Troubles of Journalism: A Critical Look at What's Right and Wrong With the Press, The

Newspaper Research Journal, Spring 1998 by Suddes, Thomas

The Troubles of Journalism: A Critical Look at What's Right and Wrong With the Press

by William A. Hachten (Mahwah,NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998. $45) 188 pp.

The Troubles of Journalism: A Critical Look at What's Right and Wrong With the Press, is an apt title for Hachten's book, which conveys, in a concise treatment, a considerable body of knowledge about news work's contemporary dilemmas, principally for students, though practitioners may also find the book pertinent. This work, Hachten wrote, "is an inquiry into the malaise" that appears to bedevil news work today. The book would likely be most useful to upper-level undergraduates studying journalism and could also be a most adequate survey for interested laypeople.

Hachten is a University of Wisconsin scholar whose "newspaper days"to borrow Mencken's phrase-extended from 1948 to 1956 at three California newspapers and what is now the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune. Perhaps prophetically, given Hachten's title, two of the newspapers on which he worked are defunct, and the other two are the sole surviving dailies in their respective cities.

Hachten briskly reviews the foundations that underpin American news media, sketching the agenda-setters (the national dailies, the weekly news magazines and the broadcasting networks), the global impact of American mass media and the legal principles inside which the U.S. mass media complex operates (Hachten may be optimistic, however, in his assessment of the Telecommunications Act of 1996: It is arguable whether, because of the act's provisions, "the public as consumers are [sic] expected to gain in various ways.")

The paradoxical structure of the evolving news industry also comes under examination. Even as news and entertainment providers-usually, but not exclusively, North American-are consolidating, those providers' audiences, as measured by newspaper readership and the size of the traditional network television audience, are fracturing or, in TV's case, migrating from channel to channel or from programmer to programmer.

Entwined with these structural developments are questions about content-its weight, veracity and taste. Especially in the realm of broadcasting, corporate mergers combined with cost-saving hardware may have fueled declines, not advances, in content.

And it is certainly open to debate whether the increasing (mechanical) speed of international communication is being matched by any greater cogitation about foreign news by producers and editors in American newsrooms' directorial and editorial chairs.

In that connection, and in a refreshing departure from the Eurocentricity with which foreign news is evaluated in America, Hachten devotes a chapter to the neglect of news from Africa, except for coverage of South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle.

In another interesting departure, Hachten devotes a chapter to the history and contemporary challenges of journalism education in the United States. His insights resonate with the arguments-some old, others newly salient-about the appropriate scholar / practitioner mix in journalism faculties.

On another salient topic, civic or public journalism, Hachten is somewhat terse, allotting only four paragraphs to it, a rather economical approach to a substantial topic.

Hachten ends his book with the statement, "Good journalism does matter." So does, or should, good copy-editing, a department in whichconsidering the liberal number of typographical errors in his book-the author has been ill-served. Surely, given the book's price, to expect fewer errors would not be unreasonable.

Thomas Suddes is a graduate student in the School of Journalism at Ohio University.