The troubles of journalism: a critical look at what's right and wrong with the press

Abstract

The Troubles of Journalism: A Critical Look at What's Right and Wrong With Press, 3d ed. William A. Machten. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2005. 208 pp. $59.95 hbk. $26 pbk. The 1998 first edition of William A. Hachten's The Troubles of Journalism was an early entry in what has since become a publishing blizzard of self-recriminations, last-chance exhortations, and outright autopsies on still-twitching body of mainstream journalism. Always a rich topic for academics and ideological critics such as Noam Chomsky and Robert W. McChesney, systemic failures of news media have, over past decade, become a sort of chronic miasma in newsrooms as well. Ethical debacles, slanted reporting, plunging readership and viewership, myopic bean-counting, corporate control, and digital anxiety are no longer merely formidable challenges; they seem to have coalesced into suicide by a thousand cuts. Amid general panic, some clear and thoughtful voices have emerged. Among traditionalists, Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel have made a strong case for resurrecting best principles and conventions of newspapering in Breach of Faith and Leaving Readers Behind. Philip Meyer, in The Vanishing Newspaper, and Dan Gillmor, in We Media, are more enthusiastic about digital future but also are willing to ask tough questions about what good journalism might come to look like. And in The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have married first principles to contemporary realities in a polemical call for a new populist conversation that actually does what best journalism has forever aspired to do. Hachten's Troubles is a precursor to those books in its breadth and author's anticipation of things gone badly off rails, and Machten deserves considerable credit for his detailed research and prescience. His central argument-that the identity, if not soul, of American journalism appears to be threatened-has become a point of departure for contemporary debate. But his book lacks very qualities that make those more recent works so crucial-a prescription for tackling troubles book deplores. This may be because book is aimed in part at a student audience that knows little about media history and news business. Hachten thus devotes page after page to summarizing past in what becomes a kind of numbing textbook boilerplate: Radio is ubiquitous and was for most of twentieth century. Receiving sets are everywhere. . . . There are over 500 million sets in America. This is, of course, a dilemma familiar to every writer of survey books: How much backstory, and where does it go? …