The financial press has been taking it on the chin lately for its coverage of the nation’s economic mess. Some of it’s well-earned. At least several financial writers have acknowledged they should have asked more questions about the long period of easy credit, soaring asset prices and ever-growing leverage on Wall Street.
To my eye, the criticism is overcooked.
Even a casual reader of the business press the last few years would have known that big trouble lurked. The two dailies showing up on my doorstep in Washington the last 13 years, the Washington Post and New York Times, regularly saw calamity on the horizon (enough to nudge our family toward adjusting investments). Here’s what Steven Pearlstein of the Post wrote almost 8 months ago: “Don’t be fooled by the latest sucker rally on stock markets or predictions that the ‘worst may be behind us.’ The first thing you need to remember is that these guys still don’t have a handle on what they’re dealing with — nobody does.”
Still, there’s been something amiss about the financial coverage. And to my mind you can see it in a hot debate among media thinkers about the legitimacy of the objective-story framework that has guided newspapers (and most of journalism) for the last half-century. Many new-media experts contend the principle of objectivity has not only outlived its usefulness, but actually did journalism a good deal of harm during its roughly half-century reign. And I think they’re onto something.
The objective, balanced, even-handed story remains American journalism’s dominant way of reporting about the world. You assemble the facts, lay them out, and give voice to the various interpretations you find about those facts. The writer stays impartial, or at least tries his or her best. It’s up to the reader to decide who’s right. Newspapers have been devout followers of this model since becoming monopolies in their communities, in part because trying to give everybody a fair shake was the only way to remain a monopoly.
But here’s the rub: This objectivity model inevitably stifles authentic and prescient voices, and so often means the daily newspaper is filled with dry, passionless writing. Which brings me back to the financial mess. There weren’t many journalists yelling at the top of their lungs that the combination of easy credit and eased regulations was going to run us over a cliff, but in a different journalism construct there might have been. Might things have been different if we had had a bigger free-for-all on this topic, unencumbered by journalism’s fair-and-balanced ethic? (How many times have do we read in a financial story that some economists think one thing while others think the other? Compare that to the punch of the Pearlstein excerpt above, taken from one of his columns.)
When I think back about the financial journalism that prepared me best for the trouble that was about to hit, I think almost entirely of columnists – people like the New York Times‘ Gretchen Morgenson writing about out-of-control executive pay and figurehead boards of directors, and the Washington Post‘s Pearlstein warning that growing deficits and indebtedness were guaranteeing a lower standard of living for future generations, or the Times‘ Floyd Norris constantly illuminating some new aspect of the saga. Some of these writers, like Morgenson and the Times‘ David Leonhardt, bounce back and forth between the standard news story and column writing, and I find it much more satisfying and illuminating when they’re using the columnist’s voice.
The Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt, recently raised questions about the practice of news staffers who operate in both the news-story and column space, arguing that it hurts the newspaper’s credibility. While that may be true, to my eye the bigger sin is depriving readers of these folks’ ability, using the columnist’s tools, to share outrage, to inspire, to offer guideposts for the future. I think the Times must have recognized this, judging by the number of times they’ve put these columnists on Page 1 in the last 6 months.
In fact, what would happen if we simply let more journalists say full-throatedly where their reporting and thinking lead them? Wouldn’t we get more genuine and less diluted arguments brought to bear on the biggest issues of the day? Wouldn’t prospects for avoiding huge national mistakes improve? Wouldn’t this be a better way to self-govern? Wouldn’t it be a more interesting newspaper to read?
I’m inclined to think so, though I admit I’m not sure. The loss of objectivity might well create other problems, like hurting those unable to speak as loudly as others, and diminishing the standing of verifiable facts. Wouldn’t it be harder, in the ensuing din, to agree on at least some pieces of common ground? (I wonder, for example, how many more Americans would have thought Barack Obama a Muslim without the constant reminders from mainstream writers, providing reliable, verifiable information, that in fact Obama is a Christian?)
The answer may well be academic, because this is pretty clearly where we’re headed. The Internet is taking us down the road of more numerous voices and fewer dominant ones. Very few of these voices are going to be couched. Most will be vibrant and passionate, not much concerned with telling the other side of the story. And I think this is a good thing.
It would be a mistake to toss away the objectivity model. You only need to turn to the top story in the Nov. 23 Times – a marvelously reported story on what went wrong at Citibank – to realize how powerful this framework can be in telling a story no one has ever told.
Even so, I think it’s a good thing to quit worshipping so regularly at the altar of objectivity. Newspapers and their Web sites need strong, passionate, authentic, real voices, not pinched ones that pull punches and bend over backward to try to hit some imagined goal of fairness. And anyway, we writers of “objective stories” have always given but one take on a situation, even as we claimed otherwise.
What will it look like when strong opinion replaces just-the-facts stories as the staple of news and information? Will the smartest and most prescient arguments (not to mention facts on the ground) be the ones that win the day? We will fervently so hope. Our democracy – well, I guess everybody’s democracy — has a lot riding on the outcome.