When the watchdog didn't bark

One of the primary functions of journalism is to serve the public by holding accountable those in power who may be harming the public. But sometimes that watchdog function fails, as it did in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008.

That, at least, is the contention of Dean Starkman in “The Great Story” (Columbia Journalism Review, January/ February). The article is an excerpt from his new book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press).

What happens when the watchdog doesn’t bark, when journalism doesn’t do its job of holding accountable those in power, Starkman writes, is that “the public is left in the dark about, and powerless against, complex problems that overtake important national institutions.”

In this case, “10 million Americans uprooted by foreclosure with even more still threatened, 23 million unemployed or underemployed, whole communities set back a generation, shocking bailouts for the perpetrators, political polarization here and instability abroad.”

The business press had produced many stories, but they failed to take on the institutions that brought down the financial system.

To help understand how and why this happened, Starkman looks at two kinds of reporting, what he calls “accountability reporting” and “access reporting.” He draws up a list comparing them (see below).

Access                                                  Accountability

fast                                                        slow

short                                                     long

elite sources                                      dissident sources

top-down                                            bottom-up

quantity                                               quality

investor                                               public

niche                                                     mass

functionalistic                                    moralistic

Access reporting gets inside information from powerful people and institutions and is geared toward investors.

Accountability reporting seeks to explain what those powerful people do and is geared toward the public. It explains complex problems to a mass audience and holds the powerful to account.

Such explaining takes time and is long, which doesn’t go over well with who want their stories quick and short.

In January, a woman who formed an organization to fight human trafficking spoke at my church. She was inspired to begin her work after reading an investigative report in the Wichita Eagle about a 13-year-old girl who was enslaved by a pimp.

I pointed out to her that without that newspaper devoting funds to “accountability reporting,” she would not have read that story.

Some call public-interest reporting “long” and “pretentious” stories by “elitist” reporters. “But opposing long and ambitious stories,” writes Starkman, “is like fully supporting apple pie but opposing flour, butter, sugar and pie tins. In the end, there is no pie.”

When we look at the financial crisis of 2008 and what led up to it, Starkman writes, “accountability reporting got the story that access reporting missed.”

Such reporting goes beyond classifications of right or left, conservative or liberal. Instead it looks at a problem and explains how it came to be. Eventually, we learned about the institutions responsible for the financial collapse, but by then many lives had been ruined.

“Without accountability reporting,” Starkman writes, “journalism has no purpose, no center, no point.”