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Articles by Dean Starkman | Email the Author

 

1. The Audit

   Shaky Writing Hurts Good Bloomberg D.C. Reporting

   October 9, 2009 10:32 AM

   The headline on this Bloomberg story says Derivatives Lobby Links With New Democrats to Blunt Obama Plan. That's true as far as it goes, but in fact, it's really Barney Frank who is at the center of this story... Continue reading

2. The Audit

   WaPo Boosts 401(k)s for No Good Reason

   October 8, 2009 10:42 AM

   A main beef I have with personal finance reporting—beyond its constant purveying of banalities ("diversify!";"buy and hold!")—is that it generally focuses on providing readers with a range of rotten options within a lousy system, rather than on questioning the whole... Continue reading

3. The Audit

   Audit Interview: The FT’s Lionel Barber

   October 8, 2009 08:29 AM

   Among the discomfiting changes sweeping through the financial news business in the U.S. has been the rising influence of what we here at The Audit call the Anglo-Australian model. The most jarring manifestation was the 2007 purchase of The... Continue reading

4. The Audit

   WSJ Is Good on Medical Transparency

   October 6, 2009 09:08 AM

   How's that expression go?—"Sunlight is the best disinfectant." The Journal's Thomas M. Burton this morning shows Louis Brandeis's adage is literally true in Pennsylvania, where a state body publishes hospitals' "medical outcomes" data, with the result being that embarrassed, poorly... Continue reading

5. The Audit

   A Good Food-Safety Investigation from the Times

   October 5, 2009 09:25 AM

   Credit is due the Times and veteran investigative reporter Michael Moss for a painstaking and stomach-turning account yesterday of the nation's hamburger supply chain and compromised food safety regime. This is an old-fashioned, time-consuming newspaper investigation, of, it... Continue reading

6. The Audit

   Of Buts and Bloomberg News

   October 2, 2009 11:04 AM

   Bloomberg News top editor Matt Winkler raised eyebrows around the newswire/data provider the other week with his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on transparency and the Fed. It wasn't the substance of the piece—He says in the interests... Continue reading

7. The Audit

   Urban-Affairs Reporting in the WSJ

   October 1, 2009 10:14 AM

   The Journal deserves a nod for a good inside-the-paper story on Detroit public schools' using free food, celebrity visits and a chance to win an IPod and other prizes to get kids into school on a day when a... Continue reading

8. The Audit

   More Journalism Green Shoots

   September 25, 2009 12:28 PM

   The news this morning of a $5 million slug of money for a new non-profit local news organization in the Bay Area, together with other scraps of news, and anecdotal chatter here and there, has me thinking that while... Continue reading

9. The Audit

   Harper’s Long Miss on AIG

   September 25, 2009 09:20 AM

   I was standing at the 116th Street subway stop looking for something to read when a trained started to pull in, so I grabbed Harper's October issue with a big picture of a fire over the headline "Too Big to... Continue reading

10. The Audit

    James Grant’s Twaddle on Detroit

    September 25, 2009 08:38 AM

    Looking over the vast landscape of foreclosures in New York City graphically illustrated at the Queens Museum of Art show on the predations of real estate finance the other day, I couldn't help but think about a long... Continue reading

11. The Audit

    Leonhardt’s Deft Med Mal Treatment

    September 24, 2009 03:25 PM

    Times's economics columnist David Leonhardt deserves a tip of the doctor's mirrors for delving into the messy business of separating fantasy from reality when it comes to medical malpractice suits' impact on medical costs. He offers a reasoned and... Continue reading

12. The Audit

    Bloomberg Further Hammers FDIC Credibility

    September 24, 2009 10:38 AM

    Audit Interviewee Jon Weil, the Bloomberg finance columnist, has a good piece this morning noting that the bank regulator is in deep financial trouble, primarily and self-evidently because of its own unwillingness or inability to regulated its insureds.... Continue reading

13. The Audit

    Go to Queens Museum, Get Mad

    September 24, 2009 09:03 AM

    Business press practitioners and their readers in the New York area who are suffering from crisis fatigue have a few days left to seek inspiration at the Queens Museum of Art, where an exhibit on, of all things, real-estate finance,... Continue reading

14. The Audit

    Bloomberg Keeps Heat on FDIC

    September 23, 2009 10:30 AM

    Yesterday, the Orange County Register banged away at bank regulators' bizarre six-year paralysis in the face of IndyMac's blatantly unsafe and unsound lending practices. Today Bloomberg follows with a good account of clay-footed regulators' too-late shutdown of New... Continue reading

15. The Audit

    Labor Gets a Word in Edgewise

    September 23, 2009 09:46 AM

    The Times gets credit this morning for initiating and prominently displaying a story on organized labor, or as I like to think of it, the unicorn of the business press. True, working people don't count, or so I must... Continue reading

16. The Audit

    Muckraking 1, Banksters 0

    September 23, 2009 08:12 AM

    The announcement yesterday by the Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase that they would end some of their most egregious abuses in the overdraft check protection racket is a press victory, plain and simple. As we'll see below, the... Continue reading

17. The Audit

    WSJ Correction: Allies Not “Roiled” After All

    September 22, 2009 06:00 PM

    Reading Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, we are finding, requires some amount of Kremlinology. What is happening is visible for all to see; what is less apparent is why. On this Cold War note, we point to a correction in... Continue reading

18. The Audit

    O.C. Register Stays on IndyMac Madness

    September 22, 2009 09:19 AM

    The Orange County Register's Mathew Padilla has an item about a newly released FDIC inspector general's report saying the agency's bank examiners were not only concerned, but camped out at the thrift as early as 2001 (h/t Calculated... Continue reading

19. The Audit

    McClatchy’s “Unconfirmed Reports” About Criminal Probes

    September 22, 2009 06:11 AM

    McClatchy asks a darned good question in a recent news story: "Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer?" Unfortunately, not all of its answers measure up. The story is a useful survey of the status... Continue reading

20. The Audit

    The Observer Advances the Ball on BoA

    September 21, 2009 09:44 AM

    Charlotte's Rick Rothacker scooped the world over the weekend with a story saying the FBI has been probing Bank of America's misbegotten acquisition of subprime investment bank Merrill Lynch for about six months. The big business news outlets... Continue reading

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