The Business & Media Institute’s Director Explains Himself

And very well.

My favorite Q&A from the e-mail interview with Dan Gainor, the organization’s director, is this one (bold in answer is mine):

8. What do you see as the biggest issues in business journalism today?

I’ll say two: The first might surprise you because I’ll say audience. Who are business stories written for? Investors? Owners? Workers? Depending on that answer, you know how to write. Too many stories try to do a little bit of everything. The result is a mess. Unemployment goes down and workers are happy but businessmen aren’t. How do you write that story? Usually, it’s written from the consumer angle as good news. Wage drops are a worker problem and wage increases spur inflation – so both results end up bad news. A new business might displace an old one – which do you focus on?

The other problem is the dreaded B-word everyone hates talking about – bias. It’s the big freakin’ elephant in the room. Everyone has biases and opinions. Most journalists are inherently suspicious of wealth and power even in their own organizations, so that sets them up to be antagonists to business. But unions also are wealthy and powerful, and government is more so. You could say the same about trial lawyers and more. Everybody has an agenda. A good reporter shouldn’t embrace one side more than another. Until journalists accept that this is a problem and work to fix it, the American public will continue to lose confidence.

I’m going to include a micro-rant on this: The first publication, network or whatever that realizes this wins big. If a major media outlet really starts to analyze how it puts together stories, how they are presented and spun and tries hard to get all of the stakeholders (as much as I hate that word) into the process, they will be the first ones to really win back credibility. Nobody I know wants a conservative monopoly on the press or a solely pro-business press. What they want is the media to tell the story of life here in America without spin or agenda – and that’s darn hard.