Watchdog That Didn't Bark (eBook)

The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism

Dean Starkman (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

2014
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-53628-8 (ISBN)

Infos

How mainstream business news failed its readers and what it means for the future of the profession.

---

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation).   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 examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that 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.   “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath   “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

Autor

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.

Inhalt

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Access and Accountability1. Ida Tarbell, Muckraking, and the Rise of Accountability Reporting2. Access and Messenger Boys: The Roots of Business News and the Birth of the Wall Street Journal3. Kilgore's Revolution at the Wall Street Journal: Rise of the Great Story4. Muckraking Goes Mainstream: Democratizing Financial and Technical Knowledge5. CNBCization: Insiders, Access, and the Return of the Messenger Boy6. Subprime Rises in the 1990s: Journalism and Regulation Fight Back7. Muckraking the Banks, 2000–2003: A Last Gasp for Journalism and Regulation8. Three Journalism Outsiders Unearth the Looming Mortgage Crisis9. The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Disappearance of Accountability Reporting and the Mortgage Frenzy, 2004–200610. Digitism, Corporatism, and the Future of Journalism: As the Hamster Wheel TurnsNotesBibliographyIndex

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.1.2014
• Reihe/Serie: Columbia Journalism Review Books
• Verlagsort: New York
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Kommunikation / Medien ► Journalistik
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Finanzwissenschaft
• ISBN-10: 0-231-53628-3 / 0231536283
• ISBN-13: 978-0-231-53628-8 / 9780231536288