Media Circus; The Trouble with America's Newspapers

New York: Times Books, 1993. First Edition [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. [10], 420, [2] pages. Sources. Index. Signed by the author with sentiment on fep side facing half-title page. Howard Alan Kurtz (born August 1, 1953) is an American journalist and author best known for his coverage of the media. Kurtz is the host of Fox News's Media Buzz program, the successor to Fox News Watch. He is the former media writer for The Washington Post and the former Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast. He has written five books about the media. Kurtz left CNN and joined Fox News in 2013. Media Circus: The Trouble with America's Newspapers identifies problems afflicting U.S. newspapers and offers suggestions. Among issues identified are timid leadership, a spreading tabloid approach to news with a growing focus on celebrities and personal scandal, poor coverage of racial issues and the Persian Gulf war, increasing bureaucracy and a pasteurization of the news. Derived from a Kirkus review: A diagnosis of what ails US newspapers. Kurtz concludes that broadsheets as well as tabloids have been losing credibility because they tend to focus on scandalous sleaze or marginal manipulators while-until overtaken by events-they all but ignore important stories like the collapse of thrift institutions and the root causes of the L.A. riots. At the same time, dailies have been squandering their natural advantages- -notably, an unrivaled ability to provide the public with in-depth context on TV's blur of sound bites. In-house woes ranging from ethical lapses through noisy allegations of racial bias and sexism have further undermined an already shaky industry. Kurtz examines how labor strife as well as economic problems have expanded the number of single-paper towns, inducing many survivors to ape USA Today-which, he says, has been moving up-market with a less flashy format and more substantive content. Covered as well are the improved performances of print journalists during the 1992 presidential campaign; the Pentagon's humiliating defeat of the press corps during the Gulf War; the many ways in which government officials can seduce correspondents supposed to probe them; and the capacity of newspapers to compete for attention in a high-tech era arguably dominated by CNN, C-SPAN, MTV, or allied sources of instant gratification. A cautionary, wide-ranging critique that's both entertaining and informative.