Breaking the News is a book that could only have been written in the late
twentieth century by someone born about the middle of the century.
It is impossible to imagine an Enlightenment pamphleteer, or
Victorian inhabitant of Grub Street, or foreign correspondent in
Weimar Berlin, wasting a hapless grove of trees to speculate whether
his chosen vocation was somehow to blame for affairs of state. But
then there has been nothing quite like the Baby Boom generation for
sheer self-regard and self-veneration, or for journalists who might
suppose that, among the remarkable achievements of their peers, “the
media” could “undermine American democracy.” Journalists of the
past, even the recent past, would have laughed at such conceit:
democracy, they would argue, might well undermine the
media—journalism is a business, subject to the marketplace—but not
the other way around.

It is a paradox of the modern journalistic world that, as the number
of newspapers in America steadily diminishes, the number of studies
devoted to the press, the number of symposia planned to discuss it,
the number of books on the subject and public philosophers to write them,
somehow rises. But there is a simple explanation, really.
Journalism, like any number of occupations, has undergone status
inflation in our times. What was once a slightly
disreputable
trade
—complete with apprenticeships, journeymen, and guilds—is now
a profession, one which attracts the likes of our author, James Fallows.

Mr. Fallows, a graduate of Harvard College who once wrote speeches
for President