From: london@rain.org ()
Subject: Review of MEDIA CIRCUS by Howard Kurtz
Date: 9 Feb 1995 23:49:46 GMT

Book Review:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

MEDIA CIRCUS
The Trouble with America's Newspapers
By Howard Kurtz
Times Books, 1993, 420 pages, $25.00


Howard Kurtz has created a name for himself in and around Washington
covering the media beat for The Washington Post, and he is a frequent
contributor to magazines like the Columbia Journalism Review, The
Washington Monthly, and The New Republic.  Although the fly leaf of Media
Circus goes a little overboard, describing Kurtz variously as a
"scrupulous reporter," a "dogged investigator," a "lucid writer," and "one
of the handful of reporters who gets any respect these days," he is no
doubt one of the more incisive journalists in the business today. 

Media Circus is his attempt to examine what has gone wrong with the
newspaper business, written from a vantage point inside the newsroom.  He
chronicles a number of stories "that the press has fumbled, bumbled, or
otherwise botched in recent years."  The trouble with America's
newspapers, he contends, is that publishers, editors, and reporters are
desperately out of touch with their readers.  Unable to curb the tide of
newspaper closings and dwindling circulation figures, today's editors have
become "focus-group groupies" vainly studying their readers habits as if
they were some exotic species.  Meanwhile, their product has become
increasingly boring, superficial and irrelevant.  Detroit auto companies
are not the only industry to have misjudged their customers, he muses. 
Newspaper readers, like car buyers, are rejecting the product and tuning
out.  In the final analysis, journalists themselves have to shoulder the
burden for what has happened to newspapers, according to Kurtz.  "We are
the architects of our own misfortune," he says, and "we need to spend more
time thinking about our shortcomings rather than chasing after the next
fire truck." 

This is essentially a work of journalism trying to pass itself off as a
critical analysis, and as such it has a few shortcomings.  But it is an
energetic and well-written book, rich with insights and anecdotes, and
compared with most media critiques these days, that is saying a lot. 


                                        Scott London * london@rain.org

                               P.O. Box 21333 * Santa Barbara CA 93121
                               Phone: 805 963 1573 * Fax: 805 963 0173