New book to examine biz journalism role in crisis

A new book will be published early next year from Columbia Journalism Review‘s Dean Starkman that will examine why the financial media failed to uncover the economic crisis before it happened.

The book will be called “The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism,” and it will be published by Columbia University Press.

In the book, Starkman travels back to the early 20th century and juxtaposes the work of reporters against other forms of journalism, particuarly muckraking. These two genres merged when mainstream American news organizations institutionalized muckracking in the 1960s and created a powerful watchdog over the public interest.

For many reasons, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process Starkman calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examine risky, even frankly corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused instead on profiling executives and informing investors. This is why, Starkman argues, that mostly outside reporters picked up on the brewing mortgage crisis while insiders failed to connect the dots.

Starkman concludes with a critique of digital-news ideology and corporate infuence, which threatens to further undermine investigative reporting, and shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite.

“A defining trait of the financial crisis was the degree to which it took the public, and the press itself, by surprise,” said Starkman in an email to Talking Biz News. ” The failure was so big, so catastrophic, and so comprehensive that all aspects of the financial system must be called into question, the journalism that covers it very much included. How could so many, covering something so closely, miss something so big so completely? Why did a few, mostly outside the mainstream, get it?”