A Little Perspective Goes a Long Way in Completing a Story

By Vandana Sinha
November 17, 2004 09:22 AM

Often times, the best reporting takes readers one giant step backward.

It lets them see the world with a wide-angle lens. It gives a broader snapshot of the business world, makes them see that elusive Big Picture.

Business writers do so by offering context. By putting people, places and things in perspective. By connecting vague, scattered dots until they take on Monet-like meaning.

That is, as all recommended things in life, harder than it sounds. It's never easy to stop and step back during a daily rush-hour beat. But context is crucial, ensuring in part that you don't write mountain stories from molehill events -- or vice versa.

Think of the presidential election -- truly a tough story to keep in perspective: A few furious months of industrial-strength stumping and spinning that ultimately decide the country's future direction. With all the back-and-forth political serves, it's hard to catch the overall score, let alone every foul.

Perhaps the biggest business molehill-turned-mountain was that the economy would decide this election. Little did business reporters foresee folks voting with their Bibles rather than paychecks, but that underscores that what reporters consider a big deal might not be all that big to our readers.

Andrew Cassel, an economy columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has some simple advice: "You've got to work," he says. "You've got to constantly learn and ask questions and report. There's no magic to it. It's doing your homework.

"When you see something going on, ask what it represents," Cassel suggests. "Are you seeing a one-time event? Are you seeing something that always happens? Is this a change from a historical pattern? Is this something that's statistically significant?"

Ask yourself, he says: What is the evidence here? How strong is this case?

Consider history -- a Red Sox championship would matter little if the last one weren't during Woodrow Wilson's administration. Consider geography -- California polls would rate the President much differently than would South Dakotans. Consider enormity -- how notable really are Britney Spears' latest nuptials next to a war overseas?

In some recent columns, Cassel sprinkles realism into the president's economic role and globalism into the American economic outlook.

In one, a veritable plea for nationwide perspective, he laments over the "split families, shattered friendships" and "talk of moving to New Zealand " this election cycle has inspired.

After the elections, "decisions will once again become complex, with nuance, degree and multiple dimensions affecting every policy or program," he writes. "When it comes to the economy, all presidents' powers are limited."

So neither candidate can truly guarantee the interminable happiness he promised during the campaign.

Clearly, Cassel is able to give the big picture here, to inject a little bit of reality into quite a bit of insanity. He even called a prospective Bush win four days early, based on none other than the more grounded markets. "While pollsters pop out data like popcorn, and pundits pompously prognosticate," he writes, "ordinary traders and investors are quietly offering what may be the best day-to-day electoral gauge going."

He takes that giant step backward and still keeps his balance in a political current and blogging tidal wave that swept many of us down the wrong river. Resist that current. Challenge preconceived notions. Just because five-dozen colleagues report something, does not make it the full story.

Cassel points to another columnist, David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal's deputy Washington bureau chief, as someone who understands perspective, and I agree.

Wessel's columns accomplish in a 10-minute read what we all wish either candidate could during two-hour debates: Puncture rhetoric and tell concrete details -- pros and rationale, cons and consequences -- about their plans on health care, taxes, Social Security, jobs and the deficit.

He straightens out spin from both sides. He examines where the last decade's trends have taken us, and forecasts as far forward as a few generations on how today's deficit will hike our grandchildren's tax rate. Wessel gets the wide-angle lens.

"Making scorecards of what happened on any president's watch is easy, but easily misleading," he writes in a column setting economic records straight. "Presidential economic policies do matter; it is just that effects don't show for a decade, maybe even a generation. So tear up those job-tally scorecards."

Presidents don't create jobs. The dollar isn't best for the country when it's at its strongest. Outsourcing can actually create more U.S. jobs in the long run. All true statements, and yet blasphemy to business reporters who reject the Big Picture.

Take a broader view of these issues, and you start seeing a different truth. Think of it this way: In a bowlful of black beads, even a beige one will look brilliantly white.

But that doesn't change the fact that it's not.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism