How the Cold War Broke the News: The Surprising Roots of Journalism’s Decline

Zelizer (The Journalism Manifesto), a professor of journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, argues in this intriguing but uneven study that many of America’s journalists “are so caught up in belonging to one side or the other they fail to lay out the stakes that matter most.” She contends that this divisiveness is the result of “us vs. them” habits journalists learned during the Cold War—ranging from political ideologies about American exceptionalism inculcated within reporters themselves, to “access journalism” coverage styles that involved cozying up to officials and editorial tactics for framing stories that tend to devalue one subject’s position relative to another’s. Zelizer’s account serves in part as a captivating history of U.S. media coverage of the Cold War—she describes reporters in full boosterism mode as well as those who lost access to government sources due to critical coverage. The connection between the Cold War and present-day reporting can feel tenuous at times, though her breakdown of the ways in which Palestinians are devalued in American news stories is fascinating, and her critique of the patness of American journalism has bite (many reporters use “familiar scripts in a business-as-usual fashion... however irrelevant they might be,” she contends). This impassioned reflection on journalistic ethics is at its best when it zeroes in on how professional laziness festers into something more dangerous. (Nov.)