Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

A lot of big-shot journalists didn't like this book, a systematic jeremiad about the current sad state of American political journalism. For instance, both the New York Times op-ed page and the New Yorker took pains to excoriate the book and its author--pretty good hints that Fallows is onto something. His point is that greed and intellectual sloth have fostered a political media elite that increasingly focuses on spin and ignores substance at the very time when solving the country's real problems requires all possible nuance.