Customer Reviews

Slick Spins and Fractured Facts

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As a journalist and a student of journalism, I like approaching media critiques from all angles. I'm just as likely to read Bernard Goldberg's Bias as I am Eric Alterman's book-length rebuttal of it. Regardless of the authors' stances, I've found them to be capable of making convincing arguments. Not so with Rivers.

At its core, Slick Spins and Fractured Facts is a contradictory tome. Rivers derides media professionals as out-of touch elites and bemoans the loss of working class journalists. Yet she relies extensively on the opinions of out-of-touch academics to form the basis of her arguments. The irony must have escaped her.

Similarly, she criticzes media types for attempting to create nonexistant blocks of consensus. An article by Ellen Goodman, for example, is supposed to represent "the female perspective" even though different females have different perspectives. Rivers is right to condemn this, but she then perpetrates the very same kind of intellectual fraud in attacking Christina Hoff Summers. If there is no such thing as a monolithic feminist perspective, why is it therefore so unreasonable for her to consider Hoff Summers a feminist?

Lastly, Rivers fails to remember that the journalists are only obligated to cover what is in the public interest (and therefore has broad relevence and applicability), not what is of importance only to a handful of special interest groups.

A cogent feminist critique of the news would be of interest to feminists and journalists alike, but a lack of logic and clarity kills this book. Rivers accompanies overly obvious "insights" with ranting and a lot of conjecture. When it comes to reporting on reporters, Howard Kurtz and Eric Alterman write circles around this author. Avoid and save your time.