Grading the gatekeepers.

• Author: McKissack, Fred, Jr.

The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril by Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 266 pages. $25.00.

Here's something new for the Miller Analogies Test: The News About the News is to journalism critiques as Disney is to the Brothers Grimm. Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser, respectively the executive editor and associate editor of The Washington Post, have documented the virtues and the massive faults of recent journalism, from dailies great and small to network news and local TV to new media. The state of the state of American journalism is bleak, they report.

"So much `news'--but is it really news?" Downie and Kaiser write. "Are you watching news when you see stock quotes streaming across the bottom of the screen while commentators trade gossip about companies and markets on CNBC? Are the polemics huffed back and forth by politicians and pundits on CNN's Crossfire a form of news? Are the interviews with Hollywood personalities on Good Morning America or Entertainment Tonight news? ... There are so many pretenders, and so few clear standards."

These are tough times.

Print journalism, save for a few papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times, is run by corporate hacks too scared to tell off Wall Street, eagerly jettisoning editorial personnel and shrinking news holes in favor of outrageous profits. Downie and Kaiser save their best shots for Gannett and Knight Ridder, detailing how insipid corporate directives and total devotion to the bottom line have hurt papers from San Jose to Philadelphia. And they cap this off with a quote from Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine, who, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, is a voracious reader. Downie and Kaiser quote her as writing: "[Knight Ridder's] historic culture has been one of producing Pulitzer Prizes instead of profits, and while we think that culture is hard to change, it does seem to be happening."

Network TV has gone from programming diamonds to cubic zirconia that twinkle because of graphics rather than content. And the Web is less a panacea than a sinkhole of baseless innuendo.

What Downie and Kaiser tell us is well reported, and their analysis is informed by decades of an intimate knowledge of their vocation, but it's not that new. If you've read or listened to James Fallows, Ben Bagdikian, Danny Schechter, John Nichols and Bob McChesney, Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, and John R. MacArthur, then The News About...