REPUBLIC OF DENIAL: Press, Politics and Public Life.

• Author: Easterbrook, Gregg
• Position: Review

Two new books hark back to a media "golden age" that never existed

REPUBLIC OF DENIAL: Press, Politics and Public Life By Michael Janeway Yale University Press, $22.50

WANT TO WRITE A BOOK YOU CAN BE certain no one else is writing? Pen something defending the press. Recent years have seen a spate of volumes denouncing American journalism. James Fallows lit bombs under the profession in Breaking the News, accusing top communications-industry figures of posturing, buck-raking, and even anti-Americanism. (His chapter on Mike Wallace so ruffled its subject that Wallace took to defending himself by saying that he shouldn't be held accountable for comments made under the pressure of live television, a delightfully nonsensical position coming from a 60 Minutes correspondent.) Howard Kurtz, in Hot Air and Spin Cycle, presented modern journalism as an exercise bordering on self-satire, with the goal being to see which news organization could make itself seem stupidest fastest. Tom Rosentiel and Bill Kovach, in Warp Speed, depict the contemporary newsroom as spinning into a blur of unthinking hype. Now comes Republic of Denial and Rich Media, Poor Democracy, two more books that let the media have it with both barrels. Isn't there anybody out there who likes the morning newspaper anymore?

Republic of Denial is by Michael Janeway, one of the country's most distinguished journalists, a former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Globe. It is Janeway's thesis that all major American news organizations are in "denial" regarding "the story that the press has largely missed," namely, that the country is falling apart. Janeway posits that the contemporary condition of the United States is far, far worse than television newscasters or newsmagazines are letting on: that modern American life is "a saga of reversal and loss" with U.S. cities "choking on dysfunction," plague-like diseases about to kill us, the plight of average people worsening, and "erosion of optimism and progress." Journalists are in "dental," Janeway suggests, by refusing to report such bad news, preferring instead presidential sex scandals, celebrity divorce melodramas, and political insider-baseball. Nobody's reporting the real, shocking, depressingly negative story.

This is a striking thesis. But after t-stating it, Republic of Denial essentially drops its own subject, saying little more about the condition of the country and switching to an analysis of the recent history of...