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.”

Who needs reporters?

This title of an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in the June 1 New York Times caught my eye, since I sometimes serve in the role of reporter. But it also raises an important issue we all should address: the role of reporting the news in order to hold leaders of various kinds accountable to their constituents.

Bruni notes that in recent months, Michele Bachmann, Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton used carefully made online videos to make important announcements.

You may ask, What’s the big deal? It’s one more example of politicians trying to control their image so they look good. And it follows the example of corporate America, which has been doing this for a long time.

“But corporations answer only to shareholders and customers,” Bruni writes. “Politicians answer to all of us, and have a scarier kind of power, easily abused. So we must see them in environments that aren’t necessarily tailored to their advantage.”

Someone needs to point out where the Emperor has no clothes. Someone needs to question the pretense or the image being manufactured. These leaders are accountable to us citizens? The Fourth Estate (the press) is one major way they are held accountable.

Such need for accountability applies to many other contexts, including Mennonite congregations, conferences and Mennonite Church USA. We are to hold each other accountable, by whatever method works best. That aligns with the Anabaptist “rule of Christ” (Matthew 18:15-20).

Unfortunately, reporters are becoming a rarer breed and losing influence. An editorial called “Empty Calories” in the May/June issue of Columbia Journalism Review, addresses the growing popularity of social media for getting news.

The Pew Research Center reports that 72 percent of all U.S. adults say the most common way they hear about news from family and friends is through “word of mouth.” And 23 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds say they primarily get news from family and friends via social media.

Many people get their news from social media, from bloggers and those who scrape together items from various sources. But what kind of news are they getting? How do they know what’s true? asks the editorial. “How can they get beyond the superficial updates about Justin Bieber’s monkey or Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy?”

As “more and more journalism shops that underwrite enterprise reporting are starting to lock their wares behind paywalls,” says the editorial, “someday, in the not-too-distant future, it seems, there will be very little credible news for the bloggers and scrapers to aggregate.”

A key word there is “credible.” Reporters are trained to ask probing questions and get quotes from various perspectives in order to try to get as accurate as possible description of an event.

Social media may provide this at times, but how do we know? Or do we just go to those sources who agree with our point of view? This is what Eli Pariser has called a “filter bubble.”

Too much of what’s out there, says the editorial, consists of “empty calories.” But “general-interest media, at least, take [readers] beyond the bubble (they might come for Kim but then discover Syria).”

As we seek to find what’s credible and hold our leaders accountable, let’s pay close attention to the news we consume and where it comes from.

We all need reporters.