On Sunday, March 31, The New York Times published a dramatic indictment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Written by Ian Urbina, the story revealed OSHA to be essentially powerless in dealing with working conditions that threaten workers' health and lives. Much of the story dealt with Royale Comfort Seating in North Carolina, and its unwillingness to stop using a dangerous chemical known as n-propyl bromide, or nPB.
Dean Starkman, who runs The Audit, the business-news section of the Columbia Journalism Review, found the series "magisterial" and "a great example of agenda-setting public-interest reporting of a kind that, sad to say, is becoming increasingly scarce among mainstream business news outlets."
That is where I almost stopped reading. I'm weary of complaints about the death of long-form journalism. I've written before that it was never a common thing in newspapers, and reports of its death are premature–because it has been terminally ill for decades.
I'm glad, however, that I did not stop reading. Starkman, unlike many who complain about the death of good journalism, linked to data to back up his claim. The charts and graphs he shows here make very clear that the number of long stories in a few of the nation's top newspapers has declined sharply, with only a few exceptions. "The loss is real," he writes, and one has no choice but to agree.
Despite that backdrop, and despite his admiration for Urbina's story, he has some reservations. Before I get into that, I should say that Urbina's story is well reported and beautifully written, and it should lead to immediate changes at OSHA. One of the things I found discouraging about Urbina's report is that OSHA officials and others mostly agreed to speak to him, with responses that amounted to a collective shrug. Yeah, it's a mess, they mostly said. But these people need jobs. It seems that no amount of outrage that might be engendered by Urbina's story would be enough to provoke any change–or to pose any threat to the managers and government bureaucrats who could do something about the poisoning of workers. Human lives are cheap in this part of North Carolina, apparently.
Now, back to Starkman. He likes the subject matter of the story, the anecdotes, and the documents that Urbina collected to tell his story. What he doesn't like is the story's "framing."
Urbina and the Times, Starkman writes, blame the workers' illnesses on the difficulty of solving the problem, on unintended consequences, and failures by the EPA and OSHA. That isn't right, he contends. "This story—like so many others—is about a company using demonstrably dangerous practices for costs reasons, and a compromised regulatory regime. Period. Full stop." And he blames the Times for a "strange ambivalence about calling out business malpractice and regulatory failure."
I think that's a tough case to make. The story should be devastating to the company involved, to OSHA, and to the EPA. The ambivalence rests not with the Times, but with the American public, I contend. I can't argue that I have data to back up this claim, but I think it must be at least partly true. Horror stories about unhealthy workplaces and regulatory failures are everywhere. Most of them do not appear in the long-form stories the Starkman laments are in decline. These horror stories appear in 400-word AP stories that nobody runs, or on advocacy websites that many people don't trust.
We don't want to lose long-form stories. We don't want to see a decline in investigative stories. But we need new ways to punch through the public's apathy and governmental inertia. Maybe, just maybe, in some circumstances, tweets and posts that generate storms on the web can do that better than a long-form piece on the front page of The New York Times.
-Paul Raeburn
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