How economics reporters can do a better job

Dean Starkman writes for Columbia Journalism Review about how economics reporters need to do a better job.

Starkman writes, “In our case, the story is about an economic discontent so profound that working-class and lower-income voters shifted in large numbers to the candidate under federal indictment for trying to overturn an election and who, the polls show and we can safely guess, was favored by many precisely because he was seen as the agent to overturn the system writ large.

“The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, makes the case for a shift to reporting on economic structures all the more urgent. I covered insurance’s response to Katrina. It’s an undercovered business. Nuanced coverage shifts us from a simplistic morality tale to a richer story about the broken incentives and systems that have stirred broad outrage at an entire industry.

“What would accountability reporting look like in our present time? What it always looks like: talking to outsiders, not insiders, reporting from the bottom up, not the top down, writing for the public, not elites, going deep, not fast, writing long, not short, and so on. We did it before. We can do it again.”

Read more here.