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

~ (Author) "As the monitors on the wall of the CBS News London Bureau all flashed the same mesmerizing images, I stood there spellbound..." (more)
Key Phrases: foreign story, foreign bureaus, foreign coverage, White House, New York, Dan Rather (more...)

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.

Product Description

Presents the thesis that an emphasis on bottom-line profits, an over dependence on third party images and sources, and increased vulnerability to political influences have all contributed to a decline in the quality of news reporting.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (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 (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #830,153 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 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 (REAL NAME)

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.

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 (REAL NAME)

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 (REAL NAME)

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.