DIMINISHED RETURNS

In The Press and the World of Money, veteran reporter John Quirt delivers a mixed bag of media history and criticism, reporter war stories, and Q&A interviews with the usual suspects, including economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman and a disgruntled Wall Street Journal supply-sider or two. Quirt comes out punching, criticizing the mainstream press in general -- no names here -- for falling asleep during the S&L crisis. He shows how easy it is to be misled by statistics and the masters of spin control, a lesson he learned early in his career while covering an automotive giant named Studebaker.

Not surprisingly he comes down harder on television than on the print media, castigating it for what he calls a "litany" of sins: "bewitchment with conflict at the expense of understanding and with personalities at the expense of issues, as well as self-aggrandizement and an overemphasis on exclusive interviews that lend themselves to hype and are in vogue as a measure of success in bigtime TV journalism."

All the evils of the media come together in an anecdote involving economist Barry Bosworth. While working for the Carter administration, Bosworth frequently served as the White House designated hitter, sent to appear on television programs to explain its economic policy. One such interview was with Barbara Walters. After reviewing a list of questions that had been compiled for her, Walters complained during a commercial break that she didn't understand the questions. No problem, her producer replied. "You don't have to understand them. Just ask them. He'll explain them."

If the Bosworth anecdote is illustrative of economic journalism at its worst, it's also illustrative of Quirt's analysis at its worst. Is anyone out there genuinely surprised to learn that the ninety-second sound bite with expert/oracle/spin doctor of the day is superficial? Or that some Manhattan editors are out of touch with what's going on in the rest of the country?

In place of analysis we get platitudes. The Wall Street Journal sets the standards. The New York Times has dramatically improved its business coverage. Forbes writes critical profiles of industry leaders. Fortune and Institutional Investor aren't what they used to be, but they used to be great. (Bloomberg news service, the all-business news agency, is ignored.)

For a longtime business and economics reporter, Quirt seems remarkably uncurious about the canons and conventions of business and government economists, as well as those of mainstream and academic economists. In a global economy, free market ideology is the closest thing we have to a world religion; the economic catechism is deserving of scrutiny. Quirt misses the opportunity and, like the journalists he criticizes, relies on oracles -- a little Friedman here, a little Galbraith there.

It's not enough to say that journalists frequently misinterpret the numbers. Even when they get the numbers right, they should question their implications. What intrinsic values do the leading economic indicators have? What do unemployment statistics really mean? Of what value are domestic trade figures, when those figures frequently represent branches of transnational corporations trading with themselves across national boundaries? What does a spectacularly high rate of economic growth in China really mean? Ask an economist to interpret a society, ask a human rights lawyer, ask an anthropologist, ask a cross section of that society's population, and you will get a series of conflicting interpretations. How much value do we place on the economist's interpretations? These aren't mere academic questions. They go to the heart of newsroom politics as well, and the relationships between bureaus and sections. What determines whether a story is a political or an economic story?

The raw material for a deeper analysis is available. Quirt recalls, for example, a story he did for CBS on third world indebtedness and the policies of the World Bank and its affiliate, the International Development Association (before third world indebtedness erupted into the major bank story of much of the '80s) -- and to which William Paley, the network's chairman, objected. Although CBS executives liked the idea of expanded business coverage in theory, they were gun-shy, Quirt concludes, when it came to stories that were less than enthusiastic about "their peers" in the money world.

Unfortunately his analysis ends there, bypassing such issues as interlocking directorates, media concentration, the role of advertising, and the media's own relationship to the world of finance. Quirt mentions Ben Bagdikian in a footnote -- much that is controversial or intriguing appears in a footnote -- but nowhere does he indicate that he has given serious consideration to the case Bagdikian makes in The Media Monopoly. Nor does he discuss the replacement of labor reporting with features or columns about the workplace.

The press is an industry itself, of course, and Quirt is remiss in failing to discuss the impact that tremendous technological changes have had -- and will have -- on business and economic coverage. He has, in fact, no warnings or suggestions for improvement. Both Quirt and his sources convey a vague understanding that more business and economic coverage doesn't necessarily mean better coverage. Unfortunately, in the case of The Press and the World of Money, more adds up to less.

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