Courtesy of the Googles

The need for a reality-based journalism and journalists is the crux of the challenge when talking about what it will take to produce muckraking work in business and finance writing. While there are no doubt immense challenges in producing muckraking journalism of any kind-the need to stand ideologically opposed to prevailing wisdom, the need to create, enhance and maintain credibility with an audience, the challenge of finding and paying qualified talent enough to keep them around, and the balancing act of effectively employing editorial judgment necessary to avoid ideological tire-swinging-each of these challenges is quantifiably more difficult when it comes to financial and business journalism.

The reason for this is simple: When it comes to business and finance in America, either as journalists or impassioned observer, everyone-and I mean everyone-is already on the same team. In politics, at least in America, party identification not only helps journalists size up pretty quickly where a potential source is coming from and what their motivations are, it also allows for a built-in audience ( to some degree) and an ideologically-complete stance from which to approach stories, reporting and editorial judgments: If I’m opposed to, say, lower taxes on the top one percent of earners in the country, chances are pretty good that I do so because I think it’s unfair and-more importantly-because I think there exists a better policy that I can easily access and refer to. It’s also pretty likely that I’m a Democrat-and that, while not true in absolute terms, I probably also agree with a wide swath of the population on a host of other policies and positions.

By contrast, in business and finance, precious little “principled opposition” exists, in any real, meaningful sense of the term. In fact, looked at from a precise, journalistic perspective, very little real understanding of the terms of the debate even exist. An easy example of this can be seen in the recent coverage of Obama and McCain campaigns. While Sarah Palin was out there railing against “socialism,” two key tells about the reality of such an idea were easily available: one, very few, if any, journalists could even find an actual American socialist in which to get reaction from (or bothered to try), and two, everybody in the country was watching with fascination as the Bush administration, in the guise of Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, was actively engaging in the largest revival of socialism in a Western democracy/late stage capitalistic society in over 100 years without seeing the irony of Palin’s words.

The reason for this is simple: When it comes to business and finance in America, either as journalists or impassioned observer, everyone-and I mean everyone-is already on the same team.

Worse, perhaps, the vast majority of both newsrooms and living rooms in America couldn’t tell the difference. Opposition to say, stem-cell research or Congressional earmarks? Sure-there’s hundreds of folks to talk to. The role of the state in distributing capital based on a theory of surplus value of labor? The dangers of concentrating wealth in a representative democracy, or even a notion of public wealth as an asset for the invisible hand to weigh? Not so much. In order to have a alternative party to the prevailing wisdom of American capitalism in our daily discourse that would be the equivalent of the Democrat/Republican divide, the U.S. would need at least a couple of million people who believed that Wall Street was not the key to their future retirement, but instead stood as a parasitic institution designed to funnel away worker and entrepreneurial wealth to selected and undeserving members of society. And, these people would somehow need to be organized enough to make a difference.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 7:04 am and is filed under On Writing.