Governing With The News: The News Media as a Political Institution.

• Author: Bennet, James

The News Media as a Political Institution by Timothy E. Cook University of Chicago, $48

This is a provocative and often wise but ultimately unsatisfying book that ends just as it is gathering steam. After a rewarding historical account of the symbiosis between news reporting and governing (of which the saddest recent example was the death of a West Virginia woman killed by a police car engaged in a high-speed chase, with a TV crew in tow), after a solid but more familiar account of how that relationship operates today, Cook delivers himself of this notion: "It may be that newsmaking helps political actors in the short run but pushes them toward particular issues, concerns, and events and away from others, to the point that news values become political values, not only within the news media but within government as well"

As that namby-pamby "may be" suggests, Cook handles this interesting thought gingerly. Again leaving himself an out, he warns later that "to the extent" that the press does organize politics, it directs attention "toward episodic outcroppings rather than continuing conditions" and "away from abstract complexity toward simple if not simplistic renderings of problems, policies, and alternatives."

Now, for a guy who devotes countless pages to proving that the press is an "institution," and then to proving that it is moreover a "political institution," Cook is dismayingly stinting in developing this idea. Perhaps he is counting on our common sense to tell us it is true. But how true is it? By trying constantly to make news, are politicians making bad policy? And are they really reacting to the values of the new business, or simply to the ancient demands of politics updated for the information age?

This administration spends a lot of time thinking about the news media, and scores itself by the daily papers as well as by polls (although the LBJ tapes suggest that this obsession is not new). A day after The New York Times ran a front-page story in May about "heroin chic" in the fashion industry, Clinton criticized the trend in a speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors. "You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes," he said. The denunciation received widespread coverage. "Headline robbery!" one delighted Clinton aide crowed at me.

But drive-by social criticism is not substantive policy. Consider an example of the latter, the creation of Clinton's economic plan.

In The Agenda, Bob Woodward details the formulation and packaging of the plan. He describes Hillary Clinton explaining to aides how, to sustain public support in Arkansas for education...