Business journalism's image problem

Chrystia Freeland, the global editor at large for Reuters and a former top editor at the Financial Times, writes Saturday in the New York Times about what she sees as the problem in business journalism.

Freeland writes, “Lewis is ‘eternally grateful’ to his subjects for their cooperation. Sorkin, a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, is ‘truly grateful’ to his. One can imagine Blomkvist sputtering with rage, but you don’t have to be a fictional Scandinavian social democrat to wish that business journalism in the United States was more about afflicting the comfortable and less about cozying up to them. In the spring, the high priests of American journalism at the Columbia Journalism Review published a tough critique of Sorkin by Dean Starkman, who argued that ‘Too Big to Fail’ was on one side — the wrong side — in the ‘mini-struggle’ between ‘deal journalism and the work of accountability-oriented reporters.’

“That article rightly highlighted the important investigative work done by reporters with a ‘more confrontational approach,’ like Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta Jr., both of The Times, and Mark Pittman of Bloomberg News, who wrote a 2007 series predicting the collapse of the banking sector. But the bigger, more complicated truth about the financial crisis is that it wasn’t caused by evil businessmen. The overarching story is one of systemic failure, not individual wrongdoing. It wasn’t the Bernie Madoffs who plunged the world into recession. It was low capital requirements, weak limits on leverage, over-the-counter traded derivatives, soft rules on mortgage lending and global financial imbalances.

“If your attention wandered as you read that list of abstract terms, you are not alone. A growing body of cognitive research is demonstrating something schoolteachers and entertainers have known for a long time: Most of us respond better to personal stories than to impersonal numbers and ideas.”

Read more here.