Why are business journalists biased against business?

James McCarthy writes for The National Review that business journalists should not be biased against companies.

McCarthy writes, “Nowhere is this unholy alliance more obvious than on the business page. In what other section are journalists so uniformly filled with animosity toward the subjects they claim to cover objectively? An arts writer who despised film and music, or a sportswriter who loathed football and golf would register as odd if not unfit. But anyone who has interacted with them can tell you that most business writers are steeped in progressive worldviews intrinsically hostile to markets and predisposed to government regulation and control.

“That could be because most have never worked in corporate America, nor studied economics beyond an undergraduate survey. Journalism and other liberal-arts departments at the universities that stock our press corps are dominated by faculty with an anti-market animus manifestly transmitted to their students. As a consequence, few business writers display any understanding of the motivations or worldviews of the people who drive private enterprise.

“The result is coverage in which any perceived market failure yields a predictable consensus around a set of supposed bad actors with malignant influence who must be stopped via regulatory or legal intervention.”

Read more here. COMMENT: I’ve been teaching business journalism for 20 years now, and I always tell my students that I am pro-business. What I don’t like are companies that rip off consumers, hurt their employees, and are scams.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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James McCarthy says:
December 1, 2020 at 9:34 am
Kind thanks for sharing the piece, Chris. I'm a longtime reader of your blog and you may recall we dialogued years ago when I was helping several clients during the Spitzer wars and media obsessions over executive compensation. Lots to kick around on this topic of course, so please count me in if there's ever opportunity or forum in your work to do so. Best, Jim