THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603180178
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROSS C. REEVES
LENGTH: Long : 101 lines
BREAKING THE NEWS
How the Media Undermine Democracy
JAMES FALLOWS
Pantheon. 296 pp. $23.
In the initial chapters of the much-talked-about Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine Democracy, journalist James Fallows indicts the shallowness, hostility and buffoonery of television news celebrities.
So, what else is new?
As amusing as this criticism may be, it is hardly a revelation that TV news shows thrive on disasters, sound bites and strife. Few readers will be surprised by Fallows' claim that ``discussion programs'' such as ``Crossfire,'' ``The McLaughlin Group'' and ``The Capital Gang'' are pure entertainment designed to shed heat but no light.
Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a National Public Radio commentator, pushes beyond this easy indictment to attempt a unified theory of why American journalism is so awful. The result is a serving of warmed-over Marshall McLuhan and New Left thinking from the 1960s. To paraphrase Disraeli, Fallows proves to be a man of many ideas, which happen to be wrong.
Only in the book's final third, when he looks at the new ``public journalism,'' does Fallows add meaningfully to media criticism.
He begins with a jeremiad on how young people, ruined by college degrees and middle-class salaries, have lost the courage and skills of their journalistic forebears. From this he concludes, doubtless to the surprise of most conservatives, that journalists are defenders of bourgeois values and the rich.
There is more. According to Fallows, journalists increasingly have an eye on the riches of the lecture circuit. Since admission to this sacred hall requires celebrity, and celebrity comes only from exposure on political yellfests such as ``Crossfire'' journalists perforce have to tart up their reporting with sensationalism and vivid imagery.
From there it only gets worse. Once the fallen journalist earns $40-$50,000 to share wisdom from the dais of the Whatnot Convention, he or she pulls punches when the Whatnot industry becomes a news story.
That Fallows can't cite an example of this occurring doesn't stop him. Nor does he bother to explain how someone like ABC's Sam Donaldson, who makes millions a year, can be bought off with an honorarium. Instead he scurries to that last refuge of scoundrels and moralists alike - the ``appearance of impropriety.''
The author makes much of what he describes as the ``attitude'' and ``snarl'' of contemporary reporting. Journalists are rarely subject to second-guessing, he argues, if they take a skeptical or cynical tone when presenting issues. They only come in for criticism when they undertake the far more risky and difficult task of presenting material in a positive light. He summarizes:
``Because of the conventions of modern `attitude' journalism, because of the fear of losing the public's attention if they stopped sounding snappy even for a moment, because of the ratings experts' advice that coverage of disasters and crimes would keep viewers hooked, because of a lack of a sense of responsibility for how public life turned out, the leading journalists of the 1990s presented a view of public life that was much bleaker than the journalists themselves believed to be true.''
The anecdotes and pop logic of the first two-thirds of Breaking the News, apparently intended to explain the disconnection of the public from democratic institutions, almost obscure the importance of the third part. Abruptly abandoning discussion of the national media, and mercifully switching from original thinking to plain reporting, Fallows examines the way local newspapers are developing healthier relationships with their readers.
Leading metropolitan dailies, including The Virginian-Pilot - editor Cole C. Campbell is quoted at length - are trying to reverse-engineer the news process. The new ``public journalists'' use the newspaper as a forum for community concerns rather than as a transmission belt for managed information put out by the national media, the political establishment and the spin doctors and consultants.
With public journalism, reporters are charged with learning from citizens what their concerns are, articulating these concerns and then providing citizens with the information they need to find solutions. The press no longer acts as an educated overseer who screens and shapes information for public use.
Whether this new ``public'' role sacrifices objectivity, whether journalists make good surrogates for citizens, and whether public journalism can be implemented without dumbing down the news have been issues for debate since John Dewey and Walter Lippman squared off over 50 years ago. They are the transforming issues within the newspaper industry today. But scant attention has been paid to them in the media.
As Fallows concludes: ``(T)oday's journalists can choose: Do they want merely to enterain the public or to engage it?'' On the answer to that simple question, he says, hinges the future of democracy in a complex world. Too bad he buried it in his book. MEMO: Ross C. Reeves is an attorney with Willcox & Savage in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: MIRKO ILIC illustration
from the book jacket for ``Breaking the News''
by CNB