Breaking the News

...He buys into the current cliché that ordinary people ask better questions of candidates than do journalists...

...One of its aims, he writes, is to keep candidates from determining the news content of their campaigns...

...It was not just a way to make as much money as he could—though he has gone on to make a lot of money now...

...It was a serious responsibility, a public trust, which deserved the very best that was in him to give...

...The second bad idea flourishing at the time was that "management" could run big organizations brilliantly...

...But I'm afraid that for this book, Fallows didn't make enough phone calls...

...He has carried these habits into an unlikeMICHAEL BARONE is a senior writer at U.S...

...I'll restrict myself to two others, both concerning me...

...The desire to drum his conviction into the hearts and minds of Americans explains his enthusiasm for "public journalism" —a relatively new phenomenon that calls for newspaper editors to collaborate with citizens in deciding what news is fit to print...

...This was nonsense, Samuelson reports...

...Fallows treats me with passing disdain, as someone apparently not worth calling during his reporting...

...My longtime friend Jack GerThe American Spectator • April 1996 65 mond often says he did not take an oath of poverty when he became a journalist...

...He contends that the "Capital Gang" show on CNN "would fall apart...

...but he fails to note that this effort was born of outrage that the press had been used by George Bush to unfairly defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988, a mistake that would not be repeated in 1992...

...Michael Kinsley "is by most accounts the most talented policy writer of his generation...

...It caused unnecessary economic distress, yet still raised expectations and created a sense of entitlement...

...in retrospect, economic growth from 1961-69 "was simply an inflationary boom...

...He would have a reporter say "whether a Medicare proposal makes sense or not," heedless that doing so would engage the reporter in opinion, not fact...

...the Association for Manufacturing Technology, which is the organization of American machine toolmakers...

...Almost all of Newsweek's news stories are written by the reporter himself, as are most of Time's...

...He devotes seven pages of his health-care chapter to the New Republic's cover story by Elizabeth McCaughey assailing the Clinton plan...

...His previous book, Looking at the Sun, was a study of Japan based on four years of reporting from and living in the Orient...

...His earnestness aside, Fallows strikes me as someone who has gone through life brooding about fates that have consigned him to more humble pursuits than befit a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar...

...Three bad ideas that had found credence in most elite quarters by the middle 1960's —just the time Samuelson and I were at Harvard—made that problem worse...

...Only through humiliation, he contends, can reporters "have the chance of learning something new...

...News & World Report and author ofThe Almanac of American Politics 1996 and Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan...

...ly venue—the Washington bureau of Newsweek, where he writes weekly columns about economics—and now has delivered his first book...

...He showed Fallows a letter to the editor he still carries from those days...

...Reich's 197o book, The Greening ofAmer- ica, maintained that the nation's economic growth was assured...

...Fallows's under-reporting is matched by his misinterpretations...

...I can see Fallows, all by his lonesome in his room in Kuala Lumpur, waiting for strangers to return his calls and finding comfort in being morally superior to those elitist colleagues who wine and dine with their sources...

...Fallows writes frequently about trade...

...He's no less selective in thumping for "public journalism...

...Who doesn't...

...The article won him instant fame and set the stage for a career that over the last two decades has been marked more by pretensions of moral and intellectual superiority than by political acuity...

...The biographical note on the book jacket also says nothing about his Carter background, nor does it mention that (like many other leftist journalists) Fallows cut his eye teeth on the neoliberal journal of opinion, the Washington Monthly...

...It is hard to imagine any experienced reporter not knowing that contentious questioners are carefully screened awayfrom such "forums...

...Neither, dare I say, did Jim Fallows, which may explain his book's curious "Epilogue" concerning the estimable ABC correspondent Jim Wooten...

...This was a natural conclusion to draw from our successes—big government, big business, and big labor had recovered us from the Depression, won the war, and built a prosperous postwar America...

...Nothing less than "American democracy" is at stake...

...Another of his remarkable notions in Breaking the News is that too much access to sources isn't good for reporters...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW The Most Unhappy Fallows Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy James Fallows Pantheon Books 296 pages / $23 REVIEWED BY Robert D. Novak james Fallows, the Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, is a pleasant chap with a graceful writing style who has fostered a reputation for thinking more deeply and being more principled than most of us who toil in journalism...

...Wooten has stepped into the void to serve as a conscience for us Give the man a raise...

...In the 1950's and early 1960's government in general, and the federal government in particular, enjoyed great confidence and high prestige among the people...

...And if this book is any indication, he is also a pretentious elitist not wholly straightforward about himself...

