Bad News

The news is supposed to tell us what is happening in the world, preferably before it becomes a catastrophe requiring theme music, animated graphics and a panel of six people shouting at one another. In Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All, veteran CBS correspondent Tom Fenton argues that serious journalism has been steadily sacrificed to ratings, corporate profit and the discovery that celebrity mishaps are considerably cheaper to cover than complicated events in distant countries.

Drawing upon decades spent reporting from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Soviet Union, Fenton describes the decline of the traditional foreign correspondent and the closing or weakening of overseas news bureaux. Experienced reporters might be watching dangerous political movements develop on the ground, but their reports still had to compete for airtime with domestic scandals, lifestyle features and stories involving attractive people who had temporarily misplaced their trousers.

Fenton is particularly scathing about the failure of American television news to give sustained attention to al-Qaeda and international terrorism before the attacks of 11 September 2001. Correspondents had followed the organisation and understood that the threat was growing, but lengthy foreign reports were frequently judged too difficult, too expensive or insufficiently entertaining for network schedules. After the attacks, of course, foreign affairs suddenly became extremely interesting, demonstrating the curious editorial principle that prevention is dull but disaster makes excellent television.

The book examines how news organisations became absorbed into large corporations, how public-service responsibilities gave way to commercial calculations and how reporting was increasingly replaced by presentation, commentary and reassuringly inexpensive studio discussion. Fenton’s complaint is not merely that television news has become shallower, but that a democracy cannot make sensible decisions if its citizens are fed an endless diet of spectacle, fear and conveniently simplified explanations.

Part professional memoir and part furious warning from someone who spent a career watching the change from inside, Bad News is lively, informed and disconcertingly prescient. Published in 2005, it comes from the comparatively innocent era before social media, algorithmic outrage and everyone with a telephone became both a news organisation and its least reliable foreign correspondent. Readers may therefore find themselves wondering whether matters have improved. To assist with this inquiry, they may switch on almost any news channel.

Published by ReganBooks, this copy is in As New condition. The physical book, unlike the industry it examines, appears to have suffered no noticeable decline in standards.

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