TWO OF THE COUNTRY’S best-known journalists embark on a two-and-a-half-year economics investigation that results in an article so long it has to be divided into ten parts. Their cash-strapped newspaper pours half a million dollars into an advertising campaign, and a leading publisher plans a book version with an initial printing that could reach 125,000. Dozens of papers beg — and bid — for syndication rights. And when it finally appears, it becomes an object of such derision in the mainstream press that just about the only person with anything nice to say about it is vagabond vice- presidential candidate Pat Choate.
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s “America: Who Stole the Dream?” ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer from September 8 to September 22. It is the longawaited sequel to the authors’ 1991 “America: What Went Wrong?” an invective-driven expose of economic decline. The earlier work was a seamless tale of how a faulty “government rulebook” had led to all the economic ills of the 1980s, that wretched decade, including mergers, junk bonds, yuppies, layoffs, and free trade. It was reviled in certain comers. Paul Keegan of Philadelphia magazine called it “an unbearably long, turgid, mind-numbing torrent of repetitive facts, numbers and anecdotes . . . so fundamentally flawed, its intellectual underpinnings so weak, that it actually says little about what went wrong with America, and everything about what went wrong with Barlett and Steele.” Nonetheless, appearing at the pit of the Bush recession, it proved the most successful “enterprise” feature in the history of a paper known for such features. It drew the praise of scores of journalists and left- wing economists, and sold 500,000 copies when it was published in book form by Andrews & McMeel.
According to the authors, it was the sections on the global economy that most piqued the readership. Hence “Who Stole the Dream?”
The new series makes a similarly seamless argument that all of our ills are attributable to the global economy. Its indictment comes down to this: Government’s failure to enact tariffs, control immigration, and protect manufacturing industries amounts to a “betrayal” of the “middle class” and an end to American upward mobility. It is a series with self-evident flaws, most of them shared with its predecessor. Foremost is its schizophrenia: It’s half government statistics, half interviews with the downtrodden, and the link between the two is tenuous. Nor does the series make the slightest feint at finding an upside to an economy converting from manufacturing to service jobs. It explicitly and proudly ignores the service economy, on the grounds that the service economy doesn’t produce “good jobs” or provide the backbone for a strong defense.
“Who Stole the Dream?” takes on faith the connection between a trade deficit and high unemployment (a relationship that appears not to be borne out in any country in the developed world). It has a confused standard for judging what is high-tech and what is not. And it is given to the authors’ let’s-pretend-this-salt-shaker-is-the-Third-Armored-Division oversimplifications. “If the minimum wage had risen at the same rate [as the trade deficit],” they explain in one much-mocked passage, “a beginning hamburger flipper at McDonald’s would earn $ 129 an hour.”
Not much difference between it and “America: What Went Wrong?” But this time, without an economic crisis and an unpopular Republican administration, journalists were less restrained in their criticism. Newsweek’s Robert Samuelson called it “junk journalism.” The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, Jr. called it a “flotsam of barnacled dogma.” Most embarrassingly, the Seattle Times, which had made plans to syndicate the entire series, pulled it after the first column. As the paper’s executive editor Michael Fancher explained, “The premise was sweeping and provocative. It was also unsubstantiated, in the eyes of editors at the Seattle Times.”
Worse than any of this is that the brass at the Inquirer itself doesn’t believe in the series. While no one will say so on the record, many people at the paper think it stinks. Op-ed-page associate editor Mike Leary, asked about the spate of editorials and columns (including Samuelson’s) the Inquirer ran against the series, won’t come down on either side. “I’m a great admirer of Barlett and Steele. They have a superb record in journalism. They care about what they’re doing. That’s what they wrote and those are their conclusions. I have a different job, to encourage debate.” A good number of the op-eds written in response to the series, including two by editorial page editor Jane Eisner, praised its mission but conspicuously refrained from an out-and-out endorsement. Nor was there any endorsement in the editorial columns; a bloc on the editorial board considered the series an embarrassment. Even those who have a high regard for Barlett and Steele dismiss it as the same old song and dance, nothing more than a rehash of their previous work. “It’s Don and Jim’s greatest hits,” says an editor.
