Breaking The News

With an Afterword to the 1997 paperback edition.  Why do Americans mistrust the news media? It may be because shows 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

"An arresting analysis.... Fallows is a true reformer... [His] points seem indisputable."
--The New York Times

"An unsparing indictment...ambitious coherent, and convincing."
--The Boston Globe

"A particularly lucid, intelligent and important critique."
--The San Francisco Chronicle