The Watchdog That Didn't Bark
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The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism DEAN STARKMAN HOW MAINSTREAM BUSINEss NEWS FAILED ITS READERS AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF THE PROFEssION. In this sweeping, incisive study, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. Dividing journalism into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—he connects the financial collapse to what happens when the former overwhelms the latter and reporters lose sight of their public role. Starkman travels back to the early twentieth century “The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, and juxtaposes the work of reporters against other given its in-depth analysis across the forms of journalism, particularly muckraking. These landscape and Dean Starkman’s keen two genres merged when mainstream American understanding of the business of news organizations institutionalized muckraking in journalism, will stand as a potentially the 1960s and created a powerful watchdog for the enduring case study of what went public interest. For many reasons, access journalism wrong and why.” came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process Starkman calls “CNBCization,” and rather —Alec Klein, Northwestern University, than examine risky, even frankly corrupt corporate director of The Medill Justice Project behavior, mainstream reporters focused instead on and award-winning investigative reporter profiling executives and informing investors. This formerly with the Washington Post is why mostly outside reporters picked up on the brewing mortgage crisis while insiders failed to con- nect the dots. Starkman concludes with a critique of digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threatens to further undermine investigative reporting, and shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. 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 newspa- pers, he was part of an investigative team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the Providence Journal. $24.95t / £16.95 cloth 978-0-231-15818-3 $23.99 / £16.50 ebook 978-0-231-53628-8 JANUARy 288 pages CURRENT EVENTs / JoURNALISM / BUSINESS COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW BOOKS All Rights: Columbia University Press CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU | 1 A Little Gay History Desire and Diversity Across the World R. B. PARKINSON PROVING THE HISTORY OF HUMAN DESIRE IS ANYTHING BUT A STRAIGHTFORWARD AFFAIR. When was the first chat line between men estab- lished? Who was the first “lesbian”? Were ancient Greek men who had sex with each other necessarily “gay,” and what did Shakespeare think about cross- dressing? A Little Gay History answers these questions and more through close readings of art objects from the “A Little Gay History succeeds in British Museum’s far-ranging collection. Consulting a whirlwind tour of the history of ancient Egyptian papyri, the Roman Warren Cup’s representation of same-sex desire erotic figures, David Hockney’s vivid prints, and through a wide-ranging series dozens of other artifacts, R. B. Parkinson draws of snapshots of art and literature, attention to a diverse range of same-sex experiences and situates them within specific historical and from ancient Persia and the Roman cultural contexts. The first of its kind, A Little Gay Empire to medieval Europe and History builds a complex and creative portrait of modern-day Britain. It is both love’s many guises. entertaining and enlightening.” “This is a very attractive book—felicitously written with —Michael Bronski, an impeccable and subtle understanding of the history Harvard University, author of and a clear eye for the artworks. There is much that A Queer History of the United States is new and original here, and even the well-known ‘suspects’ are discussed with insight, thoughtfulness, and wit.” —Robert Aldrich, University of Sydney, author of Gay Life Stories R. B. PARKINSON, a curator of ancient Egyptian culture at the British Museum, is internationally 2007 recognized as a specialist in ancient Egyptian S VI A poetry. His other publications include Voices from D Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Middle Kingdom IMON S Writings; The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient © Egyptian Poems, 1940–1640 B.C.; and Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection. $19.95t paper 978-0-231-16663-8 SEPTEMBer 128 pages / 80 color illustrations / 5.5” x 7” HIS TORy / ArT HISTORy / GAY AND LESBIAN STUDIES English-language Rights in the United States and Canada: Columbia University Press; All Other Rights: The British Museum Company Limited 2 | FALL 2013 Thai Stick Surfers, Scammers, and the Untold Story of the Marijuana Trade PETER MAGUIRE AND MIKE RITTER With a Foreword by David Farber THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO TURNED THAI POT INTO THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR HIGH. Thailand’s capital, Krungtep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and “the City of Angels” to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers: from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers and lethal marauders leftover from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant “Thai Stick is a remarkable story, navigating one of the most complex smuggling rich in untold details about a vastly channels in the history of the drug trade. lucrative yet little known trade.” Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first histori- —Anne McClintock, University of ans to document this underground industry, the only Wisconsin–Madison record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Conducting hundreds “An extraordinary work, being at of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement once a participatory anthropology, a agents, the authors recount the buy, the delivery, the detached sociology, a cultural history, voyage home, and the product offload. They capture a remarkable example of oral history, the eccentric personalities who transformed the Thai a series of smuggling stories, and marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into one many other things to boot.” of the world’s most lucrative commodities, unravel- ing a rare history from the smugglers’ perspective. —Anders Stephanson, Columbia University PETER MAGUIRE is the author of Law and War and Facing Death in Cambodia. He is a historian and former war-crimes investigator whose writings have been published in the International Herald Tribune, New York Times, The Independent, Newsday, and Boston Globe. He has taught law and war theory at Columbia University and Bard College. MIKE RITTER dropped out of the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1967 and set off on the Hippie Trail to Afghanistan and India, where he began smuggling hash and marijuana in 1968 and continued for eighteen years. He recently graduated from the University of Hawaii with an undergraduate degree in astronomy and physics. $27.95t / £19.95 cloth 978-0-231-16134-3 $26.99 / £18.50 ebook 978-0-231-53556-4 NOVEMBer 288 pages / 29 b&w illustrations and 7 maps HISY TOR All Rights: Columbia University Press CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU | 3 Anticipating a Nuclear Iran Challenges for U.S. Security JACQUELYN K. DAVIS AND ROBERT L. PFALTZGRAFF JR. THE STRATEGIC AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF AN ALREADY-NUCLEAR ROGUE POWER. This volume assumes the worst: a defensive, aggres- sive Iran already possesses a nuclear arsenal. How should the United States handle this threat, and can it deter the use of such weapons? Through three scenario models, this study explores the political, strategic, and operational challenges facing the United States in a post–Cold War world. The authors concentrate on the type of nuclear capability Iran might develop; the conditions under which Iran might resort to threatened or actual “Jaquelyn K. Davis and Robert L. weapons use; the extent to which Iran’s military Pfaltzgraff Jr. have chosen to tackle a strategy and declaratory policy might embolden Iran subject few others have: Iran actually and its proxies to pursue more aggressive policies succeeding in its quest to get ‘the in the region and vis-à-vis the United States; and bomb’ and how it might behave as a Iran’s ability to transfer nuclear materials to others within and outside the region, possibly sparking a result. Their assessment is invaluable nuclear cascade. Drawing on recent post–Cold War to U.S. policy makers who are forced, deterrence theory, the authors consider Iran’s nuclear by necessity, to think about the ‘day ambitions as they relate to its foreign policy objec- after’ Iran goes nuclear and what that tives, domestic politics, and role in the Islamic world, might mean for U.S. policy.” and they suggest specific approaches to improve U.S. defense and deterrence planning. —Ilan Berman, vice president, American Foreign Policy Council JACQUELYN K. DAVIS is executive vice president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Inc. INGER S © GUY NOF ROBERT L. PFALTZGRAFF JR. is president of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Inc., which he cofounded in 1976, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. $35.00 / £24.00 cloth 978-0-231-16622-5 $34.99 / £24.00 ebook 978-0-231-53594-6 DECEMBer 272 pages / 3 charts SECURITY Studies / CURRENT AFFAIRS All Rights: Columbia University Press 4 | FALL 2013 Nuclear Nightmares Securing the World Before It Is Too Late JOSEPH CIRINCIONE THE POLICIES, POLITICS, AND PERILS OF THESE TERRIBLE WEAPONS AND HOW WE CAN LIVE SAFELY AMONG THEM. There is a high risk that someone will use, by accident or design, one or more of the 17,000 nuclear weapons in the world today.