I finished Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy by James Fallows during the 30 minutes my plane sat on the tarmac in Houston waiting to take off. The book was written in 1996 by the then-newly promoted editor of U.S. News and World Report magazine.

Fallows builds his case by detailing why the public distrusts the media, how the behavior of the media has changed since the 70’s, the financial incentives as a result of this new behavior, the star-like attitude of those who make it big, how media personalities often get in the way of the news, and some solutions on how the media can help its image and perform better.

The first half of the book reads pretty slowly and details problems more known than not with mainstream media. News anchors do not do much journalism any more; merely, they are highly paid news readers. They try to compete with tabloid shows like Hard Copy and Inside Edition, using gimmicks to focus on the presently urgent rather than the issues that are important over the long run. When news writers started showing up on TV, they would raise their asking price so high that the demand from news commentary shows like The McLaughlin Group would only ask them to go on for a couple of times a week. They of course would make a killing for not doing relatively much work, and it also raised the price of 2nd-tier journalists, resulting in their getting paid much more than they were worth.

The second half gets significantly better. The author makes the case that journalists worry less about the effect of issues on people and instead focus on how the issues affect political players. In sports reporting, the game goes on despite the media, and people are proved wrong in their predictions. Political journalism usually offers no such review, and public opinion matters to government leaders. He spends most of a chapter detailing the media coverage during Hillary Clinton’s attempt to nationalize health-care. Perhaps because the proposal was so long, over 1600 pages, journalists relied on the negative analysis of a New York state official without checking the facts of her case for themselves. The serious debate of the “managed competition” bill was also distracted by the Somalia, Whitewater, and Troopergate scandals.

The final chapter deals with a noteworthy idea to reform journalism in the mainstream media. Called “public journalism” (he would rather it be called “just good journalism”), some newspapers have heavily polled their areas of service for the issues that are most important to them, and citizen committees of around 500 people provide continued input on how the journalists are doing. This has shown to be effective in regaining the public trust, though it offends the sensibilities of newspaper editors who insist on absolute objectivity.

This book differs from Bernie Goldberg’s Bias in that Breaking the News places on self-importance the reasons for incompetent journalism, while Bias places the blame on a homogeneously liberal press corps. Both are good critiques of the mainstream media that are not painful to read. Even though the book’s information is almost 10 years old, some concepts ring even louder in the post-September 11 world of news crawlers at the bottom of the screen and 24-hour cable news channels.