Backstory: Inside the Business of News FROM THE PUBLISHER
Journalism, it's long been said, is not just a business but a vital public service. Lately, however, voices from all sides of the political spectrum insist that today's journalism often makes a mockery of its high-minded ideals. But that's where agreement ceases and the debate about what ails journalism grows increasingly partisan and ugly. Is the culprit big media consolidation? Gotcha journalism? Noisy instant opinions on cable and the Internet? A pack of unpatriotic liberals, out of touch with America, whose collective bias forms an "Axis of Weasel"? Right-wing pundits who think that the words "fair and balanced" will, like a fairy's spell, turn their partisan diet into fair and balanced journalism? In Backstory, Ken Auletta's piercing gaze sweeps into every corner of a subject that has generated tremendous noise but precious little clear thinking. Auletta sits the reader by the campfire and tells stories. Stories about people that serve to illuminate the institutions they work for and the issues they wrestle with. He travels from the proud New York Times, a last outpost of old-school family ownership, recently buffeted by scandal, out across the country to journalism's new wave, chains like the Chicago Tribune where synergy is in the saddle and the stock price often sets the pace. He journeys to the depths of New York City's brutal tabloid wars, where he discovers that ego and power are at least as compelling a motivator as profit; he ventures out onto the cushy celebrity-journalist circuit, where he shines a spotlight on journalists who've ascended to the Olympian status of "media personality" and get to schmooze with Imus and collect fat corporate lecture fees. He reckons with the legacy of journalism's less compromised past, and prospects for its future, from fallen stars of "new media" like Inside.com to the ascendant star of cable, Roger Ailes's Fox News. The product of more than ten years covering the news media for The New Yorker, Backstory will beco
FROM THE CRITICS
If you want to know what's really happening in...newspaper and television journalism, this is the book to read.
San Antonio Express News
For a deeper understanding of how the big American media works...there's nobody better than Auletta.
Publishers Weekly
Like Auletta's earlier The Highwaymen, this is a collection of the author's work as media correspondent for the New Yorker, but the focus has shifted away from the individual toward the institutional. The book starts with a 2002 profile of then New York Times executive editor Howell Raines, depicting his attempts to redefine the paper's approach to journalism and foreshadowing his departure in the aftermath of the Jayson Blair scandal. Because of Raines's notoriety, it's an obvious choice to lead off with, but that decision affects the meta-narrative running through the book's first half. A string of articles dealing with newspapers around the country (including a look at New York's battling tabloids that didn't make it into the New Yorker because it wasn't "colorful" enough) examines the tension between editorial and business concerns, culminating in a 1993 look at the Times with open speculation about who would succeed the person who held the job before Raines and what it might mean for the newsroom. Alas, the moving profile of former Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips, who abandoned a promising career in journalism to devote himself to Christian evangelism, seems out of place amid the corporate chronicles. Yet its significance becomes clearer as subsequent pieces emphasize the growing lack of humility among contemporary journalists. Two final stories look at media startups that failed (Inside.com) and succeeded (Fox News), the latter bringing us up-to-date with the network's coverage of the war in Iraq. By putting these articles together, Auletta provides a valuable perspective on how the pressures of business have affected how we read and watch the news. Agent, Esther Newberg. (On sale Dec. 29) Forecast: Auletta regularly appears on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, The Charlie Rose Show and Nightline, and his numerous media connections should result in lots of coverage of this book. A five-city tour, blurbs from Walter Cronkite and Gay Talese, and national ads will help, too. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Media critic for The New Yorker, Auletta (World War 3.0) here offers another tale of the corrosive effects of power and wealth on a profession-in this case, print and broadcast journalism. Auletta delivers an unblinking view of the gray interface between the business of journalism and the ethics of reporting. He tells us that the business is fueled by synergy (i.e., the simultaneous ownership of broadcast, print, and entertainment outlets), set in motion by team culture, leverage, and other nebulous but au courant corporate clich s. Meanwhile, the work of newsgathering and reporting is withering under this entrepreneurial onslaught. In a series of 11 recent essays, Auletta takes to task media behemoths such as Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom for flagrant disregard of all notions of journalistic integrity and seemingly unquenchable lust for an ever-greener bottom line. Given the ongoing debate over recent FCC regulations that eased restrictions concerning the scope of media ownership, Backstory is a timely release on an issue of national concern. And the writing is lively, too. Recommended for medium and larger public libraries, as well as academic collections. [This is the first offering from Penguin Press, former Random House president Ann Godoff's new imprint at Penguin Putnam.-Ed.]-Ari Sigal, MLS, Marion, NC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Protestations by Fox News and the White House notwithstanding, the "liberal media" is a fiction. And what's killing the news business, writes New Yorker media critic Auletta (Three Blind Mice, 1991, etc.), is that most cherished of capitalist emotions: lust for profit. Independent newsgathering is increasingly rare, as documented in this collection of New Yorker pieces (augmented by one for the American Journalism Review) over the last ten years. Witness, the author offers as one bit of evidence, the bid CBS made to score an interview (presumably exclusive) with celebrity POW Jessica Lynch: an executive wrote to her family to promise exposure on several programs. "But the executive didn't stop there," Auletta writes. "She noted that Viacom, the corporate parent, owned Paramount, which could make a movie of Lynch's heroics, and Simon & Schuster, which could offer a book, and MTV, a popular cable network, which might make her a cohost of a video show, and Infinity Broadcasting, the second largest radio network." Thus the ascendancy of "synergy," which increasingly lowers the long-protected wall between the editorial and business sides of news organizations and dumbs the news down to reach a mass audience. Auletta's pieces include a careful account of the rise and fall of New York Times editor Howell Raines, whose regime collapsed in the wake of scandals involving Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg (who, as if to illustrate that synergy has no shame, has signed on to write Lynch's memoir); a lively sketch of New York's "tabloid wars," whereby its lesser organs of news and opinion scrambled to dominate the market in "a bar fight that . . . is aimed at one overriding goal: to be the last manstanding"; a look at that wall-lowering phenomenon as it played out, dramatically, at the Los Angeles Times under a new management that apparently valued news integrity less than double-digit returns; and a juicy dissection of the Fox Network, which has turned television news into an even louder and more ignorant version of all-talk radio. Eye-opening for news consumers, and useful for journalists hoping to understand the changes sweeping the profession. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM
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