I am presenting my research on business journalism and commercial influences on Saturday, March 11 at the Joint Journalism and Communications History Conference at New York University. It’s a great conference and I was happy to present there last year as well. Here is the abstract and an announcement from the Merrill College. I welcome your thoughts.

Commercialism and Business Journalism: The Debate Over Independence

Many academic works examining business journalism and past economic disasters adopt a political economy frame, which asserts commercial interests compromised journalists’ independence. Yet the issues of commercialism and journalistic autonomy are more nuanced, and the political economy frame tends to overlook the power of journalistic professional norms in the newsroom, which can serve as a counterweight to commercial pressures. This research in progress examines news media coverage of the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s and provides some empirical support for this power of journalistic professional norms. Interviews and a content analysis of coverage of the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan of California in 1989, owned by Charles Keating, and CenTrust Savings Bank of Florida in 1990, owned by David Paul, provide evidence that some journalists acted with autonomy in the face of economic pressure.

This content analysis examines the National Thrift News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and American Banker coverage of Keating from 1986-1990 and Paul from 1985-1994. These two thrift failures, which cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars, have not been the subject of detailed content analysis of news media coverage. This research examines sourcing of the news articles and the evolution of key story narratives as a way of measuring watchdog and accountability reporting. It shows the National Thrift News led on key aspects of the Keating coverage, such as a secret meeting of five senators to interfere with the regulatory examinations, and it was competitive with the Paul story, even though the Miami thrift owner was friends with the National Thrift News publisher. The trade newspaper’s performance on these two stories challenges the political economy theory, which would assert such a publication is beholden to the industry it covers and would therefore not have independent news coverage.

These two instances raise important questions about the efficacy of the political economy theory. This research summarizes literature on autonomy as a professional norm in journalism. It then examines the political economy theory, and credits its important contribution for analyzing corporate power and its effect on the news media. This paper then offers a critique of the political economy theory: its key flaws are a deterministic theoretical construction and a lack of agency to individuals which do not account for innovation in our dynamic market economy. This research argues journalistic professional norms should be considered in any analysis of commercial involvement in newsrooms.