Breaking the News.

I continually tell my journalism students - and myself - that if they want to be widely loved they should choose some other profession.

The public has "hated" the media for a number of reasons. Since the Nixon years, Republican administrations and conservative publications have orchestrated a campaign to demonize the "liberal" press in a strategy to neutralize critical scrutiny. Press coverage of Vietnam and Watergate chronicled a decade of national disgrace from which the American psyche has not recovered, and part of the public has not forgiven the messengers who brought the bad news.

Furthermore, because the media reflect our culture and thrive economically by pandering to our baser lusts and curiosities, they are, whether we like it or not, "us"; and, while we ogle trash-TV, chuckle at "The McLaughlin Group," or plunk down our dollars for Vanity Fair or a deteriorating New Yorker, deep down we must despise them - as we do ourselves when old pals keep us out all night and send us home with hangovers.

But recent public and professional griping about the media has taken a different - and oddly perverse - tone. In May, during a week-long series on race, "Nightline" focused on a white Philadelphia neighborhood that had driven out a newly resident black woman. When Ted Koppel asked a studio assembly of the white neighbors what made them "most angry," they replied with one voice, "the media!" which had called public attention to their actions. They were referring to the local TV news shows. Yet, here they were all basking in the national media's glow, confident that when they got home their neighbors would gasp, "Saw you on TV."

More recently, Newsweek columnist Joe Klein, lambasted by his colleagues for lying repeatedly about his authorship of Primary Colors, whined that he had become a media victim.

In this climate, James Fallows's stimulating Breaking the News, a personal, focused analysis of the media's fall in public esteem, has become a media phenomenon itself. Widely reviewed and debated, Fallows's thesis that the media now fail to fulfill their basic function in a democratic society has provoked a year-long stir among his colleagues and adversaries.

What has led journalism to forsake its public function - which is to provide citizens with the tools of democracy, or, in the words of a nineteenth-century Manchester Guardian editor, "to see life steady and see it whole"?

Because "60 Minutes" made money and turned its investigative reporters into stars, the networks began demanding that their news divisions show a profit, coverage declined. Because Joe McGinnis's The Selling of the President, 1968, exposed the Nixon campaign as a manipulative fraud, political coverage has degenerated into a prolonged spat between spin doctors and cynical reporters. Meanwhile, chain ownership and "downsizing" have weakened local newspapers, TV competition has killed off general circulation magazines, and the status revolution in big-time journalism has made reporters identify more with the rich and Powerful, rather than with the "have-nots" who need journalists to fight their cause.

Political coverage in an election year is particularly superficial because both print and broadcast reporters, who are not sufficiently trained in history, economics, and international affairs, find it easier to report tactics, "water cooler conversations," rather than analyze complex issues. Its easier to debrief a political consultant at lunch on whether the president had a "good or bad week" or call up a Nexis search on a candidate's positions on a computer than to slog to some small town and ask strangers on the street what are the real issues in their lives.

One issue which the press flubbed, "its Vietnam," Fallows argues, was the health-care debate. From the start it focused on the horse-race politics of health care - the secret meetings, the jockeying among interest groups, and the fundamentally wrong-headed Elizabeth McCaughey (now New York lieutenant-governor) attack on the Clinton plan in the New Republic - rather than cover the issue in a way that would promote the public good.

Journalism is, in many ways, the most self-critical, and thus self-correcting, profession; but Fallows's prescription for these ills - known as public or civic journalism - contradicts the traditional wisdom of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In Fallows's version of public journalism, a newspaper sees itself as a citizen participant in an election campaign. It sponsors public forums, researches and defines the issues, rather than distances itself as the "objective" observer who allows the candidates free rein to determine the agenda, the issues, and their timing.

Occasionally, Fallows's critique sounds as if it were the product more of dialogues with fellow Washingtonians than of conversations in the trenches. At the same time, his case for public journalism would be stronger if he had discussed its antecedents: Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and its imitators, like the Brooklyn Eagle, frequently coordinated their investigative reporting and editorials to achieve specific civic goals - like a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty or a 1941 "Ten-Point Plan" to revitalize Brooklyn. Fallows will have a chance to demonstrate his intellectual convictions as the new editor of U.S. News & World Report.

Fallows also seems to forget that journalism's purpose is not only to promote democracy but also to entertain. It's supposed to be fun - for reporters and readers alike. Tonya Harding, the Menendez brothers, and O. J. Simpson may be, in the long run, less consequential than the health-care debate; but they are great stories, and the press has an obligation to understand and cover them properly.

And public "hatred" of the press, depending on the story, may mean something or nothing at all. Readers may greet a high-minded public-journalism analysis of Latin American poverty or the tax structure with bored silence but erupt in rage over a racial or ethnic story, which, because of the low level of public literacy, they haven't properly understood.

Fallows's virtues are research joined with idealism and righteous indignation which drive him to slam the profession he loves. He closes with a touching anecdote about ABC's James Wooten's pride in a letter praising his Huntsville Times cub reporting in the 1960s on Southern rural poverty: "In the apparent absence of any community conscience Mr. Wooten has stepped into the void to serve as a conscience for us all."

Sometimes journalists are loved after all.