“These are two different views of journalism’s very purpose, forever in competition for status, resources, and power. These approaches require different skills, different practices, and different sources, and produce radically different representations of reality. Access journalism seeks to provide insider information from powerful institutions and people. Accountability journalism seeks to provide information about those people and institutions. Put in even shorter-hand, access reporting tells you what the powerful said, while accountability reporting tells you what they did.
Nowhere was the difference more consequential than in the coverage of Wall Street and the mortgage business in the run-up to the Great Recession, the subject of Starkman’s new book . . . The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism. It was accountability reporting — done, as it happens, almost entirely outside the mainstream business press — that understood and conveyed the systemic corruption that was overrunning the subprime mortgage business. Access reporting not only missed the story, but, Starkman argues, it fueled the frenzy.”
— Columbia Journalism Review
RE:SOURCES
- The Editors; 2014. “Access vs. accountability journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review. Posted January; accessed March 10.
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