The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark

The Watchdog that Didn't Bark, given its in-depth analysis across the landscape, steeped in history, and Starkman's keen understanding of business of journalism, can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why. -- Alec Klein, Northwestern University Journalism Professor, Director of The Medill Justice Project and award-winning investigative reporter formerly of The Washington Post Dean Starkman is literally a reporter's reporter. As such he gets to the bottom of the story of how the US business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past 80 years until it was too late. And he does so with prose that is intelligent, engaging and erudite. I recommend The Watchdog without reservation. -- Eric Alterman, CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism, Brooklyn College, and media columnist, The Nation Journalism was complicit in the predation and corruption that brought down world financial markets and wrecked the lives of millions. Obsessed with shallow scoops, giddy from the laughing gas of access, financial journalists abjectly failed to connect dots, and left abusive, reckless, and criminal corporations free to drag the global economy into the abyss. Dean Starkman is the author we have been waiting for to tell this story. He not only puts forward a keen, subtle, and fair account of the journalistic default, he names names. -- Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology; Chair, Ph. D. Program in Communications, Columbia University With American journalism at sea, here comes a navigator who really knows its mission, the riptides it's facing, and the ports it must reach. Dean Starkman tells it all with the heart, clarity, and dry wit that redeem business journalism even while showing how it lost its anchor and its compass. -- Jim Sleeper, lecturer in political science, Yale, former editor and columnist at Newsday and the New York Daily News Journalists didn't miss the subprime lending that spun into the devastating financial collapse of 2008. Excellent reporting was available, from the Financial Times to the Los Angeles Times to a small alternative publication, Southern Exposure. But Dean Starkman shows that even reporters who were on top of things buried the lead: the story wasn't new financial instruments, risky investments, or high-pressured Wall Street. The story was corruption. There were old-fashioned, greedy villains. Old-fashioned moralizing was called for. It would have had the advantage of being both true and fascinating. So how did so many fine journalists miss the big story? Read Starkman's powerful and disturbing analysis of how business journalism came to write for an audience of investors, not citizens. You may not share his every judgment, but this account has the advantage of being both true and fascinating. -- Michael Schudson, Columbia University