Human nature and the newsroom.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Decline of investigative journalism - Pundit Watch - Column

One recent morning, I curled up with a New York Times column--Get Thee to a Mental Gym--by Max Frankel, recently morphed from editorial management to (uh oh!) pundit. Frankel began the column by urging that "mental laborers" need to "take time off to think new thoughts." To do this, they need to declare a reading day, when they crack open those journals, books, and magazines that have served primarily as dust-mote condos in the corners of their offices.

What did Frankel turn to? First he reported on an exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. It was on the history of the news. Here Frankel learned that "the nature of `news' is shaped more by human nature than editorial discretion." (Is that a whiff of self-justification, waiting off the mental stairmaster?) For centuries, it turns out, people have always been drawn to murder and mayhem stories. So the "if-it-bleeds-it-leads" style of journalism appears, alas, to be inevitable, Frankel concluded.

Next, Frankel read James Fallows's Breaking the News. Now he got a bit more exercised. Fallows's book argues that recent trends in journalism--the overemphasis on which politician, or party, is "on top"; the ridiculous and futile obsession with predicting future election results; the appalling undercoverage of substantive issues; and the rise of an elite corps of millionaire celebrity journalists completely out of touch with regular people--have undermined the nation's ability to discuss sensible solutions to our social problems and have made two-thirds of the American public deeply hostile to the news media. Fallows doesn't even get into corporate censorship of the news, but his argument was too much for Frankel who, in his rebuttal, proves Fallows's point that all too many elite journalists are in denial about the excesses and failures of their field. Hyperventilating by now (and giving off a somewhat defensive odor), Frankel accused

Fallows of trying to turn journalists into social activists who no longer just report the news, but become actors in it as well. "Fallows leaves no room for the customary journalistic ambition to inform and instruct."

Maybe Frankel needs a better trainer, for the bulk of Fallows's book bemoans just that--the news media's failure to inform its audience about the substance of different welfare-"reform" proposals, the impact of NAFTA and GATT, the successes and failures of various health-care plans, and so forth. Frankel does, however, commend Fallows's...