he says, while natural or serendipitous disasters remind us how close to the edge we live and thus compel us to cherish each moment. And sometimes, he says, we need to disconnect and get away from the news altogether.

These two works don’t exactly converge, but they complement each other nicely. The News assuages, with reassuring strategies designed to help ordinary folk cope. The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark enrages but also lays out a clear program of action for journalism professionals. Both are useful for classroom use at any level and also make for solid extra-curricular reading. Take them in either order.