Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All [Hardcover]

Tom Fenton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

In his long journalistic experience as the senior European correspondent for CBS News, Tom Fenton has reported on everything from the fall of the Shah of Iran to the movements of al Qaeda throughout Europe -- a story he was tracking before 9/11. And in the three years since that fateful day, he has come to a sobering realization: Our once-noble news media -- and network TV news in particular -- have abdicated their responsibility to the American people, and endangered us in the process.

As Fenton points out, much of the United States still depends on the networks for most of its information about the world. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the networks gutted their news-gathering operations -- just as the old Cold War status quo was shattering -- leaving behind an unstable and violent new world order. Once a public service, the network news was commandeered by its corporate parents as a cash cow. In-depth reporting on critical issues was replaced with saturation coverage of sensationalistic crime stories and simpleminded "news you can use." Even as genocide spread through Africa -- and Islamic terror festered in the Middle East -- international reporting disappeared almost entirely from the airwaves. And Americans were left uninformed, unable to judge the accuracy of politically biased stories (on both sides of the spectrum), and utterly unprepared for the war on terror about to descend on their doorstep.

In Bad News, Tom Fenton offers a fiery indictment of just how far "the news" has fallen. As a frequent voice in the wilderness himself -- who fought in vain to interest CBS in an Osama bin Laden interview in the 1990s -- Fenton reveals a news-gathering environmentgutted by corporate bottom-lining bottom-feeders, staffed by dilatory producers and executives (who dismissed important stories as depressing or obscure), and dangerously dependent on images and information gathered by third-party sources. In hard-hitting interviews with Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw, he exposes how even the anchors themselves believed they were outlandishly compensated -- while quality coverage was being slashed. And he charges that the news media must lose its entertainment-industry mindset and reestablish its role as a keeper of the public trust.

"This is not just a book," writes Fenton. "This is the beginning of a campaign to galvanize America. We need more and better news. Our lives depend on it."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What makes this discourse on the current state of broadcast news such a gripping read is not that it critiques the establishment—it's the specific nature of Fenton's complaint. The author, who's been reporting for CBS News for 34 years, accuses the industry not just of having a political bias, but of being supremely lazy and incompetent. Fenton shares his own opinions, but buttresses them with sharp interviews from the Big Three (Brokaw, Rather, Jennings) and elder statesman Cronkite, who, not surprisingly, is most forthcoming, admitting he doesn't even watch the CBS Evening News anymore: "Nothing there but crime and sob sister material." Fenton lays out the hows and whys of what he sees as the problems present in today's news media (largely broadcast news) with exacting logic. After the end of the Cold War, an unfortunate confluence of factors—including the lack of a pervasive threat that might keep audiences attuned to foreign news, a growing herd mentality within the media, and "cutbacks, bottom-line fever, and CEO-mandated news criteria"—resulted in an industrywide dumbing-down and a decline in ratings. Along with this well-structured explanation of what's wrong and how to fix it, Fenton also provides a convenient guide to the biggest underreported stories and why they're important. (Mar. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Thomas Fenton has been a foreign correspondent for CBS News since 1970; prior to that he worked for the Baltimore Sun, after an earlier career as an officer in the U.S. Navy. In his career with CBS he has covered nearly every major European and Middle Eastern story of the day -- from the 1966 Six Day War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has covered hundreds of international summits, natural disasters, riots, the civil war in Northern Ireland, famine in Africa, the intifada in Palestine, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the death of Princess Diana, the end of Communism in the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and now the new American crusade against terror.

Fenton is the recipient of four Emmy Awards, a Columbia University Dupont Award, a Georgetown University Weintal Award, and numerous Overseas Press Club awards for his reporting.

Fenton and his wife have two children, both of whom have followed him into the television news business. He is currently based in London, England.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition first Printing edition (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060797460
• ISBN-13: 978-0060797461
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #886,193 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 76 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars With Appreciation - and How!, March 11, 2005

By 

Richard A. Heinlein "Old Timer" (New York City) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All (Hardcover)

Thank you, Tom Fenton, for giving our generation a public voice. All the MBA's, CPA's and LLB's have brought boardroom boredom to the small screen by confusing reporting with entertainment and bottom line statistics and you get criticized for being critical of the blunder bosses, with the publication of Bad News. They were born too late.

They will never understand the intellectual and social advantage of entering this world during the Great Depression when heroic men and women inspired great hope in what should have been the worst of times; and then, moving into the adolescent years, a part of the total commitment of the Greatest Generation of World War II. Meatless meals and ration coupons were no sacrifice while GI's we knew were dying for a proud country and twenty-one dollars a month. We had stable, supportive neighborhoods; extended families, and dependable, imaginative, friends. Additional encouragement was surely provided by the poorly paid nobility of superbly dedicated teachers. All of it grew us. There was no bottom line, no money issue beyond survival. The issue was posterity.

