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
Extract the names from this source
Back to search page