Investigative journalism is in a sad place and Dean Starkman in The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark provides a eulogy as regards the financial press which includes bifurcating the profession into “access reporting [which] tells readers what powerful actors say while accountability reporting tells readers what they do.” Basically this means that the mainstream press is provided access if they behave and the alternative is to educate yourself first and then your readers without regard to how you feel (or benefit) personally from your subject. Most mainstream media provide ‘access reporting’ while ‘accountability reporting’ remains rare since
institutionalization carries a price, and it is telling that some of our era’s great investigative reporters chose, or were forced, to work outside major news organizations. Seymour Hersh was in and out, mostly out, of mainstream media for most of his career before becoming a regular contributor to The New Yorker; Wayne Barrett, a muckraking urban-affairs reporter, worked the bulk of his career at the Village Voice; William Greider, the great economics-affairs writer, left the Washington Post for Rolling Stone; Lowell Bergman, a long-time network reporter and producer, works across multiple media, including for the public-affairs program Frontline. for advocates of institutionalized accountability reporting, it is problematic, to say the least, that so many of the country’s best investigative journalists worked outside the mainstream and that to do so they in some ways had to transcend it by becoming brands in themselves. (pages 118-9)
This all hit home when I read today’s lead editorial in New Jersey’s largest newspaper bemoaning their endorsement of Chris Christie for governor last year while admitting:
Christie has boycotted the editorial board for years, an attempt to bully us into more loving coverage. So we’ve had a front-row view of what a creep he can be.
So there was no access and, based on some amazing pronouncements in the rest of the editorial, no accountability……..on the part of the Star Ledger.
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