NRJ Book Review: The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism

Abstract

Dean Starkman, The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (New York: Columbia Journalism Review Books, 2014). Hardcover, 368 pages, $24.95Review by Marc EdgeDean Starkman has arguably emerged as one of the most incisive contemporary analysts of the news media business through his articles in the Columbia Journalism Review. As editor of CJR's business news section The Audit, he has trenchantly dissected some of journalism's most pressing modern issues. His article in 2010 pointed to the do-more-with-less meme sweeping the news business as a result of the recent recession and a growing first focus. The following year, he caused no small amount of consternation with his article Confidence Game, which outed what he called the Future of News (FON) consensus. He argues that the digital gurus pushing the FON consensus, mostly Big Apple academics, have played right into the hands of an increasingly corporate media ownership by justifying reckless and unnecessary cuts in newsroom staffing and thus marginalizing reporting in the public interest. Best of all, Starkman's analysis is usually delivered in a freewheeling, rollicking style, more so in his magazine articles than in his new book, The Watchdog That Didn't Bark, which is written in a more straight-forward, restrained style. In it, Starkman combines the Hamster Wheel and FON perspectives by examining how business journalism failed to investigate and hold accountable Wall Street banks and sub-prime mortgage lenders in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. He does so by counterpoising the accountability reporting pioneered by muckrakers, whose journalism reined in the robber barons a century ago, with the access reporting more typical today, as exemplified by what he calls the CNBCization of business news. What journalism was able to do in 1903 it could not muster in 2003, Starkman writes. And that's tragic.CNBC is hardly the sole culprit in the demise of accountability reporting on business, according to Starkman. He takes a methodically historical approach in showing how the Wall Street Journal, from its founding in 1889 by Charles Dow and Edward Jones, ebbed and flowed from access reporting to accountability reporting and back again. Its purchase in 1902 by Clarence Barron led to some of the worst journalistic excesses of the Roaring '20s,and its newsroom corruption even became a subject of post-crash Senate hearings. Bernard Kilgore helped revive the Journal's fortunes as managing editor in the 1940s by emphasizing narrative journalism, and this long-form accountability reporting set the industry standard for decades. Since its purchase by Rupert Murdoch in 2007, however, the Journal has fallen back into mostly access reporting, according to Starkman, with a focus on merger and acquisition scoops at the expense of the investigative journalism, loudly disdained by its new proprietor. …