Wall Street Journal falls short in covering economic crisis

Dean Starkman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, writes Wednesday that the paper’s performance in covering the current economic crisis leaves something to be desired.

Starkman writes, “Senior Journal leadership may dismiss this idea, but at least a few among the rank-and-file have expressed to me a gnawing sense that paper has buried itself in the weeds of this unprecedented financial story and lost sight of the big picture. That’s certainly my view: its coverage is too incremental, overly geared toward those already in the know, and too willing to trade arms-length scrutiny for access. At this point, for instance, the paper isn’t so much as covering the Treasury Department as channeling it.

“The problems are two-fold, as I see them. The paper’s leadership has not shown the vision needed to stop, take a deep breath, and take control of the narrative. Absent has been an effort to explain in a coherent way what just happened — how a few publicly traded companies managed to siphon a trillion dollars from the U.S. Treasury and tip the world into recession — and who is to blame.

“Let’s put this part on Murdoch and his top editor, Robert Thomson. Sending the staff to chase news like so many hamsters on a wheel is not the same as editing a great newspaper. Neither is festooning page one with the news everyone else already has. The net result is that much great work is lost in the news gusher.

“But this is not all about Murdoch, not by a long shot. Old Journal formulas — inside-the-boardroom narratives — seem anachronistic now. Old rules — not revisiting a topic once it has been “doneâ€? in a single story — should be irrelevant. I wonder, too, if the Journal’s general we-don’t-rake-muck attitude quite fits the moment.”

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