...Fallows concurs...

...In other words, if your motives are pristinely liberal and pro-government, long may you prosper...

...Former New York Times political correspondent Wooten "had turned to television," Fallows writes, "because he needed the money...

...A number-crunching, Harvard Business School genius like Robert McNamara seemed to be the answer to any problem...

...Fallows shows his hand in other ways...

...He asserts that journalism is "the main tool we have for keeping the world's events in perspective," and he implores journalists to "pay more attention...to the impact of their work on the health of democracy...

...local conditions for Alabama's Huntsville Times...

...and the employees association of a firm in Alabama called Vulcan Industries...

...After exhausting these now familiar complaints (conveyed in a much more sprightly fashion by Howard Kurtz in his recently published Hot Air, which was reviewed in the February TAS), Fallows spends a long chapter blaming the news media for killing the Clinton health plan...

...Purporting to explain "why we hate the media," Fallows contends that ordinary Americans are outraged because journalists are "hammering home the message that 'issues' don't matter except as items for politicians to squabble about...

...Meanwhile, though he trumpets the requirement of full disclosure for journalists, he prefers not to divulge too much about himself...

...The third bad idea of the 1960's was entitlement itself, articulated best by Charles Reich, the Yale law professor whose 1965 article, "The New Property," argued that government payments such as welfare were entitlements that could not be taken away without due process...

...We were both on the undergraduate newspaper, the Harvard Crimson—as smug an institution as can be imagined...

...Evidently, he's dead serious that this article "retarded the national effort" for health reform...

...After resigning as Jimmy Carter's chief speech writer at age 29, he wrote an article for his new employer, the Atlantic Monthly, condemning his former boss for "the height of arrogance" and "willful ignorance...

...You hope rather than expect that your call will be returned...

...These groups have been: the American Institute of Architects, the alliance of Japanese pharmaceutical companies called PharmaForum...

...No sooner was his analysis of the yellow peril published than the Japanese economy went into a dive...

...The liveliest part of this book shows Fallows at his most disingenuous: his attack on "buckraking" journalists who double as TV talking heads and lecturers (to which I plead guilty as charged...

...Sam, as we called him, was different: he wore frowzy clothes, covered not the universe but the Cambridge City Council, and added to a native skepticism the insight of the Chicago-trained Edward Banfield that government action tends to be ineffective and self-defeating...

...We" was the Keynesian economics professoriate which, by controlling a few key institutions, believed it could manipulate the federal budget surplus or deficit and the Federal Reserve interest rates...

...And a very good book it is...

...Perhaps it is not a coincidence that public confidence in institutions started to decline at The Winters of Our Discontent & Entitlement 66 April 1996 • The American Spectator...

...His crackpot ideas gained wide acceptance, and around the time Richard Nixon took office, we experienced the weird phenomenon of an elite moving left even as the people moved right...

...His central thesis is that the decline of standards in the news media is poisoning the "public life all Americans share...

...It wasn't until the 1980's that "power shifted from the executive suite to the market," big companies downsized, and productivity started zooming up again after years of stagnation...

...When it comes to "helping readers understand what current trends mean," Garry Wills "is well-suited to this challenge...

...He claims that he "became uncomfortable with the show," implying—but not saying—that he turned down requests to appear again...

...His claim that news magazines suffer because different people report and write the stories, for example, is at least a decade out of date...

...Their singular commitment to earning more and more money "helps account for the overripe, fin-de-siCcle mood in the elite press corps, especially in Washington...

...in the future people would just sit around, jettison capitalist rules and conventional mores, and enjoy the fun...

...For those sterling achievements we have since paid a price...

...When I first arrived in Washington thirty-nine years ago as a reporter for the Associated Press, that venerable news organization was labeling every advance and every setback of any bill as a win or a loss for the Eisenhower administration...

...If you're traveling, you spend hours sitting in the hotel room waiting for your calls to be returned...

...Samuelson begins in 1945—Americans have just won a victory that was not inevitable, and are about to embark on a generation of economic growth that seemed impossible...

...That is but one of ten glaring examples of inaccurate reporting that I jotted down while reading Breaking the News...

...Breaking the News has been celebrated by liberal politicians and, oddly, by many journalists for launching an assault on the news media from the left...

...But Fallows has always had trouble as a reporter...

...I found no reference to his stint in the Carter White House (the book lacks a badly needed index...

...Since he speaks only infrequently, does that make it permissible —like being just a little bit pregnant...

...When I took Economics i in 1964, I wastaught that we know how to produce low-inflation economic growth indefinitely...

