BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy [Hardcover]

James Fallows (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 16, 1996

At last a persuasive explanation of what's gone wrong with the American media--and what can be done about it. Fallows details the ways in which the current style of news coverage engenders a sense of futility in the American public about our ability to influence our society. He reveals how the reigning practices evolved and whose interests are served. National ads/media.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A lot of big-shot journalists didn't like this book, a systematic jeremiad about the current sad state of American political journalism. For instance, both the New York Times op-ed page and the New Yorker took pains to excoriate the book and its author--pretty good hints that Fallows is onto something. His point is that greed and intellectual sloth have fostered a political media elite that increasingly focuses on spin and ignores substance at the very time when solving the country's real problems requires all possible nuance.

From Publishers Weekly

Fallows's rousing jeremiad is an important beacon for everyone concerned about the news media's poor performance in helping the public make sane choices about the way we live, work and govern. The Atlantic Monthly's Washington editor argues that growing bottom-line pressure?on newspapers struggling to survive, and on TV newscasters for ratings?has made reporting a cynical game increasingly dominated by image over substance and by overpaid star reporters. Domestic news coverage, instead of helping people to understand, cope with and even control events that affect them, focuses on scandal, spectacle and political squabbles. Reporters, says Fallows, display a strong if unconscious bias in favor of the rich and well-off over the have-nots. News coverage of international affairs, in his estimate, is riddled with projections of American concerns and assumptions. Fallows, himself a frequent guest on shows like Meet the Press and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, blasts TV talk shows and the lecture circuit, which, in his opinion, breed polarization and overstatement while trivializing the issues. He closes with a look at the "public journalism" movement, led by Wichita Eagle editor Davis Merritt and New York University communications scholar Jay Rosen, whose goal is to reconnect people to the public life of their communities. Buttressed by a wealth of examples, Fallows's points are well taken. First serial to Atlantic; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 296 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (January 16, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067944209X
• ISBN-13: 978-0679442097
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,289,907 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Terrific & Penetrating Look At How The Media Fails Us!, September 5, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Paperback)

Few authors are as capable of approaching the unenviable task of explaining the otherwise baffling devolution in both the content and context of the mass media's coverage of the news as brilliantly as is noted journalist James Fallows in this literate, scathing, and thought-provoking broadside against his fellow journalists and the organizations they work for. By illuminating the specific circumstances attending the startling transformation in terms of the way news is viewed and covered by the media, he consistently gives readers reason for concern, and often for alarm. For example, Fallows contends that the viewing public increasingly distrusts the media because the public recognizes they can no longer depend on the media to provide the essential information citizens need to make sense out of current events and the world at large.

In a carefully constructed look at how this has happened, Fallows masterfully describes how several aspects of media's coverage of the news has had the net effect of its become more of an effort to entertain and less an exercise in edifying and informing the public in an objective and disinterested fashion. As a result, the media increasingly presents public life in terms of a "depressing spectacle" rather than in its proper context as one of several vital aspects of a vibrant democratic experiment in progress. By concentrating almost exclusively on those more entertaining elements of the news involves conflict or controversy, the media offers us a glossy, superficial and profoundly inaccurate perspective of the often intricately complicated world outside our doors, and in the process makes the world even less comprehensible to those of us attempting to make sense of it all.

Fallows argues that at least part of this process is propelled by the phenomenon of corporate acquisition of news agencies by large conglomerates whose concern for "the bottom line" has corrupted the news organization's fabled ability to maintain objectivity and disinterest. This results in concerns for competitive ratings, and a desperate attempt to compete with more traditional entertainment programs for audience share. As a result, news programs go for what is shocking, flashy, and provocative, so that "what bleeds, leads" the evening's news coverage. In a similar financial concern for confining costs, a plethora of quasi-news programs featuring "talking heads" featuring well known journalists like Robert Novak who ostensibly discuss the news but are actually offering their contrived punditry for our entertainment. In such a world dominated by a script requiring conflict and controversy, politicians are covered like sports stars, and all political actions, from attempts to pass healthcare legislation to decisions to bomb Iraq, are viewed strictly in terms of their consequence for the politicians involved and seldom discussed or debated in terms of their specifics or substantive elements.

Yet clever parlor talk by pontificating pundits does little to help us comprehend or interpret current events or important social, economic, or political issues; in this way our overflowing servings of political entertainment disguised as public service are actually obstacles to public awareness. It is this unintended consequence of the change in the news that Fallows is most concerned with, for to the extent the media becomes an element in managing the news rather than a disinterested purveyor of it, it becomes a potentially anti-democratic vehicle for anyone clever enough and cynical enough to manipulate it. In this sense this book is a call to arms, and a compassionate plea to his colleagues to correct the serious dysfunctions now visiting professional journalism. This is an important book, and one I heartily recommend to all citizens concerned with how the media is increasingly abrogating their civic responsibilities in favor of serving their own parochial secular interests.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb book on our most important national issue!, January 14, 2004

By 

Tracy Marks (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Paperback)

Appalled at the biases, distortions and omissions in the media, which have been worsening since 9-11, I recently launched on a campaign of study in regard to learning about the deterioration of the media and the influence of corporate control - and what we can do to counter it. This is one of the best, most informative and most readable of the six books on the subject I've read. I can't emphasize enough how important it is, how much our corporate-run media influence political thinking, decisionmaking and voting and influence not only the outcome of elections but the agenda and actions of politicians - and how motivated we need to become in order to counter it, to become informed about political realities rather than propaganda and myth, and as a country, to become more of a democracy and less of a plutocracy. The biggest difficult we face is that the media itself is not likely to publicize its own corruption, and is actively blocking attempts of people concerned with these issues inform the public. I also highly recommend the books on media disinformation and reform by Robert McChesney, including his mini-books Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy and Our Media, Not Theirs.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative and Accurate Account of Politcal Journalism, August 14, 2000

By 

Anne Grossman (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Paperback)

Fallows does a great job of using simple language to convey the complex issues that introduce themself in political journalism. He is surely looking out for the best interests of the public and the values of American democracy in this text. Reading this book will make you a more conscientious citizen, voter, and newspaper reader. The facts that he reveals about journalism should be known by all, and he writes with genuine concern for the state of a fragile American democracy and tainted political journalism. I would reccomend it for both academic and entertainment purposes.