Journalism and the CNBC effect

Steve Waldman of Washington Monthly reviews Dean Starkman‘s book “The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism.”

Waldman writes, “Starkman spends most of his time analyzing the output of newspapers and magazines, and while he mocks CNBC, he largely ignores network and local TV news (still the sources of news for most Americans), NPR, Fox Business Network, and, for that matter, major providers of digital news such as Huffington Post or Yahoo! He probably figured they were inconsequential players in this drama, and that in and of itself deserves mention.

“And I wanted to know: In the few cases when reporters did write the stories critical of financial giants, why didn’t those stories explode on the public scene? Some interviews with the big-time business editors might have shed more light on why they ignored the growing evidence.

“The digital world is supposed to be able to take great stories—whether they’re in a small hamlet or New York City—and bring them to massive audiences. Why didn’t that happen? To some extent it’s because the 2004-2006 collapse predated the Twitter explosion and the rise of BuzzFeed, Upworthy, and other online news sources that are focused on accelerating virality. Starkman’s contempt for the digital evangelist types, aggregators, and other newfangled media is unfortunate, and may have blinded him to the profoundly important role that this new amplification system could play in accountability reporting of future scandals.

“But we’ll never know: Would those same stories have gotten more traction now because of this new amplification sector? Or would they have been crowded out by lists of ‘Betty White and Animals’ or ‘Cats Who Think They’re Sushi’?”

Read more here.