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On Nov. 26, discussing what went wrong for the Democrats in the presidential election, Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager, told Ezra Klein, “There’s a hunger in America for understanding how the economy is rigged against them.”
He’s basically right. But alas, journalists have a lot of competition on that particular story, leaving the space open to politicians, think tanks, people on social media—folks with more time on their hands than reporters have.
Why journalism should be instrumental in telling this story gets us into philosophical questions that I’ll leave to James W. Carey and other big thinkers about journalism and democracy. But, since we’re here at the Columbia Journalism Review, after all, let’s make at least one assumption, that journalism must play a big role in shaping the economic discourse.
The election created a journalistic problem, I would argue, some facts that don’t add up.
Trump won in large part because the economy was a very important issue; voters were unhappy with it, and those who were voted for him, not her. Even more, working-class voters in particular—those making less than $100,000 and less than $50,000 a year, including nonwhites—voted for Trump everywhere it matters, in a decisive shift.
Meanwhile, Trump’s broad message—big picture—was about immigrants, and that’s what his supporters heard, loud and clear.
If nothing else, it was a message. Even more disconnected voters could hear and understand it, and they broke for Trump, too.
Okay, so maybe that’s slightly oversimplified, and of course tariffs were a big theme. But then so were courting billionaires, the handling of labor strikes, transgender rights, and many other things.
But basically, broad strokes, workers unhappy with the economy shifted decisively to Trump. Trump made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign.
But as reporters, our hunch is that immigrants are not behind people’s economic discontent—or not the main thing by a long shot. You can call it a bias, and no doubt many would. I’m sticking with “hunch.”
(“Bias” is a word used to attack reporters to imply their reporting is agenda-driven. “Hunch” suggests that a reporter is acting in good faith in pursuit of verified facts to discover what’s real. I think that’s generally the case with reporters. That’s my bias.)
Democrats are back in disarray in large part because they believe, with plenty of evidence, that Joe Biden was the most pro-labor president in generations and had to a large degree embraced Sanders’s progressive agenda—and yet Kamala Harris still lost working-class voters in droves.
Her broad message was, it’s fair to say, harder to discern than Trump’s, but launched on the theme of creating an “opportunity economy,” and, as the left-of-center Jacobin demonstrates convincingly, veered away from Bernie’s diagnosis of voters’ economic discontent—“millionaires and billionaires,” broadly speaking. The perception has triggered a robust and probably long-overdue intra-Democratic debate over both policy and, maybe more to the point, messaging.
Whatever you think about blaming “millionaires and billionaires” for the state of the economy and public discontent, it is—like immigration—a message.
In The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism, a 2014 book based on my CJR reporting, I argued that the 2008–09 global financial crisis was not just a total system failure, but worse—it was a surprise.
I tried to sort through why. Why—with all the resources, talent, and, yes, good intentions we had in the business press—didn’t we see it coming?
The premise of the book is that the public has zero hope of understanding the things that affect their material lives—housing costs, the bills at the end of the month, literal bread and butter—without journalism that reports on business and finance in the public interest. I argued:
This book is about journalism watchdogs and what happens when they don’t bark. What happens is the public is left in the dark about and powerless against complex problems that overtake important national institutions. In this case, the complex problem was the corruption of the US financial system.
So I did a (massive) content analysis to find the kind of reporting that did see it coming, did see the corruption, citing Mike Hudson, Richard Lord, and Gillian Tett, among others, and presented data showing a steep dropoff in such reporting starting in 2004, the worst possible time.
More importantly for our purposes, I created an analytical framework to understand what happened, what worked, and what didn’t, and landed on the historical tension between two kinds of reporting: access and accountability.
Access reporting tends to talk to elites; accountability, to dissidents. Access writes about specialized topics for a niche audience. Accountability writes about general topics for a mass audience. Access tends to transmit orthodox views; accountability tends to transmit heterodox views. Access reporting is functional; accountability reporting is moralistic.
Access reporting emphasizes speed, concision, orthodox viewpoints, a top-down point of view, news aimed at investors and friendly to news managers.
