This book is a project of the Columbia Journalism Review and would not have been possible without its support. Founded in 1961, CJR considers itself a friend and watchdog over the press, and it is in that spirit this book is written. So thanks are owed to its chairman and guiding spirit, Victor Navasky, and to Nicholas Lemann, the outgoing dean of the Columbia Journalism School. I’d also like to express special thanks to Mike Hoyt for encouraging this project and for his friendship, wise counsel, and invaluable editorial support. Ryan Chittum, deputy chief of “The Audit,” CJR’s business section, which I run, has been a stalwart in upholding its values while emerging as one of the bright stars among media bloggers.
Warm thanks also go to funders of CJR, starting with supporters of “The Audit.” Our major funder, Kingsford Capital Management, has supported “The Audit” throughout. I’m particularly grateful to Mike Wilkins and his family for their warm hospitality, as well as to his longtime Kingsford partner, Dave Scially. I also thank Peter Lowy for his friendship and support, along with my friend Gary Lutin. I and the Nation Institute for their support of my work over the years. I thank CJR’s vice chairmen, David Kellogg and Peter Osnos, and its board: Stephen Adler, Neil Barsky, Emily Bell, Nathan S. Collier, Cathleen Collins, Sheila Coronel, Howard W. French, Wade Greene, Joan Konner, Eric Lax, Kenneth Lerer, Steven Lipin, Michael Oreskes, Josh Reibel, Randall Rothenberg, Michael Schudson, Richard Snyder, and Laurel Touby.
Thanks also Brent Cunningham, Liz Barrett, Brendan Fitzgerald, Greg Marx, Michael Murphy, Justin Peters, Curtis Brainard, Cyndi Stivers, Stephanie Sandberg, Dean Pajevic, Tom O’Neill, Cathy Harding, Marietta Bell, Lt. Jose Robledo, Elinore Longordi, Christopher U. Massie, Sang Ngo, Kira Goldenberg, and Dennis Giza.
I also wish to extend warm thanks to Philip Leventhal, my editor at Columbia University Press, for asking to me to do the book in the first place and for his skillful edits and wise counsel in guiding it to completion. Same goes for Michael Haskell for his superb edits, suggestions, and fixes. I also thank James Jordan, the press’s outgoing president and director, for his support and wish him well on his next adventure. Warm thanks also to Tom Wallace, my agent, as well as Deirdre Mullane, CJR’s agent on its Best Business Writing series.
By a stroke of luck, CJR happened to share an office suite at Pulitzer Hall with Professor Richard R. John, who went far beyond normal standards of collegiality and enormously improved The Watchdog with his insights and authoritative knowledge of the field. I owe great thanks to the library staff of Columbia University for their tireless help in researching this book, most especially Kathleen Dreyer, head librarian at Thomas J. Watson business library, for cheerfully responding to my endless requests for information and references. Thanks also to Jane Folpe for brilliant edits and big-picture suggestions that did much to help shape this argument; Alyssa Katz for taking time to read and offer wise suggestions on a key chapter; and Michael Massing for a stimulating conversation on the work of the great Ida Tarbell. Warm thanks also to Anya Schiffrin for her friendship, encouragement, and steadfast support.
I thank Mike Hudson, a reporter and an important figure in this book, for getting in touch with me five years ago to show me his Citigroup story, and for his time and cooperation and his friendship.
