Barlett and Steele, who until that first series were pretty much unknown outside journalism, received approximately 20,000 calls and letters about it, many telling the reporters they had captured real life. An expanded book version spent months on best-seller lists.

Along with the fame came attacks. Critics charged the investigative team with intellectual crimes: Inaccurate information. Selective use of otherwise accurate information. Formulating a thesis first, then looking only for data to back the thesis.

The 1996 series led to similar praise and similar criticism. Newsweek's contributing editor, Robert J. Samuelson, called it "junk journalism" and suggested that economically undereducated reporters and editors have no business in that high realm. Some publications declined to run a syndicated version and The Seattle Times yanked it in midstream. At TheTacomaNews Tribune in Washington, executive editor David Zeeck told readers in a column that "Reaction to this series tops anything I've experienced at the News Tribune."

Why is the work of Barlett/Steele such a lightning rod?

The answer is surprisingly simple: they have developed a new kind of journalism, unprecedented in its scope (trying to explain the economic and social breakdown of an entire society through investigative reporting) and in its sophisticated, hybrid techniques (computer-assisted reporting using government databases, creation of original databases that uncover new realities, author analysis, and the proposal of solutions).

I have taken to calling the work of Barlett and Steele "expert journalism." The term was apparently coined by Lou Ureneck, a Portland, Maine, newspaper editor who, during a public-policy debate earlier this decade about commercial fishing, commissioned his most talented investigative reporters to go beyond dueling experts. "They were empowered by their editors to immerse themselves in the topic and draw their own conclusions," Ureneck recalls.

Any new form is bound to ignite controversy. That said, the criticism of Barlett and Steele's wk is off base. Most of it will seem ludicrous to anybody who has read the two "America" series carefully, and I have read the first series three times, all 235 pages in its book version, and the 1996 series, 241 pages in book form, twice. In those readings I have brought to bear everything I know about information-gathering and presentation. I have seen some of the evidence collected by Barlett and Steele and I have interviewed them.

I am baffled when I read criticism such as that from Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a Wall Street Journal columnist: "Their latest opus, an anecdotal avalanche, purports to prove the evils of foreign trade and immigration. To say their view of the global economy is one-sided, though, would be drastically to understate their intellectual aphasia.

"Huh? The series is filled with anecdotes, but the anecdotes bring to life a statistical avalanche that Jenkins never refutes. And Barlett and Steele never say foreign trade and immigration are evil. Rather, they show that bad decisions in foreign trade and immigration policy by government and big business have unnecessarily cost U.S. workers their jobs. Such misrepresentation is typical of the attacks, as is the contention that Barlett and Steele play down opposing views. In dozens of paragraphs, they quote the conventional wisdom of presidents, cabinet members, senators, House members, corporate lobbyists, and executives of multinationals. Critics seem to overlook those paragraphs, perhaps because those spouting the conventional wisdom end up looking like fools - not through Barlett and Steele's invective, but through their relentless presentation of evidence about the inequitability of the U.S. tax system, the true cost of debt financing, the unacknowledged barriers in global trade, the false promise of job retraining, and the fragility of pensions and health insurance.

Barlett and Steele did not start with a conviction about anything, I am convinced, except that corporate downsizing looked like an interesting topic. As they interviewed workers, "something happened on this project that had never happened to us in all our years of working together," Steele told me. "You would read these transcripts and it sounded like we had interviewed all the same people. Even though one person was out in California, the interview from the person in New England sounded like that same person." Over and over, Barlett and Steele were hearing workers say they had given their lives to an employer, only to lose their jobs, pensions, health insurance, and confidence in the system. They realized they had to investigate not just how this was happening but why.

Have their critics analyzed seventy years of income tax data, as Barlett and Steele did? Have they visited factories in dozens of states, documenting the broken careers and families of thousands of workers? Have they read corporate filings at the Securities and Exchge Commission from every business mentioned in the two series? Such research does not guarantee truth, but it certainly gives a reporter the authority to challenge conventional wisdom.

Will Barlett and Steele be vindicated? I think so. Consider: almost 100 years ago, the journalist Ida Tarbell began researching the most burning topic of her era - the trusts, which were monopolizing industry after industry. What would that mean for the working person? Tarbell focused on the biggest trust of all, Standard Oil.Her work received an outpouring of gratitude from the citizenry much like the outpouring for Barlett and Steele. Her work also received criticism - charges of bias, selective use of evidence, intellectual dishonesty.

Later, historians began scrutinizing Tarbell's work more dispassionately. The overwhelming verdict - she was correct. I recently re-read The History of the Standard Oil Co. It could easily have been written in 1997 rather than 1902. In fact, it reads a lot like "America: What Went Wrong?" and "America: Who Stole the Dream?"

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