Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by Alan Tonelson

If only James Fallows had waited until after the holidays to complete Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Pantheon, 304 pp), his alarming but reader-friendly exploration of how America's biggest news organizations are threatening, not buttressing, the nation's capacity for self-government. Then his discussion of pundits' self-importance could have included Cokie Roberts cutting off Sen. Alfonse D'Amato in mid-answer on This Week With David Brinkley because "we need to let George Will get in here, please."

Not that Breaking the News isn't already packed with such morsels. Their abundance, however, does not merely ridicule. The book documents Fallows' original and important argument - that the combination of arrogance, insularity and often deliberate buffoonery displayed by many leading journalists not only is enervating their profession but also alienating the American public from a political system that ultimately cannot survive without public participation.

Of course, the contemporary press has been accused of undermining democracy ever since television's potential as a vivid and terrible simplifier first became clear. Since then, concerns about political (mainly liberal) bias and bottom-line-induced parochialism and fluff have been added to the national debate about the media's performance and impact.

During the 1980s, some observers (including Fallows) identified a wholly new problem: the talk-show-driven emergence of Washington-based journalists who parlay their celebrity into lucrative speaking engagements before so many business groups that they became walking "appearances of conflicts of interest." Other critics scored the new punditocracy for a pronounced Reaganite tilt (notably Mark Hertsgaard in On Bended Knee) and its glibness (Alan Hirsch in Talking Heads).

Glibness rather than slant continues to preoccupy Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly and author of several influential books on defense policy and international economics. But Breaking the News transforms this often-vague indictment into something close to a unified-field theory of how the interaction of all these problems jeopardizes much more than the good name of the press.

The theory begins by showing how talk shows serve as "a transmission belt bringing the values of TV into the world of print" - thereby turning civic education into a much purer form of showbiz than is widely realized. The fame and riches won by "buckraking" celebrity journalists of both the left and right show their less-prominent colleagues that the traits needed most by a good reporter are completely different from those that earn society's most glittering prizes.

The modern American journalistic tradition, as Fallows notes, properly claims to value diligent, open-minded investigation and careful description and analysis of complex issues and events. But as any true follower of The McLaughlin Group, Capital Gang or even the relatively dignified Washington Week in Review knows, the panelists not only are predictable, they positively revel in typecasting - like all successful sitcom characters.

This role-playing - John McLaughlin's bullying or folksy Charles McDowell's reassuring explanations about even the most distressing events - is tightly intertwined with their substantive views, for politics is the plot of each show. The resulting "ethic of polarization and overstatement," Fallows continues, leads to and is amplified by the game of competitive glibness" played by the participants. Where verbal dueling, not discussion, is the idea, the best weapons cannot be informative analyses that simply take too long, but sound bites that cleverly rehash familiar views in seconds.

Perhaps worst of all, talk shows have replaced informed assessment - a core function of good journalism - with simple, off-the-cuff prediction. The problem, Fallows argues, is not that the pundits so often are wrong - political events are notoriously difficult to predict. Rather, "the shows have shifted emphasis away from what journalists can do and should, to what they shouldn't and can't." Even more importantly, the entertainment spectacles produced by these buckraking journalists unavoidably help convince Americans that politics is simply an endless series of empty maneuvers and power grabs by other greedy or egomaniacal celebrities.

In Fallows' view, the problem has two root causes: First, caustic banter about who's up and who's down is relatively easy compared with understanding a new budget plan or trade agreement (which can eat into valuable cocktail-party or lecture-circuit time); second, the pundits' privileged lives are much more affected by the fate of Beltway personalities (the sources of their inside information) than by the fate of many government initiatives.

Thus the journalism they produce has little to do with the day-to-day concerns of ordinary news consumers - an argument that Fallows supports with scholarly surveys. The punditocracy, however, is hastening its own demise, Fallows says. For if readers and listeners lose all interest in substance and perceive news and news talk as mere entertainment, eventually they will opt for the real McCoy. The author provides considerable evidence to show that this is in fact happening.