Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

"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

Amazon.com 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.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

News reporting as sports and gossip, 2008-05-10
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 seem as bad or worse then they were then. The solutions he proposes are as needed as ever.

Fallows clearly describes how the approach the media has taken to covering national politics and other big issues has frustrated and repelled readers and viewers. We now have a news system were the most prominent reports are celebrities in their own right. They appear on television with instant dissections of any politician or policy that has grabbed their attention. These journalists spend more time making highly paid speeches then they do reporting. In many ways they are more powerful then the politicians on whom they report.

Things have not gotten any better since Breaking The News was written. They seem to have gotten worse. Some solutions are discussed, however they seem a bit weak to me. Perhaps it is too much to ask for. Any changes for the better will be difficult to come by, as they always are.



2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Interesting New Take on Something We Already Know, 2006-11-24
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!


0 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

good book but not his best work, 2006-03-08
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.


14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

Liberal vs. Conservative? No Contest, 2004-10-18
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 truly transcends the partisan and raises issues above the divisive fray that almost tragically seems to divide our great country. Although critics may contend that Jim offers a liberal apologist's view that liberal bias is not the primary problem (or even much of a problem at all), even my friends who are staunch conservatives should find little to disagree with and much to learn in "Breaking the News."


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

media wanting power, 2004-03-26
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 has also affects the political system. The media and journalist only show or write about issues that will get people's attention so that they could get the money that they want, not so much to find a soulution. They don't care so much about the issues, all they just want is the attention and the money. This affects how people view the polical system.

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