Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy Book

I have been a big fan of James Fallows since his days at The Atlantic Monthly in the '80s and '90s. I knew that Fallows was a media critic, as I associate him with the idea that journalism changed for the worse when it went from being a working-class occupation to a middle- or upper-middle-class career, especially after the 1960s. He alleged that formerly reporters and the people they interviewed had nothing in common socio-economically and that made for more critical and objective reporting. Through the late 20th century it became progressively more the case that the reporters and the people they covered would have gone to college together, thus forming an insider community on both sides of the microphone, to the detriment of news coverage.

In a way, this is the jumping off point for Breaking the News, where he implies that Walter Lippman is responsible for this trend. In this 1996 book, Fallows criticizes the news media for covering all topics as conflict. He further alleges that they use their vaunted objectivity as an excuse to dodge responsibility for how covering everything as conflict affects the people's relationship with the government. He pins a certain amount of the blame for the American disengagement from public life on the media itself, the very industry that is supposed to connect them with the civic sphere and with one another.

A disspiriting, not to say depressing, aspect of reading a book published in 1996, during the very end of the 2020 election is to realize how accurate and current-seeming many of Fallows's complaints remain. He has been a frequent contributor to NPR over the years, and public radio is praised in these pages, but I have been listening to it regularly since well before this book was written, and over the years they have slid into the same pattern as commercial media: they are obsessed with conflict. After some elected official makes a statement, they now have a strong tendency ask each other "how is this going to play?" rather than "how does this actually address the issue?"

In a chapter called "The Gravy Train" Fallows takes journalists to task for spending too much time on television. He documents the shift in the tenor of political talk shows over the decades from a substantial discussion of issues to the equivalent of over-caffeinated Monday-morning quarterbacking. He pins much of the blame on The McLaughlin Group and Crossfire, who have substituted conversation for a polarized trading of insults and zingers.

He is particularly unhappy with a triangular pattern that he identifies as "buckraking"; print journalists write witty, barbed opinion pieces that get them on the television talk shows, where they perform in an animated manner in front of an audience much larger than their readership. This makes them attractive on the lecture circuit. The pay for television appearances and lecture gigs significantly augments their income, but also draws them away from covering the news and into the world of entertainment, where conflict most definitely plays.

Fallows argues that the buckraking circus as a tainting effect beyond the participants and on the whole of media. On the one hand, the general public sees these media personalities less as reasonable providers of information and more as low-rent entertainers, pale versions of movie, music, and sports stars. This decreases their credibility as journalists. On the other hand, within the media the journalists who are not on the buckraking circuit begin to imitate the style that got their colleagues there. This is partly in order to get in on the action, but also because the buckrakers become role models in a society more interested in entertainment than reasoned discourse.

Three-quarters of the book is a critique of the media. In the last quarter Fallows offers a solution in the form of "public journalism." In the 1990s Jay Rosen of New York University and several editors at mid-size newspapers around the country abandoned the conflict model and began to invest in surveying their readership systematically to discover their actual concerns. Their newspapers began to run front page stories that explained the science behind a particular environmental problem, for example, rather than how a particular public official's statements about that issue played with his political opponents. The response from the public was quite favorable and the journalists felt better about themselves too.

It should be noted, however, that one of the chains that Fallows lauded in 1996 for embracing public journalism, the Knight-Ridder chain, was purchased by the McLatchey group in 2006, which immediately shut down many of the former Knight-Ridder papers. In other words, journalism has continued down the road that Fallows saw it going, Americans continued to disengage with public life and be less and less informed about the issues. And then in 2016 they elected Donald Trump, a reality television star, as president of the United States.

Breaking the News is a sobering read. This is in part because Fallows is such a humane person and refuses to really savage any of the journalists he criticizes. And yet, he cites such damning evidence for their complicity in the grievous despoiling, if not destruction, of his profession and our democracy. Margaret Atwood's Handmaiden's Tale leapt back into the spotlight during the Trump presidency because it seemed so prescient and apt (and spawned an excellent television show). In a more low-key way, Fallows's book is worth reading 26 years after it was first issued for the same reasons.