Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 3 (Fall 2000)

 

Republic of Denial: Press, Politics, and Public Life
By Michael Janeway. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Doris Graber

 

Here is another classic in the government-media-bashing tradition that has become fashionable among academics and media gurus. Michael Janeway, whose career has spanned government service, newspaper and journal editing, and academia, laments the breakdown of political structures in the United States since the 1960s. The country has become socially and culturally fragmented, the public has become depressed and alienated from bad government and worse politics, and the political disasters have hurled the media into a maelstrom of decline. What is worse, there is little chance that the descent to doom can be reversed because all of the movers and shakers are frozen into a state of denial.

Republic of Denial is Janeway's analysis of how it all happened and why. He acknowledges that other writers have dissected the social and political trends of these pivotal decades in greater detail than is possible or intended in his brief volume. His special contribution, Janeway argues, is to tell the story based on the unique perspective of an insider who combines work experience in government with extensive experience in practical and academic journalism. It is an ominous story that must be told with brutal frankness in hopes of alerting Americans to the gravity of the crisis that is encircling them.

Who are the main culprits in the debasement of government and the media? On the governmental side, they are overly-demanding, often violent interest groups, declining political parties, and unprincipled, corrupt politicians. On the media side, the rise of television has turned solid news into cotton-candy infotainments. Pressured by advertisers, marketers have turned to tabloid journalism and have splintered the national audience into ever smaller segments. Business tycoons, with their eyes glued on the bottom line of profits, are ever ready to cut the resources needed for excellent journalism and to divert profits into the nonmedia sectors of their huge and diverse business conglomerates.

The best and the brightest among young journalists, along with a few elite print media institutions, are the remaining ray of hope that the precious cultural values of the past may be rekindled. But journalism leaders will not be able to pull the country away from disaster as long as American government remains "ineffective, degraded, debased, despised, incompetent to deal with society's real and deep problems, and irrelevant to so many millions of Americans" (p. 17l). Political power inevitably trumps media power.

I do not share Michael Janeway's vision of gloom and doom about the future of American politics and the future of American journalism. Though he will probably see my disagreement with his worst-case interpretation of the American scene as an example of unwarranted denial, I see it as a case of greater realism. The problems that Janeway discusses in the political arena and in journalism are real; but they are neither as universal nor as serious and incurable as he alleges. Many of the developments that he labels as utter disasters have their positive aspects along with the negative ones. For example, niche programming, which he sees as the cause of destructive social and political fragmentation, has the advantage of serving the interests of many hitherto neglected groups. The dire consequences that he attributes to segmentation have not happened. The United States is not on the verge of becoming a feudal society split into thousands of disconnected ghettos.

Republic of Denial may serve well as a warning clarion call that shatters illusions that all is well on the political and media fronts. But the message loses persuasiveness because its lack of nuances strains credibility.

Doris Graber
University of Illinois at Chicago