Accountability journalism, in contrast, takes time (to report and to explain), highlights dissident sources and heterodox views, tells stories from the bottom up, and is more skeptical of the claims of elites, including management.
The point is not to choose. You need both. But it pays to remember these competing journalistic practices produce entirely different representations of reality.
Writing for Southern Exposure, Hudson exposed the giant predatory subprime operations in a scathing six-thousand-word exposé, complete with sidebars, graphics, and photos, of a not-obscure operation known as Citigroup. That was in 2003.
Lord, a reporter for the alternative Pittsburgh City Paper, stumbled upon a spike of foreclosures in Pittsburgh’s inner city, found it wasn’t just Pittsburgh but a national phenomenon, and traced the spreading misery to perverse incentives in the global bond market. “By its very nature, the mortgage-backed securities market encourages lenders to make as many loans at as high an interest rate as possible,” he wrote.
He wrote that in a book called American Nightmare: Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure of the American Dream, published in 2004.
Tett, who trained as a social anthropologist and wrote her dissertation on Tajik wedding rituals, discovered looming anomalies in the debt markets in 2005. Working in the backwaters of the Financial Times, she sketched a cognitive map, a tool used by scholars, to delineate the disconnect between finance as it really was and the journalism that purported to cover it, and set about poking holes in the debt market’s self-presentation as a field tantamount to science. By 2008, she was Britain’s “Business Journalist of the Year”; by 2009, after the scale of the financial crisis had sunk in, she was just “Journalist of the Year.” She remains a big shot.
So it’s doable. One advantage I had as a business reporter was, well, I’m not that smart. The economy and the financial system are complicated. It takes me, and most people, a long time to get up to speed on the players, the rules, and, especially, the lingo. But if I can, you can.
And do, please, remember that Wall Street is, to a very large degree, a giant sales machine, and mystification is just not part and parcel but often the whole point. This is why a share of a collateralized debt obligation—the thing that crushed the global financial system—was called a “tranche.” N’importe quoi.
As a corollary, ignore the heavy sighs and eye-rolls one inevitably encounters when embarking on accountability-oriented economics and financial reporting, including from business reporters (yes, I did once write a four-thousand-word defense of Matt Taibbi; different context).
But I can report that the more you learn about economics and finance, the madder you get.
Of course, a lot has been done over the past decade in terms of high-quality business journalism. Think of Gretchen Morgenson on private equity; Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe on McKinsey; Conor Dougherty on the crisis of housing affordability; and STAT News’s reporting on health insurers’ use of artificial intelligence to deny claims. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, where I’m an editor, was instrumental in putting the inequalities generated by offshore finance on the global public agenda. David Enrich’s work on Deutsche Bank has been invaluable. So has Matt Stoller’s work on monopoly. And so on.
A content analysis of economics reporting in the past decade might indeed be useful. But it’s not needed to sense the dangerous disconnect between the public discourse about the economy and how people experience it.
In our case, the story is about an economic discontent so profound that working-class and lower-income voters shifted in large numbers to the candidate under federal indictment for trying to overturn an election and who, the polls show and we can safely guess, was favored by many precisely because he was seen as the agent to overturn the system writ large.
The reaction to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, makes the case for a shift to reporting on economic structures all the more urgent. I covered insurance’s response to Katrina. It’s an undercovered business. Nuanced coverage shifts us from a simplistic morality tale to a richer story about the broken incentives and systems that have stirred broad outrage at an entire industry.
What would accountability reporting look like in our present time? What it always looks like: talking to outsiders, not insiders, reporting from the bottom up, not the top down, writing for the public, not elites, going deep, not fast, writing long, not short, and so on. We did it before. We can do it again.
If all this seems pretty basic, well, I would suggest that whatever we thought we were doing before the election wasn’t working. I mean, the guy who calls us “the enemy of the people” and such won, right?
Would accountability reporting on the economy—bottom-up reporting on outsiders, dissidents, and the like—have produced a different election result? That’s not really our business. But would it have produced a different political discourse? As journalists, we have to think so, and remember what works.
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