It’s this lack of faith that provides the gravamen of the case against the Inquirer, and against Barlett and Steele: that they ran with a poor article they didn’t believe in, in order to pander to a Pulitzer prize committee that awards its honors on an increasingly formulaic basis.
The stakes are high for the Inquirer, where circulation has been headed steadily downward in the last five years. The paper has an acclaimed recent history, much of it centered around the Pulitzer prize. Under Eugene Roberts, who became its executive editor in 1972, the Inquirer won its first Pulitzer ever in 1975 — for a Barlett and Steele feature on how the IRS trained its auditing guns on smaller taxpayers. (The pair won another Pulitzer in 1989, for yet another IRS expose.) By 1991, when Roberts left, the paper had won a total of 17 Pulitzers, many for the kind of Cecil B. DeMille-like multi-year, multi-part enterprise pieces in which Barlett and Steele specialize. It hasn’t won one since.
Now, few people accused the Inquirer of pandering for Pulitzers back when they were getting some; it’s rather like sexual harassment, under whose draconian rules the only sexual advances ever reported are “unwanted sexual advances.” But since Barlett and Steele won their last Pulitzer seven years ago, the Inquirer has seen its reputation for everything except political correctness drastically reduced, while dozens of its top journalists have fled.
“Much like the Washington Post after Watergate,” one editor opines, ” the Inquirer is in a state of detumescence.” When Roberts departed, two things went immediately awry. First, his loyal if aging staff of reporters had grown dependent on him for assignments and inspiration, and found themselves adrift. Second, and more important, Roberts had been a forceful (and resourceful) arguer with Knight-Ridder, the Inquirer’s notoriously frugal Miami-based parent company. Unsatisfied with the Inquirer’s single- digit profit margin, Knight-Ridder was constantly pressuring the paper to shrink its news hole and rein in its editorial expenses. Once Roberts was gone, the wall against corporate interference collapsed. Reporting travel was cut back, phone calls monitored, and reporters suddenly found themselves dealing with markedly fewer resources.
When Roberts went to the New York Times in 1994, the Inquirer, which had already been losing talent to the Times since the year before, began to hemorrhage it. Times-ward departures in recent years are well into double digits: Federal court correspondent Tim Weiner moved to the Times to cover the CIA. State political writer Kit Seelye went there to cover Congress. The Inquirer lost sportswriter Jere Longman, metro reporter Pam Belluck, city hall reporter Matt Purdy, and book critic Doreen Carvajal. Atlantic City correspondent David Cay Johnston went to cover the IRS. That’s a partial list and doesn’t include the dozens of writers who have moved to other papers. In all, 9 of the paper’s 17 Pulitzer winners have left.
What’s more, this was at the point when political correctness was infecting the Inquirer with a vengeance. The paper took a wishy-washy stance on the disciplining of a University of Pennsylvania student who had called a black carouser a “water buffalo,” ran an apology for an editorial urging that use of the Norplant contraceptive be part of future welfarereform packages, and (more recently) demanded that a “balancing” review be run when the paper’s regularly assigned review of Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism came in positive.
What’s more, Roberts’s successor Maxwell King announced a “quota” system under which, for the foreseeable future, half the Inquirer’s new hires would be women and half minorities. Whether because of the quota system or not, the paper’s most ambitious young reporters were increasingly disinclined to stay there. The final embarrassment came last spring, when two young reporters who had recently left the Inquirer’s “correspondent” (or internship) program — Joby Warrick of the Raleigh News and Observer and David Rohde of the Christian Science Monitor — won Pulitzers for public service and foreign correspondence respectively.
Barlett and Steele are the only heavy-hitting reporters left from the paper’s heyday. Barlett, 60, and Steele, 53, claim to have no politics, but there is a constant thread of populist anger at the powers-that-be that has run through all their articles, even since before they began working on economics. Given the strong industrial-laborite bias of their last two series, it’s not surprising that Steele worked for two years as a flack in the Washington offices of the Laborers’ International Union. The two started at the Inquirer on the same day in 1970 and the following year teamed on a series on federal mortgage programs. They have since collaborated on dozens of articles and five books, and have such a close working relationship that their writing styles have become indistinguishable. They spend almost no time together, each reporting and writing his own sections (in isolation) and editing the other’s. They almost never socialize, and their wives have not met.
Not surprisingly, Barlett and Steele’s blockbuster series were looked upon as magic bullets. One Pulitzer committee juror describes Roberts as the ” Marlin Perkins of Pulitzer fishing” and Barlett and Steele as his archetypal writers. “Roberts is the master of producing these preposterous series,” the juror says. “Among people who hand out Pulitzer prizes, it’s all ‘This must be high-quality stuff’ and ‘Barlett and Steele have awakened the people to the underside of American capitalism’ and blah-blah-blah.”
Having commissioned the series, the Inquirer sought to stoke interest in it, with a multimedia advertising blitz that cost them just under $ 500, 000, according to Inquirer public relations director Charles Fancher. The series fell short of the success of “America: What Went Wrong?” — 4,000 phone calls to the paper, according to Barlett, versus 20,000 for the earlier series. Not surprising, since those most subject to the depredations it describes tend not to read the Inquirer, only 19 percent of whose subscribers are blue-collar, according to the paper’s own market research. But Barlett and Steele say the mail and calls were running two to one in favor of the series, while deputy editor Gene Foreman says the paper’s Philadelphia Online service registered an unusually high number of hits on the days the series ran. It also gave the paper a circulation bump — about 30,000 readers on the Sundays it appeared, according to Foreman. (The biggest regular bump the Inquirer gets comes when the Eagles win, which pushes Monday sales up 10,000.)
The authors deny tailoring their work to the Pulitzer genre, and neither thinks the series is Pulitzer material anyway. “This thing doesn’t have a chance in the world,” says Steele. “This one wouldn’t stand a prayer of a Pulitzer,” says Barlett. “Very little truly controversial work has ever won the Pulitzer.”
Their appraisal is right but their reasoning wrong. The problem is not that their work is controversial but that it’s economically unsound. The article you hold in your hand is not the first to comment on both writers’ eerie capacity for economic non sequiturs. Take Barlett, when confronted with recent poll numbers showing that by a margin of 52-22, Americans are happy about the direction the country is going in, and don’t think of the “dream” as having been “stolen.” “Tuesday the government released its housing sales report,” says Barlett. “Housing sales are running at a record level, 800,000 annually. But bankruptcies are running at a million. So that good news is sometimes not what it’s cracked up to be.”
Or take Steele, discussing the pair’s earlier series “America: What Went Wrong?” “We really focused more on taxes,” Steele says. “Some people said, ‘You’re ignoring the fact that the rich pay more taxes than they ever have before.’ Well, as a group that’s true. But individually they don’t.” If the rich are shrinking into an oligarchy, how can that be true?
The predicament Barlett and Steele are in is not wholly their fault. One is reminded of a 17-year-old sports phenom or starlet getting fleeced by her agent. Barlett and Steele are solid journalists, biased perhaps, but skilled at researching in government documents and willing to do the hard legwork of interviewing. They have certainly done Pulitzer-caliber work in the past. Unfortunately, their increasingly desperate employers have allowed to them drift far from their area of competence and expertise, so they’ve wound up, willy-nilly, carrying water for the pundits of economic catastrophe.
The desperate Max King has tried to parry criticism by claiming Barlett and Steele are practicing a new type of journalism. “Conclusive journalism,” he calls it, although King has not been able to define it on the record, despite several tries. While King, on vacation, could not be reached to give it one more stab, none of the editors working under him has the foggiest idea what it means. Nor does Barlett or Steele. What it seems to mean is walking down to the waterfront, seeing that the ocean is two feet higher than it was an hour ago, and “concluding” that everyone in the country is eventually going to drown. Which is a fair conclusion to draw if you don’t know anything about tides.
by Christopher Caldwell
