Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

Over the past quarter century or so, bashing the news media may well have supplanted baseball as the national pastime (certainly the news is filled with more strikes, balls, hits, and errors). From Spiro Agnew's alliterative attack on reporters as "nattering nabobs of negativism," to the bumper-sticker slogan "Annoy the Media, ReElect George Bush," to President Clinton's own spirited excoriations of the press's "insatiable desire...to build up and tear down," elected officials waste little time in attacking the self-styled adversarial media.

This may be one of the few areas in which people and politicians are completely in sync: Polls consistently show that about two-thirds of Americans think the press is "biased" (in various ways) and out of touch with average Americans. Last fall, a poll conducted by The Roper Center in conjunction with The Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation that analyzes free speech and press issues, found that only 10 percent of Americans had a "great deal" of confidence in the news media. (Washington politicians didn't fare so well, either: A mere 6 percent had a great deal of confidence in Congress, while Clinton garnered a relatively robust 16 percent rating in the category.)

To be sure, outspoken and widespread skepticism toward the press (or the government) is nothing new. Back in 1807, for instance, then-President Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle....Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into four chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short."

Nor, contrary to the media's own self-interested fretting, is such incredulity anything to be overly worried about, at least for the country at large. Far from indicating some horrible and nihilistic trend in American cultural life, current attitudes toward the media are actually a return to an earlier, pre-World War II understanding of the press as inherently biased and subjective. Skepticism toward institutions of power is a healthy and necessary response in a free society. Intelligent people should cast wary eyes toward the media (along with politicians, pundits, and "experts" of all stripes). Journalists especially should understand this posture: It is, after all, simply a variation on the hoary journalistic directive that when your mother tells you she loves you, you should check it out.

Not surprisingly, though, journalists are not very comfortable with the realization that their audience sees them in less than ideal terms. Two recent books, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, by Howard Kurtz, and Good Intentions Make Bad News: Why Americans Hate Campaign Journalism, explore the often tortured - and tortuous - relationship between the political press, its subjects, and its audience.

Kurtz, a reporter at The Washington Post, is a representative of what he terms the "Old Media - the big newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts." He decries the rise of a "talk show nation, a boob-tube civilization, a run-at-the-mouth culture in which anyone can say anything at any time as long as they pull some ratings." Hot Air is a compellingly infuriating read: Even as Kurtz sets out to critique "the triumph of talk," he epitomizes the smug, dismissive, domineering, and pseudo-objective perspective that people hate about Big Journalism. Good Intentions, which focuses specifically on presidential campaign journalism, stands as something of a counterpoint to Hot Air and offers a compelling explanation of "why Americans hate campaign journalism." As the '96 election season shifts into high gear, Lichter and Noyes's analysis could hardly be more timely.

"America is awash in talk," writes Kurtz at the opening of Hot Air. "Loud talk. Angry talk. Conspiratorial talk. Raunchy talk, smug talk...