Democracy and the News [Hardcover]

Here are some of the "features" of Herbert Gans's DEMOCRACY AND THE NEWS:

-- Dozens if not hundreds of sentences with such subject phrases as many people, some organizations, most editors, a significant number of elected officials, much of the audience, and some observers.

-- Dozens if not hundreds of sentences containing such qualifiers as perhaps, sometimes, many times, often, may be, could be, might be, probably, may yet be, could in theory be, is difficult to say, and virtually any other squishy generalizer the author could conjure.

-- Repeated assertions that questions deserve to be asked, no one has charted the processes, has not received sufficient consideration, deserves more legwork than it receives, needs discussion, and no one has ever tried to measure.

-- A plethora of vague generalities, occasionally interrupted by such revealing specifics as the fact that "60 Minutes" focuses on watchdog news, that the Florida voting count investigations did not reverse the 2000 Presidential election, that government officials use press leaks as trial balloons, that young people "apparently" obtain their news from "Comedy Central," and that Rush Limbaugh is currently the most famous of radio hosts who draw audiences by being as argumentative as possible.

-- A set of recommendations that would have big city newspapers reporting on which DMV office had the shortest lines, how rising oil prices are affecting Mr. Johnson's body shop, society news written by journalists from "low income backgrounds," reports written in non-standard English, and stories written by teen reporters aabout how new legislation will affect their peers (Beavis and Butthead do Washington). As if American mass culture doesn't already bottom feed enough, Gans would have the mass media dumbing down even further in the name of "localization."

-- An astounding 380 footnotes for 125 pages of text, occupying nearly 20% of the page count and frequently adding further generalizations and loose conjecture on top of the already vague sentences from which they were generated.

-- Possibly the Hope Diamond of meaningless academic writing (referring to a Pew Center study that half the respondents only follow the news wnen something important or interesting is happening): "Whether yet more members of the news audience will adopt this pattern remains to be seen, for it depends on what happens in and to the country." And the stock market will fluctuate and the seasons will change. So sayeth Chauncey Gardener.

Professor Gans manages to insult his readers' intelligence with the astoundingly obvious. At the same time, he barely mentions independent Internet websites and weblogs (Slate, Matt Drudge, Wonkette, etc.), word-of-mouth via multiply-forwarded email, Fox News and MSNBC, talking head programs like Crossfire, current events books focusing on politics, Bill Maher and Jon Stewart, MTV, and almost any other new technology or non-traditional news source. He also completely ignores European news institutions such as BBC News, despite the fact that Europeans frequently know and understand American economic and foreign policy better than most Americans.

If you are looking for a book that deals in critical and specific detail with the roles and issues of the news media in the American democratic system, please look elsewhere. DEMOCRACY AND THE NEWS provides strong evidence that even full professors at Columbia University are not immune from writing 125 pages of heavily footnoted drivel. If this is what "publish or perish" is all about, then please, by all means, perish.