BAD NEWS, BAD NEWS

By WALTER ISAACSON

JOURNALISM MAKES DEMOCRACY POSsible. It does so by giving citizens the information to make political decisions and the tools to participate in public life, both prerequisites of self-governance. Why then are people so cynical about the press? Because the press has become so cynical about politics, argues James Fallows in his devastatingly reasonable critique Breaking the News (Pantheon; 296 pages; $23).

Increasingly, Fallows argues, journalists falsely pride themselves for being detached, indeed condescending, about the political process. Instead of trying to help people find common ground on complex issues--abortion, welfare reform, Medicaid--the media play up conflicts and cross fires in a quest for entertaining, diverting drama. "By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the press helps bring about that very result."

Ouch. He has a point. Part of the problem is that it is easier for journalists to analyze the politics of an issue than the issue itself. When Bill Clinton was planning to restore relations with Vietnam, for example, the New York Times (like other outlets) led its story with the political perils facing a President who had avoided the draft. Fallows cites a series of similar cases: the crime bill's funding for more cops on the beat, the debate over immigration, raising Medicare premiums, ending welfare entitlements.

That's because speculating about political fallout is an endeavor in which reporters can feign expertise, and they can do it with a veneer of impartiality that is harder to maintain when assessing the actual merits of a proposal. "The effect is as flattening and mind-shrinking as if the discussion of every new advance in medicine boiled down to speculation about whether its creator would win the Nobel Prize that year."

Fallows goes a bit far in skewering the press for becoming too querulous about official pronouncements. That habit began with the deceits of Lyndon Johnson about Vietnam and Richard Nixon about Cambodia and Watergate--and for good reason. But he is right that the effort to be tough often degenerates into being merely snarling and snide, with an elitist irony substituting for honest skepticism. Reporters earn their investigative stripes by chasing scandals and catching politicians in flip-flops, which divert attention from truly important policy issues that must be resolved. "The result is an arms race of 'attitude,' in which reporters don't explicitly argue or analyze what they dislike in a political program but instead sound sneering and supercilious about the whole idea of politics."

Fallows is particularly brutal about the corrupting effect of journalists' taking huge fees (which they seek to keep secret) for speaking to corporate and special-interest groups, something most politicians are rightly barred from doing. Cokie Roberts of ABC and her husband Steve of U.S. News & World Report are politely zapped as exemplars of this buckraking game. But they are not the best examples of what is most insidious about the process. Far worse are those journalists whose eagerness to get such lucrative gigs causes them to scramble to get on the type of TV shoutfests that prize glib, contentious opinions and turn reporters into performers.

Sanctimony, of course, is also a journalistic sin, and Fallows could be faulted for that if his own credentials were not so pristine. As an author and magazine writer, his primary patrons have been the two living saints of thoughtful journalism, Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly and William Whitworth of the Atlantic Monthly, and he has done them proud. Although many of his criticisms are not new--they have probably been voiced by every President since George Washington and have been examined in greater depth by such books as Thomas Patterson's sharp 1993 treatise Out of Order--Fallows has the standing within the journalistic community to give them fresh force.

--By Walter Isaacson