The enforcers thesis

Abstract Business journalism is often criticized for failing to reach beyond a narrow audience of stock brokers and business executives, even though news about business affects the broader society. This critique is more pronounced for a genre of journalism known as the trade press or business‐to‐business media, news organizations that cover specific industries such as defense or trucking. New research shows robust investigative and accountability journalism in the trade press field, reporting that angered important industry players but was socially beneficial since it identified bad actors in the business. This article offers a new theoretical construct, the Enforcers Thesis, to describe conditions that support investigative and accountability journalism in the trade press and how such reporting can advance socially beneficial goals. The Enforcers Thesis describes how business reporters focus on normative ethical practices in industry and tend to report on companies that violate those norms. This process results in accountability reporting, where journalists effectively enforce a code of industry conduct or secular morality by identifying socially harmful business actors.