Good stories gone bad

Good stories gone bad
When things go wrong, journalists have a role to play: going back, identifying poor decisions and people who might have been in the wrong job. Those kinds of stories are well worth publishing.

But there is a growing tendency among some journalists to engage in finger-pointing exercises. Magazines, in particular, have tended to confuse muckraking with guilt-raking.

I recall a conversation with a magazine journalist who cheerfully acknowledged that any proposal for a company profile required either a negative spin or a positive spin. If the proposal was balanced-pointing out some good things, some not so good-his editors invariably rejected it, this writer said. That kind of Darwinian selection has skewed business journalism away from the in-depth fact finding that is so valuable.

Early this summer Fortune magazine ran a long piece about Rambus Inc., drawing heavily on the court record in the Rambus v. Infineon trial in the U.S. District Court in Richmond, Va. Fortune's story led the reader through some of the more important moments of a significant trial. But several times the author stopped in midthought to point a long, bony finger at Rambus executives, accusing them of falling into a pit of greed and avarice. An odd comment for a magazine named Fortune.

A recent Business Week cover story on Motorola also comes to mind. The authors did a tremendous job of digging into Motorola's failed reorganization, which had temporarily added another layer of bureaucracy to a company already well-known for its caution.

What bothered me was the article's underlying theme that CEO Chris Galvin should be kicked upstairs and made chairman. It appeared as if the editors at Business Week had decided beforehand that the article's premise would be that Galvin belonged in the chairman's role.

Another round of finger pointing occurred when the Internet-centric magazine The Industry Standard went bankrupt. Pundits were quick to accuse the editors of having indulged in too many open-house parties and similar excesses. Granted, the magazine's publishers may have tried to create a publishing empire based on their early successes, but that's poor business management, not a moral failing akin to Hitler's invasion of Poland.

Journalists have a responsibility to dig, dig, dig and tell an interesting story. Good journalism goes bad, however, when the facts are filtered to match the "spin" of the story, and guilt-rather than responsibility-is assigned to people who simply may have made the wrong moves.