Introduction

As the United States enters the post-Cold War era, more often than not the most important stories are financial ones. Whether it is the growing deficit that threatens our economy, or international white-collar financial crime that threatens our institutions, complex business and financial stories have ever more profound national and international implications. Reporting these complex stories is one of the great challenges facing the media today.

On May 29, 1992, The Annenberg Washington Program sponsored a half-day forum, "The Media and Complex News Stories." The conference focused on business stories and investigative reporting, using the savings and loan and BCCI scandals as case studies.

These stories are alike in many ways. Both are complex, involving numbers, financial transactions, and business fraud. They are further complicated because they evolved over many years and involved numerous people and places; in the case of BCCI, moreover, most of the people and places are foreign and unfamiliar.

Both BCCI and the savings and loan crisis are similar in other respects, as well. Both stories required extensive investigative reporting. In fact, the media played an essential role in uncovering these scandals; nevertheless, though reporters advanced the stories at several key junctures, the media were forced to turn to the government for additional essential information. Finally, the two stories are similar in that editors found it difficult to decide whether they were political or business stories -- an issue which clearly affected the extent and impact of media coverage.

Conference participants analyzed BCCI and the savings and loan crisis case studies to define the various obstacles to the presentation of complex news stories. While no clear consensus emerged as to which obstacles caused the greatest problems, two sets of barriers emerged: institutional obstacles, which arise from the structure and incentives in the print and broadcast media, and cultural barriers, which hinder the presentation of complex stories, especially business stories. Editorial oversight for content and location created a major institutional barrier for reporters who hoped to present substantial, front-page articles on the scandals. Cultural factors, such as the increasingly high concept, sound-bite approach to news and the changing expectations of the public toward the role of the media, constitute a potentially greater obstacle to in-depth coverage of complex news stories.

I've always considered the term complex news story to be kind of an oxymoron. Every time I see the word 'complex' or 'tangled' in a headline, I take this as a tip-off that the reporter and the editor never quite got to the bottom of it. And I'm probably going to be disappointed if I read the story and maybe I should wait for the next day or the day after to get the full story.

"That is not to say that there are no complex flim-flams and incredibly turgid criminal conspiracies out there. But to make them a news story, I think it's our job to cut through all that, connect the dots, if you will, explain to our readers what the story is. And that has to be in simple terms.

Brooks Jackson
Correspondent
Cable News Network (CNN)