Jump to content

Dean Starkman and the watchdog that didn't bark

Add links
From Wikiversity
This discusses a 2025-05-21 interview with Dean Starkman[1] about his work with the Bulgarian Center for Information, Democracy, and Citizenship,[2] the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ),[3] and his (2014) book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism. The podcast was released 2025-05-31 to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show[4] syndicated for the Pacifica Radio[5] Network of over 200 community radio stations.[6]
It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources[7] and treating others with respect.[8]
Interview with Dean Starkman about his work with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the Bulgarian Center for Information, Democracy, and Citizenship, and his 2014 book on The watchdog that didn’t bark
29:00 mm:ss podcast from interview conducted 2025-05-21 of Dean Starkman by Spencer Graves about his work with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the Bulgarian Center for Information, Democracy, and Citizenship, and his 2014 book, The watchdog that didn't bark

Journalist and scholar Dean Starkman,[1] discusses his work with the American University in Bulgaria,[9] the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), and his 2014 book, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism.[10] At the American University in Bulgaria, he is a Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow in their Center for Information, Democracy, and Citizenship.[2] He serves there as Editorial Director of their International Journalism Fellowship, which is a reporting project designed to bring more international attention to Bulgaria’s democratic journey.[11] As a senior editor with ICIJ, Starkman contributed to 8 prize-winning projects in the 6 years between 2017 and 2022.[1] The biggest of those projects was the Pandora Papers, which included almost 3 terabytes of data in 12 million documents from 14 financial service companies from countries including Panama, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Those documents exposed secret offshore accounts of over 100 business leaders, billionaires, and celebrities and 35 world leaders including presidents, prime ministers, and other heads of state. The investigations involved more than 600 journalists from 91 media outlets in 117 countries collaborating virtually 24/7.[12]

The 2022 “Ericsson List” project included a report that, “As US-style corporate leniency deals for bribery and corruption go global, repeat offenders are on the rise”.[13] A 2023 report in this series noted that Ericsson agreed to pay $206 million in a plea agreement in court documents that revealed how Ericsson lawyers and employees withheld information from U.S. prosecutors in violation of a 2019 agreement under which Ericsson paid $1 billion and pledged to stamp out corruption and report any more wrongdoing to the U.S. government.[14] $206 million is less than one percent of Ericsson’s 2024 revenue and total assets.[15] If they paid $1 billion every 5 years, that’s less that one percent per year of revenue and total assets. Is that just another cost of doing business?

Starkman’s The Watchdog that didn’t bark makes a distinction between “accountability” and “access” journalism: Accountability reporting provides the public with information about potential malfeasance in government, business, or nonprofits, sometimes facilitating reforms. Access journalism helps leaders communicate their message to the audience for that media outlet. Starkmen quotes Herb Greenberg as saying that the difference between accountability and access journalism is “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”[16]

Starkman discusses his work with Spencer Graves.[17]

Key observations in the interview

[edit | edit source]

During the interview, Starkman said, "A mergers and acquisition scoop [e.g., in The Wall Street Journal] is a classic example of access journalism. The Washington political sites, Politico, ... Axios, these are all access sites. Basically, their idea is to get the information from elite sources about what's on the minds of elites ... . I'm not saying it's easy, but it's a much more management friendly form of journalism. That's to be juxtaposed against something I call accountability journalism, ... [talking] to outsiders as opposed to insiders. ... You're reporting from the bottom up rather than the top down. You're more likely to get more heterodox views ... . Dissident sources like in my business used to be plaintiffs, lawyers, and short sellers, community groups and people basically who are powerless against the powerful. But these are ... investigative reporting that carries enormous risks. Takes a lot of time, ... comes with ... a lot of legal stress, and is very management unfriendly. It's ... very hard to support that kind of reporting, but that's the reporting in the public interest."

He spoke especially of Ida Tarbell, a leading muckraker of the Progressive Era. "The central problem of American society in the early twentieth century, which honestly doesn't sound so different from the central problem of the early twenty-first century, and that is market consolidation, concentration of power, and monopoly. ... You could call it oligarchy ... . Back then they called them robber barons. ... Back then, ... all of society was dominated by a handful of very powerful interests ... . J. P. Morgan in banking, ... the sugar trust, and ... Standard Oil company run by John D. Rockefeller." Tarbell and colleagues decided to do an exposé of Standard Oil and how it could dominate 90% of the oil market in the US. She did not invent long form, investigative journalism, but she certainly consolidated the practice. The first installment of the series was an exposé of how Standard Oil rigged contracts with railroad companies to exclude competitors. Her series, consolidated into her (1904) The History of the Standard Oil Company, led to the breakup of Standard Oil.

Starkman's Watchdog includes discussion of the subprime crisis, fueled by unscrupulous lenders, who sold mortgages to poor people who didn't need them using bait-and-switch tactics and forged signatures to saddle their victims with debts they couldn't pay. Before the victims defaulted, the fraudsters sold the mortgages to unsuspecting investors with the complicity of major financial institutions like Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, ... . "This was the heart of Wall Street pouring money into these subprime lenders."