The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark is the culmination of a nearly twenty-five-year reporting career, which was influenced by a remarkable set of mentors, colleagues, and friends. I learned what a writer looks and sounds like from the late Hugh MacLennan, the great Canadian novelist, and an English professor and a mentor at McGill. Penn Kimball, my master’s project advisor at the Columbia School of Journalism, taught me invaluable lessons about long-form news writing as well as his main mantra, “Journalism is a group activity!” which he repeated often in a slow cadence in case we didn’t understand the first time. I learned about the importance of institutional journalism from the inside-out and was lucky to work at small, medium, and large newspapers, all, as it happens, family controlled. I’m grateful to H. Brandt Ayers and his family for their enlightened stewardship of the Anniston Star, where I first went to work as a reporter covering rural Alabama and later cops and courts. At Brandy’s Star, I learned how deep a relationship can form—even if it was sometimes ambivalent—between a community and its newspaper. I learned the critical role accountability reporting plays in a troubled community during my ten years at the Providence Journal, where I began covering night cops and ended as chief of its investigative team. Majority owned by the Metcalf family, and under the leadership of the brilliant Michael P. Metcalf, chairman and chief executive of its parent company, the Projo was, with the Rhode Island State Police under Colonel Walter E. Stone, one of a few islands of integrity in a state then beset by the twin plagues of organized crime and political corruption. Michael Metcalf’s untimely death in 1988, two years after I arrived, was a severe blow to the organization and to American journalism in general. I’d also like to thank two important editors, James V. Wyman and Thomas P. Heslin, whose sound judgment and unflinching courage made possible groundbreaking news investigations that helped to spur innumerable reforms in that troubled state and led us to a Pulitzer Prize. I offer thanks to the paper’s then outside counsel, Joseph V. Cavanagh Jr., the very model of a newspaper lawyer who, while fiercely protective of the institution, always asked how to get stories into the paper, not how to keep them out. My time in Providence was profoundly shaped by my friend, the late Ralph Greco, who flew bombing missions over Europe in World War II and returned home to build a successful jewelry-manufacturing supply business. A member of the board of the powerful Rhode Island Public Buildings Authority, he was a key whistleblower in what turned out to be a sweeping Providence Journal investigation into corruption in the state’s public contracting system. Ralph provided information at great personal and economic cost only because he knew what he was seeing was wrong and he wanted it exposed. For him, it was as simple as that.
Similarly, I will always be grateful for my eight years at the Wall Street Journal, from 1996 to 2004. During my time there, I saw and experienced firsthand not just the inner workings of great American businesses and financial institutions but the inner life of a great American news organization. I interviewed CEOs, covered and did intellectual battle with some of the brightest minds in business, law, and finance, and had a chance to cover—for a readership of millions—momentous events, including the troubled reconstruction of the World Trade Center, destroyed in the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as high-stakes mergers and acquisitions, including some hard-fought takeover battles. I am probably most proud of my financial investigations into the predations of unscrupulous real estate operators against their shareholders, as well as my work on abuses of private-property rights through the process of government expropriation known as eminent domain. My time at the Journal was not, however, an unalloyed pleasure. I left at the end of 2004 as the result of many disagreements with supervisors over stories. In the end, though, the experience provided me with a unique and privileged perspective on American institutional journalism at its highest level. I made deep and lasting friendships and thank the dear friends who remain. Given my current job as a critic, it’s probably best they go unnamed.
I thank my editor at the Washington Post, Martha Hamilton, a close friend and journalist of unerring judgment and tremendous integrity and who single-handedly restored my faith in editors. I’m grateful to the Open Society Foundation (then Open Society Institute) for naming me a Katrina Media Fellow, which allowed me to set up the experimental Insurance Transparency Project, one of the happiest journalism experiences of my life, and to see the workings of the insurance industry in the Gulf of Mexico from the bottom up. It was, I must say, not a pretty sight. The insurance industry remains, for me, one of the great uncovered stories in American business.
John Sullivan is the best reporter I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. He was and is a constant source of good ideas, support, and dry, flinty humor that is only mean-spirited if you think about it. I look forward to our next project. Thanks also to great friends Kathryn Kranhold, Lisa Baines, and Katy Dickey.
I thank my mother, Regina Starkman, and my late father, Stanley Starkman, who, on the weekend I was turning in this manuscript, was struck down by a brain hemorrhage and died five days later at the age of eighty-seven. He was keenly interested in this book’s progress right up to the very end of his life. I think of him every day. My gratitude to my sister, Ellen Starkman, and brother, Paul Starkman, for their love and support.
Most of all, I thank my wife, Alexandra Kowalski, my true love and inspiration, without whom this book never happens, and our Julian.