What would Mikael Blomkvist think of the U.S. business press?
Chrystia Freeland, global editor at large for Reuters, argues that Mikael Blomkvist, the hero reporter of the popular Stieg Larsson novels (eg. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), would sneer at those business reporters who are too close to their subjects.
But she also has something important to say about cognitive bias. Ultimately, I think that’s more important than a debate about access versus accountability journalism.
Freeland sets the stage by talking about two business books that look at the 2008 financial meltdown: New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (I read the latter; thought it was outstanding).
Both authors loudly professed their gratitude to their sources for letting them inside.
One can imagine Blomkvist sputtering with rage, but you don’t have to be a fictional Scandinavian social democrat to wish that business journalism in the United States was more about afflicting the comfortable and less about cozying up to them. In the spring, the high priests of American journalism at the Columbia Journalism Review published a tough critique of Sorkin by Dean Starkman, who argued that “Too Big to Fail” was on one side — the wrong side — in the “mini-struggle” between “deal journalism and the work of accountability-oriented reporters.”
That article rightly highlighted the important investigative work done by reporters with a “more confrontational approach,” like Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta Jr., both of The Times, and Mark Pittman of Bloomberg News, who wrote a 2007 series predicting the collapse of the banking sector. But the bigger, more complicated truth about the financial crisis is that it wasn’t caused by evil businessmen. The overarching story is one of systemic failure, not individual wrongdoing. It wasn’t the Bernie Madoffs who plunged the world into recession. It was low capital requirements, weak limits on leverage, over-the-counter traded derivatives, soft rules on mortgage lending and global financial imbalances.
If your attention wandered as you read that list of abstract terms, you are not alone. A growing body of cognitive research is demonstrating something schoolteachers and entertainers have known for a long time: Most of us respond better to personal stories than to impersonal numbers and ideas. That cognitive bias is so pronounced that Deborah Small, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, has found that charitable giving actually goes down if too many statistics are included in individual tales of need (and if we get only statistics and don’t learn any personal stories, giving is even lower). Forget “just the facts, ma’am.” Actually, forget the facts altogether.
For readers, that same bias means we are drawn to stories about people, not systems. When it comes to the financial crisis, we want heroes and villains and what-he-had-for-breakfast narratives; we are less enthralled by analytical accounts of the global financial system and the cycle of boom and bust. The Columbia Journalism Review — and Blomkvist — juxtapose the approaches of “access” and “investigative” journalists. But the real divide may be between storytellers and system analysts. (This is one of many reasons that anyone interested in the financial crisis and its causes should venture farther down the best-seller list and dip into “This Time Is Different,” a lucid and unapologetically dense study of eight centuries of financial crises by the economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.)
Freeland thinks the world needs fewer narrative writers and more data analysts.
On Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Bangalore and in Shanghai, the new technologies and the capital flows that are reshaping our world are dominated by the people who master data dumps. This split — more than geography, more than gender, more than what your parents did for a living — may be the real class divide of our time.
If Larson’s novels were truer to life, the socially-awkward genius computer hacker Elisabeth Salander would be Blomqvist’s boss, and not the other way around, she said.
Except Salander and Blomqvist were both pattern analysts of a type — one quantitative, one qualitative.
Both skillsets are needed to both find that which is interesting and important and then communicate it to a wider audience.
Unfortunately, our cognitive bias limits the type of information we are willing to take in — or are capable of handling. The more abstract and conceptual, the more likely we are to tune out. I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent, but I found Lewis’s book bogged down for me when it got into the nitty-gritty of credit default swaps and whatnot.
Keep in mind that people don’t necessarily read journalism as an act of citizenship. There is a very high risk they will default to do something more entertaining with their leisure time than plow through a quantitatively dense treatise on investment banking sector problems — even though the problem has the potential to shatter their world.
I believe it was Neil Postman who coined the phrase “Amusing ourselves to death.”
It pains me to write this, but with regards to the financial crisis, I doubt even the best journalism in the lead-up period would have made any difference, given the tenor of the times in the United States (George W. Bush as Republican president, Alan Greenspan as chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Republicans dominating both Houses of Congress).
Very few individual acts of journalism are powerful enough to turn the tide of history when faced with those obstacles — particularly if people don’t want to read them.