Starkman noted that the fines associated with Ericsson's List are examples of elite corruption of white collar and corporate crime that morphed into a Kabuki show trial, "a toll booth, where no matter what the company does, bribery or fraud or enabling public corruption overseas, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act could be paid for with a criminal fine, with some big number that had absolutely no impact on the people who perpetrated the crime. ... [I]t became a cost of doing business." Whitewashing corporate crime is done with a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), described by Eisinger (2017). "When these deals are announced with the Justice Department, invariably the shares of the company go up, not down."

"Democracy is rule by the people. If the people are going to rule, they have to have good information. ... [That requires] financially autonomous, politically independent sources."

Highlights of Starkman's career

[edit | edit source]

Earlier in Starkman's career, he helped lead The Providence Journal to the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations. He has written for several major American newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and for magazines including The New Republic, The Nation, and Mother Jones. He ran the Columbia Journalism Review’s business section for a few years. And he taught media courses for Central European University’s Department of Public Policy.[1]

The need for media reform to improve democracy

[edit | edit source]

This article is part of category:Media reform to improve democracy. We describe here briefly the motivation for this series.

One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, “There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper.”[18] McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.[19]

At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which contributed to making the US a leader in the rate of growth in average annual income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita). Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.

That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.[20]

In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet.[21] This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence worldwide, threatening democracy itself.

The threat from loss of newspapers

[edit | edit source]

A previous Media & Democracy interview with Arizona State University accounting professor Roger White on "Local newspapers limit malfeasance" describes problems that increase as the quality and quantity of news declines and ownership and control of the media become more highly concentrated: Major media too often deflect the public's attention from political corruption enabled by poor media. This too often contributes to other problems like scapegoating immigrants and attacking Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while also facilitating increases in pollution, the cost of borrowing, political polarization and violence, and decreases in workplace safety. More on this is included in other interviews in this Media & Democracy series available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

An important quantitative analysis of the problems associated with deficiencies in news is Neff and Pickard (2024). They analyzed data on media funding and democracy in 33 countries. The US has been rated as a "flawed democracy" according to the Economist Democracy Index and spends substantially less per capita on media compared to the world's leading democracies in Scandinavia and Commonweath countries. They note that commercial media focus primarily on people with money, while publicly-funded media try harder to serve everyone. Public funding is more strongly correlated with democracy than private funding. This recommends increasing public funding for media as a means of strengthening democracy. See also "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

Discussion

[edit | edit source]
[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources[7] and treating others with respect.[8]]

A court in Braunschweig, Germany, convicted four Volkswagen managers of criminal fraud on 2025-05-26, in contrast to the deferred prosecution agreements obtained by Ericsson in the US, mentioned above. The four were found guilty for their part in the manipulation of emissions controls of their diesel engines almost a decade after the problem made the news. Two of the four received prison sentences: One was sentenced to 4.5 years; another got 31 months. The other two received suspended sentences of 15 and 10 months, respectively.[22]

Notes

[edit | edit source]
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Dean Starkman, Wikidata Q17036928
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Center for Information, Democracy, and Citizenship, Wikidata Q134522865
  3. ↑ International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Wikidata Q16166292
  4. ↑ Media & Democracy, Director: Spencer Graves, Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q127839818{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  5. ↑ Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q2045587
  6. ↑ list of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates, Wikidata Q6593294
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 The rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources may not be enforced on other parts of Wikiversity. However, they can facilitate dialog between people with dramatically different beliefs
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Wikiversity asks contributors to assume good faith, similar to Wikipedia. The rule in Wikinews is different: Contributors there are asked to "Don't assume things; be skeptical about everything." That's wise. However, we should still treat others with respect while being skeptical.
  9. ↑ American University in Bulgaria, Wikidata Q469484
  10. ↑ Senior editor Dean Starkman, Wikidata Q134523138
  11. ↑ Bulgaria International Journalism Fellowship, Wikidata Q134523231
  12. ↑ Weber and Dunham (2024, pp. xviii, 6).
  13. ↑ Freedberg et al. (2022).
  14. ↑ Freedberg (2023).
  15. ↑ Wikipedia "Ericsson" gave Ericsson’s 2024 revenue and total assets as 248 and 292 billion Swedish Krona, respectively. One USD = 9.73 Swedish Krona, per Exchange-Rates.org, Wikidata Q134524394, accessed 2025-05-14,
  16. ↑ Starkman (2014, locn 2976 in a Kindle edition). This is a paraphrase of a famous quote from Mark Twain, who said several times, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.'” For this, see Wikiquote, “Mark Twain".
  17. ↑ Spencer Graves, Wikidata Q56452480
  18. ↑ Tocqueville (1835, p. 93).
  19. ↑ McChesney and Nichols (2010, pp. 310-311, note 88).
  20. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015, p. 80).
  21. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015). See also Wikiversity, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” and “Category:Media reform to improve democracy“.
  22. ↑ Associated Press (2025).

Bibliography

[edit | edit source]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Dean_Starkman_and_the_watchdog_that_didn%27t_bark&oldid=2789295"