Watchdog That Didn't Bark

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Access and Accountability1. Ida Tarbell, Muckraking, and the Rise of Accountability Reporting2. Access and Messenger Boys: The Roots of Business News and the Birth of the Wall Street Journal3. Kilgore's Revolution at the Wall Street Journal: Rise of the Great Story4. Muckraking Goes Mainstream: Democratizing Financial and Technical Knowledge5. CNBCization: Insiders, Access, and the Return of the Messenger Boy6. Subprime Rises in the 1990s: Journalism and Regulation Fight Back7. Muckraking the Banks, 2000-2003: A Last Gasp for Journalism and Regulation8. Three Journalism Outsiders Unearth the Looming Mortgage Crisis9. The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Disappearance of Accountability Reporting and the Mortgage Frenzy, 2004-200610. Digitism, Corporatism, and the Future of Journalism: As the Hamster Wheel TurnsNotesBibliographyIndex

Dean Starkman is editor of the Columbia Journalism Review¿s business section, ¿The Audit,¿ and is the magazine¿s Kingsford Capital Fellow. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, he was part of an investigative team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the Providence Journal.

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