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Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.230973
EAN: 9780679758563
Edition: 1st Vintage Books Ed
ISBN: 0679758569
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: January 14, 1997
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: January 14, 1997
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
A lot of big-shot journalists didn't like this book, a systematic jeremiad about the current sad state of American political journalism. For instance, both the New York Times op-ed page and the New Yorker took pains to excoriate the book and its author--pretty good hints that Fallows is onto something. His point is that greed and intellectual sloth have fostered a political media elite that increasingly focuses on spin and ignores substance at the very time when solving the country's real problems requires all possible nuance.
Why do Americans mistrust the news media? It may be because show like "The McLaughlin Group" reduce participating journalists to so many shouting heads. Or because, increasingly, the profession treats issues as complex as health-care reform and foreign policy as exercises in political gamesmanship. These are just a few of the arguments that have made Breaking the News so controversial and so widely acclaimed. Drawing on his own experience as a National Book Award-winning journalist--and on the gaffes of colleagues from George Will to Cokie Roberts--Fallows shows why the media have not only lost our respect but alienated us from our public life. "Important and lucid...It moves smartly beyond the usual attacks on sensationalism and bias to the more profound problems in modern American journalism...dead-on."--Newsweek
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - News reporting as sports and gossip
The mainstream media reports on important topics all the time. If the issues are important you have to wonder why it is so boring and seems so irrelevant?
James Fallows is an excellent journalist who has written insightful articles and books on a number of subjects. Breaking the News is a well written book about what journalism has become. It was originally published in 1996, so some of the names and some of the television programs seem dated. However the problems Fallows describes ... Read More
Rating: - Interesting New Take on Something We Already Know
The author has done a superb job of researching this treatise on a media out of control. Many we illustrative examples are given to prove the author's point and the writing style is good as well.
Between what is presented here and listening to the pundits who spout at the mouth along their own agendas in the radio, it is difficult for anybody to ever figure out what is fact and what is what someone wants things to be. Very thought provoking!
Rating:  - good book but not his best work
Fallows is very smart and an excellent writer. This book is very good but I do not believe it to be his best work. However, this is an important part of any survey or recent books on the large problems within the US media.
Rating: - Liberal vs. Conservative? No Contest
I first met James Fallows online in the early '90s, and then in person several times. For a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard grad, he was surprisingly in touch with the realities I knew as a moderate Westerner living in the East. He was kind enough to give me a copy of Breaking the News, and I found it to be a great read. It offered new perspectives and excellent explanations on the sorry state of today's journalism, far beyond the traditional but simplistic explanation of "liberal bias." Jim's perspective ... Read More
Rating: - media wanting power
The book Breaking The News:How the Media Undermine American Democracy by James Fallows is a well written book. It tells about issues that we should hear and it may change how the people view the media and how the media have control and why we shouldn't always believe what we hear on the news. The author tells about how the media controls how we see our goverment. It's not so much about how important issues should be resolved like health care, education, etc.,but more on what is controversial about it. It ... Read More
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