Abstract
Dean Starkman starts with a premise: accountability journalism is the mother’s milk of the journalism industry and needed to ensure a healthy democracy. His message resonates loudly and clearly in this book that is must-reading for students aspiring to be investigative or business reporters.
Starkman uses the financial collapse from the 2000s to illustrate how a variety of factors contributed to America’s leading newsrooms and journalists failing to grasp the enormity of the interconnected banking, lending, and mortgage crises. The combined effect was a public left unaware of the depth of the scandalous problem. Many of them lost their homes and their jobs in the washout.
Starkman suggests that the Bush administration’s disdain for government regulation of business is a convenient factor to cite in explaining why the crises happened. Yes, President George W. Bush did neuter the oversight agencies that could have stepped in and prevented the collapse that took the American economy with it. But Starkman also notes that the massive layoffs, resignations, and firings in newsrooms small and especially large guaranteed that fewer journalists were doing what they could have been doing—digging. Furthermore, he adds that the lust for “clicks” as newsrooms began adopting digital-first mentalities contributed to journalists needing to chase stories that valued eyes over minds. Saying that, he acknowledges that in the run up to the collapse—2000 to 2003—journalism did a fine job of detailing what was happening in the financial industry. But from 2004 to 2006, encompassing some of the worst loan practices that would soon become evident, accountability journalism took a backseat to stories fawning over corporate executives, chasing the latest rumors, and reacting to stock price fluctuations. By the time journalists got back to digging in 2007, the seeds of the disaster had been planted and were about to be harvested.
Lest you think Starkman is letting President Bush’s successor off the hook, he notes that President Obama and his attorney general “must bear primary responsibility” for the failure to criminally prosecute anyone connected to what took place in the financial industry (p. 288). That absence of holding someone responsible added to the public’s perception that the country’s elite political and business people were somehow above the law.
What is accountability journalism? It is “The Great Story” that can trace its roots to the muckraking era of more than 100 years ago, and through to the mythical early 1970s Washington Post reporting on the Nixon administration. It holds those in power responsible for what they have done wrong, it uncovers the corruption linked to them, and it points the finger of guilt to wherever and at whomever it should be. It is also a lengthy process that requires news managers give the reporter time and resources.
Not to be forgotten, according to Starkman, is that the public demands accountability reporting with multiple polls in two decades after Watergate finding that public recognized the importance of “The Great Story.”
Corruption must be uncovered because it “coddles incompetence, discourages achievement, and wrecks markets. Ultimately, it undermines the legitimacy of any system that tolerates it” (p. 33). In Starkman’s mind, that was true when Ida Tarbell was writing about Standard Oil, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were reporting about Watergate, and it should have been true in the mid-2000s. The integrity of the journalism industry suffered in its absence. More ominously, Americans suffered.
Accountability journalism differs from access journalism, which can be boiled down to a simple phrase—it is the news of the day because “important” players do something. Starkman does not suggest that access reporting is bad; rather, he takes to task companies, such as News Corp. and Gannett, that wantonly disembowel the long-form journalism associated with accountability reporting in favor of a non-stop and often intellectually vacant style connected with access journalism.
The newspaper industry is not alone in overindulging in access reporting when it comes to business. Starkman provides a litany of complaints against CNBC, which grew in importance in the minds of many Americans as they invested more and more heavily into the stock market. They were interested in the amount of money in their portfolios and in learning more about the men and women who ran the companies in which they were invested. CNBC’s often chummy interviews with corporate leaders; a graphics-driven approach that showed the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 change in real time; and a breaking-news philosophy ensured that the audience could track their stocks much like they could their favorite sports team. And when stocks went up, people felt as if they were winning and they wanted to see their team (the companies they had stock in) succeed in front of their eyes second by second.
Starkman states, “CNBC-ized news is characterized by two traits: a focus on insider, investor-focused news and speed” (p. 154). And although it seemed like a fun ride when stocks were going up, “(t)he granular, insider approach and the focus on incremental news development instead of the larger forces driving events would . . . do CNBC’s viewers little good . . . on the eve of the mortgage crisis” (p. 155). A “dangerously distorted view of reality” helped no one (p. 161).
In sum, investigative journalism and accountability reporting could have been done—in fact, should have continued to be done—during the worst of the financial crisis. But politics and a corporate approach that undervalued investigative journalism and overvalued Internet clicks ensured that the public did not receive what it should have.
Richly researched and wonderfully written, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark is a book you need to get your hands on if you care about the future of journalism.