Fallows, James. Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. 296 pages.

James Fallows was a draft-dodger at Harvard, a Nader's Raider in Georgia, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a magazine editor for the Washington Monthly and then the Texas Monthly, the chief speech writer for Jimmy Carter, the Washington editor of Atlantic Monthly, a pundit on National Public Radio, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and most recently, the editor of U.S. News and World Report, owned by real-estate tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman (who also owns Atlantic Monthly and the New York Daily News, and is also a CFR member). Fallows thinks (this just in!) that journalists have grown too close to the mighty and powerful, and the profession is corrupted. He writes well and has many trenchant observations about today's pathetic news coverage. He criticizes journalists (such as Cokie Roberts) who become media personalities, and then cash in on the lecture circuit. Nothing he writes is disagreeable, but the last chapter is strange. Here Fallows plugs "public journalism," a vague movement that fancies itself as grass-roots, but has yet to find a constituency.

Ultimately this book is only half the story, because there's no discussion of the private-sector centralization and profiteering behind our mass media. Fallows is concerned mostly with the style of journalism. He shows no awareness of infrastructure, and no class consciousness.
ISBN 0-679-44209-X

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