Grading the gatekeepers.

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 the News is a nonsurprise. Not a disappointment, but a ho-hum recitation of facts that people who work in media or read critiques of it already know. Then again--and this should give pause for thought--there are tens of millions of people who may actually be shocked to know they live in a culture where the pissing match between Us and People draws more attention than the death of two-newspaper towns, the rise of giant media conglomerates, and FCC deregulation.

Downie and Kaiser do dish out some good anecdotes, factoids, and quotes, especially when it comes to inspecting the weaknesses in network news. To make their point, they contrast a CBS newscast from !981 with one in 2000. The 1981 newscast featured a four-minute, forty-second story on a power struggle between Alexander Haig and other members of the Reagan cabinet and a two-and-a-half minute report from Poland. The night began with an eight-second piece on a terrorist attack against the American embassy in San Salvador. Even today, with the U.S. in a war with no end in sight, it's hard to imagine CBS spending four minutes on topics that didn't directly affect the health or wealth of the average American. "The 2000 broadcast was faster-paced and shorter," Downie and Kaiser write. "More than ten minutes was devoted to commercials, and [Dan] Rather spent eighty seconds on `teases'--brief previews of what was still to come on the program to persuade viewers to stick with CBS through its four commercial breaks, each lasting two minutes or more."

Downie and Kaiser did solicit opinions from anchors and network executives about the effects of September 11 on redefining television journalism. Their answers reveal both hope and cynicism.

"I think it's a great moment in American journalism," CBS's Rather told Downie and Kaiser three weeks after the attacks, still basking in the glow of a renewed interest in honest-to-goodness news gathering. "Now, whether we can make this moment last, and how long we can make it last, these are the open questions.... I'm mildly optimistic, but the italics must be on the mildly."

Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC News, said, "I don't know that the current interests [in international news] will continue much beyond this story, however long it lasts," he said.

And Friedman was right. Recent studies show that after an initial rush to cover far-flung places such as Kabul and Karachi, networks have settled back into the routine of covering the sensational, salacious story of the moment. From the apparently irresistible pull of actor Robert Blake's arrest for murder to the kidnapping of Salt Lake City teenager Elizabeth Smart to endless features on botox parties and uncovering Deep Throat, the media quickly moved back to chasing sirens, infotainment, and inane stories on the life and death struggles of dogs on ships.

One of the saddest and possibly most inadvertently humorous passages in the network news section is when Rather tells the authors in 2000 that he dreams of a day when baby boomers demand "integrity-based" news, and CBS gives it to them. Downie and Kaiser recount Rather's one-hour dreamcast.

"My own preference [would be] to have it on at ten o'clock and make it a combination of The CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes, and Nightline," Rather said. "I think somebody is going to do that."

Two years later, ABC executives tried to kill Nightline in favor of stealing David Letterman. Aging baby boomers aren't the ideal demographic. Only shame and a reluctant David Letterman kept this atrocity from becoming reality.

CBS isn't much better. The Tiffany network told award-winning correspondent Carol Marin there wasn't enough money to keep her. However, the network found enough money to hire Lara Logan, a former swimwear model, who was reprimanded by the British military last year in Afghanistan for wearing "low-cut tops" and "skimpy outfits" and for "shamelessly flaunting her gender." Logan may grow to be a respected correspondent in the vein of Marin and Lesley Stahl, but CBS looks more foolish than fiscally responsible, the network news version of a lad magazine.

NBC's Tom Brokaw perfectly summed up the current pitiful ethos of network journalism: Folks on the inside, all well educated and smart, just "don't give a shit about the news," he said. The real power is in talk shows.

You think networks are a sorry lot? Local broadcasting is a stomach-churning mess of car crashes, murder scenes, natural disasters, breathless weather reports from the "Storm Team," and the rat-a-tat of equally breathless sports anchors. When Downie and Kaiser ask a D.C.-based news director about the longtime television ethos of sensational visuals, his response sums up the corrupted values in the studio. He told them about airing video of a fistfight between the new and old managers of a Taiwan television station. "We have this video and we have to put it on television," he told them. "It's just fascinating. Doesn't mean a damn thing. And we don't need more than twenty seconds of it. But we will suck that out of the sky, bounce it off three satellites, spend a ton of money on it."

The director had high aspirations for his station, "but he made it clear that the resources available to pursue [his aspirations are] strictly limited by the need to provide extraordinary profits that NBC, the station's owner, demands," Downie and Kaiser write. The station's profit margins were hinted to exceed 50 percent. If it's making money, don't fix it.

What I found most disconcerting were the self-serving examples of how great The Washington Post and the national mainstream print press are when stacked up against competitors in vertical and horizontal markets. This kind of chest thumping comes off as bullying when the authors blast newspapers such as the Omaha World Herald and The Akron Beacon Journal for localizing the September 11 story. They then cite The Burlington (Vermont) Free Press for "making extensive and intelligent use of meaty stories from the news services of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post in a thirteen-page main section cleared of advertisements."

Yes, and the Gannett-owned Free Press pays a considerable fee to reprint those stories. Plus, anyone with a modem can go online and compare them with those from any number of other news outlets from Oakland to London to Bombay.

There is a nauseating amount of condescension about the differences between the big national dailies and small newspapers, especially in how they dealt with September 11. "A newsroom with little or no experience handling stories about an important, complicated national and international event can't learn how to do so on the fly, when a catastrophe happens," Downie and Kaiser write. Yes, but wasn't it a small circulation magazine in the Middle East that beat the experienced U.S. press on Iran-contra? And for all the "financial experts" on staff at these great newspapers of record, how is it that they all missed Enron? Or why did their seasoned Pentagon reporters and national and foreign editors fail to give much play to the U.S. Commission on National Security's report, released in January 2001, that exposed deep flaws in anti-terrorism tactics?

Downie and Kaiser do offer some insight into their newspaper's mistakes over the years, but it's less mea culpa and more of a case study on how a newsroom functions.

What is woefully lacking in The News About the News is any discussion, much less mention, of alternative weeklies and other nontraditional news sources in uncovering facts and reporting on communities that big dailies don't write about.

The Chicago Reporter and The National Catholic Reporter, and venerable weeklies such as The Village Voice, Boston Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Denver's West-world, to name a just a few authentic news organizations with good standards, have undertaken deep, adventurous investigations into subjects where the national media refused to tread. And with limited resources and small staffs, they manage to pull out stories worth reading and following.

The convergence of Downie and Kaiser's analysis and those of Solomon and McChesney comes at the end of the book.

"News is an important part of the American culture," Downie and Kaiser write. "The United States will be a better place if its citizens can get from the news what they need to know to govern themselves effectively and improve their lives."

I guess it's comforting that two mainstream journalists are echoing what lefty critics have been saying for years. Welcome aboard.

Fred McKissack Jr. is Associate Editor of The Progressive. He has contributed to The Washington Post Book World and The Post's Education Review.