There is sometimes a bit too much throat clearing, self-aware preening, and unnecessary color and human interest vignettes, but nonetheless it an accessible work that a lot of Americans would benefit from picking up. His take is fresh and topical enough that I think it makes the read worthwhile. Given that much of Stirewalt's arguments appear in other works, including those that are sources for this text like Amusing Ourselves to Death, he is careful not to dwell on overly familiar ground. This becomes a race to the bottom and makes for an unhealthy public discourse, which feeds forward into a dysfunctional politically and civic system. Hype, advocacy, sponsored content, gossip, and personality-driven tactics continue to creep into what should be the purview of solemn hard news in order to make a desperate grasp for new viewership and rage-provoking partisan opining is used to keep cultivated viewers hooked. It has also falsely turned up the dial on the tone of coverage.
This environmental has paradoxically nationalized and fragmented journalism, leading to both the decline of quality local news and old school investigative journalism.
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He recaps the familiar story about the changing technological landscape of journalism, the disengagement of Americans with journalistic content, and the associated disruption of the old print and old internet ad model, which has been supplanted by rapid, hyper-competitive attention model to which social media apps and cable TV are the portals with non-stop access. Stirewalt introduces his book, indicating that it will illustrate how "market pressures on the new media led decision makers" at all types of outlets "to embrace fear and rage as business models" (post-journalism). Despite, Broken News being a work of criticism, Stirewalt's jaunty voice shines through, and the work has an overall hopeful tone. Stirewalt's work is an accessible summary of many sophisticated system-level problems in news media and journalism. Broken News is polemic contra the phenomenon of "post-journalism," which is an Andrey Miroshnichenko term used to describe the cultivation of a focused consumer based that "highly habituated" to particular types of content. Chris Stirewalt of former Fox News Decision Desk fame has put together a brisk book of media criticism.