...accurate forecasting was impossible, and people's adjustments to Keynesian policies produced higher inflation and lower employment than the models predicted...

...If a working definition of a 1996 liberal is somebody who still believes that government is the solution rather than the problem, then Fallows surely qualifies...

...In any event, Fallows's suggested alternative would make matters worse...

...Coat-and-tied young men (and the occasional young woman) debated what to do about NATO or how big the deficit should be or how Harvard should be run...

...Thus he clumsily confuses good journalism with a liberal agenda —as 64 April 19 9 6 • The American Spectator might be expected from a man who has never worked for a newspaper other than the Harvard Crimson...

...The problem, Samuelson argues, is that the people got in the habit of expecting it to do a good job and feeling entitled to ever better results...

...He censures his colleagues for appearing both on television shows and the lecture circuit, "cheapening" themselves even as they become vulnerable to conflict-of-interest charges...

...What [the Clintons] lost legislatively," he writes, "was trivial compared to the damage to public life...

...He even expressed dismay to at least one fellow journalist, asking how he might improve his television persona...

...I appeared with Fallows on those programs, and he was so uninteresting that he was not invited back...

...On those rare occasions when Fallows expresses admiration for a fellow journalist, it is always for an unabashed liberal...

...His salary by 1995 "was several hundred thousand dollars per year," but that was all right for Wooten because of his journalism...

...The Good Life and Its Discontents is an analysis of why our politics keeps producing unsatisfactory results, but it also serves as a history of the last half-century...

...When government takes on tasks it can't perform, its reputation suffers—as so many believers in big government woefully lament...

...When you're a reporter not familiar with your beat, "you have to spell your name and explain whom you work for...

...it had done a good job...

...He decries elite journalists for riding "the gravy train" and no longer ROBERT D. NOVAK is a nationally syndicated columnist and co-host of CNN's "Evans 6 Novak...

...Fallows later asserts that, in my newspaper column, I frequently use the adjectives "dynamic," "rising," and "thoughtful" to reward my news sources...

...if Robert Novak stopped attacking and interrupting all the other panelists...

...It is hard to judge this experiment kindly...

...As the 1970's showed, Keynes was wrong...

...As evidence, he cites six policy questions posed to President Clinton by teenagers in Boston on January 3, 1995• All fit neatly into the president's policy agenda, including such toughies as whether the Clinton administration could sponsor more apprenticeship programs and whether Clinton could urge colleges to "help inner city kids get to stay in college...

...As for lectures, he says his infrequent performances are "mostly at universities," but in the same long note ends with this: In the last two years I have been paid fees for speaking to six organizations...

...For today's journalists, Fallows booms, the choice is clear: "Do they want merely to entertain the public or to engage it...

...Back in the 1960's, for instance, he'd heeded Bobby Kennedy's call to examine rural poverty in the South and done a five-part series on The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995 Robert J. Samuelson Times Books / 293 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Michael Barone Ifirst met Robert Samuelson in 1963 or 1964...

...the United Technologies Corporation...

...Fisher Scientific International...

...There he reveals that "more than a decade ago, in the early years of The McLaughlin Group, I was a guest panelist on the show three times within a six-month period...

...Fallows isn't one to hold back from making grandiose claims...

...As it happens, a computer search of my columns over the last six months revealed only one use of any of these adjectives—in a reference to House Democratic whip David Bonior, who's never been accused of being a Novak source...

...but it could not be perpetually held at some fixed, low level without spawning high inflation," Samuelson writes...

...Unemployment could be reduced to low levels...

...It's all very high-minded, and the charges and pretentiousness fly fast and thick...

...How do these appearances square with his pristine ethical standards...

...I do agree with him that reporters tend to describe every development in terms of its political impact, but this practice is old hat...

...Chalk up another little Washingtoncliché Fallows has bought into without bothering to check it out...

...One was Keynesian economics...

...In an apparent absence of any community conscience," the writer said, "Mr...

...It's easy to become distraught about the news media if you exaggerate its impact...

...entering the profession for "non-monetary" reasons...

...Anybody who watches the program even intermittently can confirm that I seldom do either...

...The reader learns of the author's own experience as a buckraker only by persisting into the notes at the back of the book...

...It's not surprising, then, that Fallows never deigns to even consider the following proposition: the reason so many people hate the news media is that journalists like Fallows are outrageously biased in the liberal direction, and never bother to identify their true position on the political spectrum in the first place...

...Less obviously, he is a left-wing ideologue who has proved a deficient reporter...