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Citation: Columbia Journalism Review Jan-Feb 1997, v35, n5, p18(1)
Author: Weinberg, Steve
Title: In defense of "expert journalism." by Steve Weinberg
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COPYRIGHT 1997 Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
In 1991, The Philadelphia Inquirer investigative team of Donald L. Barlett
and James B. Steele published a historic expose, "America: What Went Wrong?"
Late last year they published a follow-up, "America: Who Stole the Dream?"
Both projects show how legislators, presidents, executive-branch rulemakers,
corporate executives, Wall Street financiers, and lobbyists have worked in
tandem to diminish the lives of middle-class Americans.
Barlett and Steele, who until that first series were pretty much unknown
outside journalism, received approximately 20,000 calls and letters they had
captured real life. An expanded book version spent months on best-seller
lists.
Along with the frame came attacks. Critics charged the investigative team
with intellectual crimes: Inaccurate information. Formulating a thesis first,
then looking only for data to back the thesis.
The 1996 series led to similar praise and similar criticism. Newsweek's
contributing editor, Robert J. Samuelson, called it "junk journalism" and
suggested that economically undereducated reporters and editors have no
business in that high realm. Some publications declined to run a syndicated
version and The Seattle Times yanked it in midstream. At The Tacoma News
Tribune in Washington, executive editor David Zeeck told readers in a column
that "Reaction to this series tops anything I've experienced at the News
Tribune."
Why is the work of Barlett/Steele such a lightning rod?
The answer is surprisingly simple: they have developed a new kind of
journalism, unprecedented in its scope (trying to explain the economic and
social breakdown of an entire society through investigative reporting) and in
its sophisticated, hybrid techniques (computer-assisted reporting using
government databases, creation of original database that uncover new
realities, author analysis, and the proposal of solutions).
I have taken to calling the work of Barlett and Steele "expert journalism."
The term was apparently coined by Lou Ureneck, a Portland, Maine, newspaper
editor who, during a public-policy debate earlier this decade about commercial
fishing, commissioned his most talented investigative reporters to go beyond
dueling experts. "They were empowered by their editors to immerse themselves
in the topic and draw their own conclusions," Ureneck recalls.
Any new form is bound to ignite controversy. That said, the criticism of
Barlett and Steele's work is off base. Most of it will seem ludicrous to
anybody who has read the two "America" series carefully, and I have read the
first series three times, all 235 pages in its book version, and the 1996
series, 241 pages in book form, twice. In those readings I have brought to
bear everything I know about information-gathering and presentation. I have
seen some of the evidence collected by Barlett and Steele and I have
interviewed them.
I am baffled when I read criticism such as that form Holman W. Jenkins Jr.,
a Wall Street Journal columnist: "Their latest opus, an anecdotal avalanche,
purports to prove the evils of foreign trade and immigration. To say their
view of the global economy is one-sided, though, would be drastically to
understate their intellectual aphasia."
Huh? The series is filled with anecdotes, but the anecdotes bring to life a
statistical avalanche that Jenkins never refutes. And Barlett and Steele never
say foreign trade and immigration are evil. Rather, they show that bad
decisions in foreign trade and immigration policy by government and big
business have unnecessarily cost U.S. workers their jobs. Such
misrepresentation is typical of the attacks, as is the contention that Barlett
and Steele play down opposing views. In dozens of paragraphs, they quote the
conventional wisdom of presidents, cabinet members, senators, House members,
corporate lobbyists, and executives of multinationals. Critics seem to
overlook those paragraphs, perhaps because those spouting the conventional
wisdom end up looking like fools -- not through Barlett and Steele's
invective, but through their relentless presentation of evidence about the
inequitability of the U.S. tax system, the true cost of debt financing, the
unacknowledged barriers in global trade, the false promise of job retraining,
and the fragility of pensions and health insurance.
Barlett and Steele did not start with a conviction about anything, I am
convinced, except that corporate downsizing looked like an interesting topic.
As they interviewed workers, "something happened on this project that had
never happened to us in all our years of working together," Steele told me.
"You would read these transcripts and it sounded like we had interviewed all
the same people. Even though one person was out in California, the interview
from the person in New England sounded like that same person." Over and over,
Barlett and Steele were hearing workers say they had given their lives to an
employer, only to lose their jobs, pensions, health insurance, and confidence
in the system. They realized they had to investigate not just how this was
happening but why.
Have their critics analyzed seventy years of income tax data, as Barlett
and Steele did? Have they visited factories in dozens of states, documenting
the broken careers and families of thousands of workers? Have they read
corporate filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission from every
business mentioned in the two series? Such research does not guarantee truth,
but it certainly gives a reporter the authority to challenge conventional
wisdom.
Will Barlett and Steele be vindicated? I think so. Consider: almost 100
years ago, the journalist Ida Tarbell began researching the most burning topic
of her era -- the trusts, which were monopolizing industry after industry.
What would that mean for the working person? Tarbell focused on the biggest
trust of all, Standard Oil.
Her work received an outpouring of gratitude from the citizenry much like
the outpouring for Barlett and Steele. Her work also received criticism --
charges of bias, selective use of evidence, intellectual dishonesty.
Later, historians began scrutinizing Tarbell's work more dispassiontely.
The overwhelming verdict -- she was correct. I recently re-read The History of
the Standard Oil Co. It could easily have been written in 1997 rather than
1902. In fact, it reads a lot like "America: What Went Wrong?" and "America:
Who Stole the Dream?"
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