It is a historical reference going back to the three "estates" of the British Parliament — clergy, nobility and commoners. Terming the press the "Fourth Estate" is attributed to the statesman Edmund Burke, who supposedly used it in 1787 when journalists were first allowed to cover debates in the House of Commons.
Now a new book by an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review accuses the press, and specifically the business press, of failing in its duty to alert the public to the abuses in the financial markets that led to the traumatic crisis that began in 2008 and is still with us.
The book, The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism by Dean Starkman, details the consequences of a press asleep at the switch.
"What happens is the public is left in the dark about and powerless against complex problems that overtake important national institutions," Starkman writes. "In this case, the complex problem was the corruption of the U.S. financial system."
In the aftermath of the crisis, the press has taken turns blaming everyone — lawmakers, regulators, governments, bankers, mortgage lenders, and the borrowers themselves — while letting itself off the hook.
Starkman draws on a study he did at CJR of nine major business news outlets to look into this failure. The years leading up to the crisis, 2004 to 2006, showed the biggest gap: "Missing are investigative stories that directly confront powerful institutions about basic business practices while those institutions were still powerful."
Top 5 Growth Companies To Own For 2015
The author does credit the business press for following the lead of active regulators in warning of the dangers of predatory lending in 2000 to 2003, but he says th! ey subsequently missed the "radicalization" of financial markets through the growth of derivatives and other changes.
Starkman attributes this in part to the financial difficulties that many media organizations were feeling as they coped with the impact of the Internet.
But he also attributes it to the growing importance of the "scoop" as stodgy print publications attempted to keep up with digital innovators like Bloomberg, saying it came at the expense of the longer, investigative pieces that enabled newspapers in the past to step back and look at the bigger picture.
Media became focused on "access journalism" rather than "accountability journalism," Starkman says, typified by the grinding coverage of the CNBC cable television network, but now part of most every news organization.
The worst part of all this, in Starkman's view, is that the lack of self-criticism in missing the biggest story on its beat in decades has prevented any reform in the media.
"Indeed, mainstream business news generally moved on from the greatest business story in several generations with, it is fair to say, stunning complacency and few backward glances to determine exactly where it fit into the system that had so recently collapsed," the author says.
One result of this persistent myopia regarding the institutions they cover is that the press has been complicit in "perpetuating the pernicious myth that borrowers — particularly minority borrowers — drove the system to crisis."
It is hard, Starkman acknowledges, for the press to engage in accountability reporting when law enforcement officials from Attorney General Eric Holder on down have failed to prosecute a single individual for the rampant fraud that led to the crisis. Only indictments, he says, can "change a narrative."
An old newspaper hand, Starkman sees the future of accountability reporting in the same "Great Story" — the long-form investigative piece — that marked its greatest successes in the past. Most of the ! substanti! ve business reporting, he says, still comes from legacy news media, despite the rise of bloggers and news aggregators on the Web.
Blogger David Dayen, however, takes Starkman to task in an American Prospect article about his book for underestimating the accomplishments and potential of digital media.
"While the Internet 'presents severe structural barriers to accountability reporting,' as Starkman writes, it also presents potential breakthroughs," Dayen says. "Instead of long-form journalism that bundles months of reporting into one shot, there's value in incremental, iterative reporting that releases each detail as it's gathered, breaks down complex material into digestible chunks and furthers the narrative for months, even years."
Dayen's view gains credence from the blistering criticism by Starkman himself for the corporatism that continues to steer traditional media away from public-service journalism.
As the remaining "estates" — legislators, regulators, and government officials — grapple with the consequences of the financial crisis through the Dodd-Frank financial reform act and other measures, it is important for the Fourth Estate, too, to come to terms with its past and future roles in keeping the public informed. Starkman's critical look provides a good starting point.
Darrell Delamaide has reported on business and economics from New York, Paris, Berlin and Washington for Dow Jones news service, Barron's, Institutional Investor and Bloomberg News service, among others. He is the author of four books, including the financial thriller Gold.
No comments:
Post a Comment