Tom, do you know of a front office exec that has used - or even understood - that word? It was the selfless platform that our founding fathers built a nation on. Too, the early newsmen at CBS knew they were builders for the future, not grasping bottom-liners. What a world of giants you followed, Tom, with those paragons of intellect and elocution, Edward R. Murrow's "boys" at CBS News: Eric Severeid, Charles Collingwood, William L. Shirer, Robert Trout, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Richard C. Hottelet, Howard K. Smith, Larry LeSueur, Winston Burdett, and Murrow's producer, Fred W. Friendly? All of patrician mien if not patrician birth, they were mesmerizers and rarely, if ever, spoke a word in error.

That you aspired to follow them does you credit, Tom, a courageous recognition of personal worth....and you certainly fit that CBS mold, now discarded in some musty attic of fading memory, an artifact that wouldn't find a buyer on eBay or a price on the Antiques Road Show.

The inspirations are long gone now, Tom, remembered and commemorated only in the minds of the elderly among us mourning the lost legacy of the great issues your words speak of in Bad News. Today's power elite believe in narrowing down the salable, simplistic, "big story" and rehashing it over and over to the exclusion of all else, even as tens of thousands dying in the darker, obscured-to-the public regions of the world are ignored. And that is as much the fault of an increasingly crass Fourth Estate, the erstwhile custodians of public conscience, as it is uncaring governments not urged into action. "It's the competition stupid!" So what if more than half the public can't find Sweden on a map. Who ever heard of Scandinavia anyway, huh!

Compare those legends of the past to today's anchors and correspondents, particularly on the cable news networks that are now threatening the very existence of network newscasts. It's a world of pretenders, despite their degrees from Harvard and Stanford. They would have been an embarrassment to `enry `iggins and my 8B3 class back in 1944! When the Elbe River and Wilkesbarre , PA, are as foreign to them as quarks and mesons are to the average major league shortstop, they commit errors that should send them to their minor leagues to report on automobile accidents and two-headed turtles. No such luck. Too many of them are paid to be personable gigglers and chatter-boxers, too good looking and too sexy (in somebody's opinion) to be given the boot. They blend perfectly with the made over, tucked and enhanced generation. Alas, these jolly anchor people are now used as occasional correspondents in more distant venues. They are save-a-buck assignees, doing in-shallow reporting in fractured English. What ever happened to incisive follow-up questions? Soft ball players!

Dare we expect something better from our news centers while the United States is listed near or at the bottom of the world's industrial nations in educational quality, in knowledge of our native language, in math skills, and even in our pitifully low contribution of foreign aid as a percentage of GNP? Small wonder that our once most-admired-nation is now out-sourcing our foreign correspondents along with everything else of value, to enrich the grand poobahs of commerce, while impoverishing the rest of us.

For every concerned Lou Dobbs or sensitive Aaron Brown on the domestic front, or a Tom Fenton (before he retired) on the foreign scene, there are a dozen silver-spoon generation entertainers. Whether in the news rooms or temporarily on the road, they are readers, essentially, who read poorly scripted news poorly, and who are indistinguishable one from the other, society's Peter Pans, that will "never grow up" as long as they are suspended like marionettes. As a lifetime news junkie, I resent it.

Thanks again for telling it the way it is, Tom; but the Dutch boy at the dike is folk fiction. I fear that you, and a few less expressive others, can't hold back the spreading wasteland. It is no longer fashionable to be smart, and compassionately concerned. And we are becoming increasingly aware of how dangerous it is to be critical. Once on "the list," you lose access.

What the hell! You're right, it's still worth the fight, Tom, or else I wouldn't have bought your book in the first place.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good News for all, March 10, 2005

By 

A. Hurley (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All (Hardcover)

As a former local television news producer I have been dismayed at the lack of news to be found on network television. Foreign news may not seem interesting to many, but I never thought a news show was aired to entertain us. There are plenty of other shows that do that. I agree with the author on this point. We would never have learned much at school is all we were taught had to be entertaining as well. I don't think that adding another 1/2 hour to the evening news is too much to ask for. How else are we going to find out what is going on in the world around us.

Fenton's book is well written and easy to read and gives clear concise reasons why it matters.

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scary, but Join the Club, March 15, 2005

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All (Hardcover)

I think that the problem with the news as being broadcast by television, both national and local is that we consider it to be the news. If we think of it as just another form of entertainment show featuring a small team of bubble heads with puffed up hair and the ability to giggle at each other then it all makes sense.

Last night a featured local story was that diesel fuel prices were higher here than a few hundred miles away so truckers were just buying enough fuel to get to where it was cheaper. So what.

Every day or so we hear another American has been killed in Iraq. Every week or so a thousand Americans are killed in car crashes. Not a mention. Every month 10,000 or so people die from AIDS -- old news, no one cares.

Tom Fenton's book is quite interesting from an international news point of view. It joins with a bunch of other books lamenting the dumbing down, spin controlled, if it bleeds, it leads attitude of the media. I wish I could say that I felt it would do some good.

Have a good retirement Tom.