Can James Fallows
practice what he preaches?

It did not take The Washington Post long to assess the James Fallows regime at U.S. News & World Report. "The tone of the new U.S. News," Linton Weeks wrote in the Style section, "is the same as it ever was - the soporific droning of a middle-aged conservative who, having trapped you at a PTA social, prattles on and on about electric cars, negative political campaign ads, and no-fault divorce."

 "To be fair," Weeks added, magnanimously, "this is only Fallows's second issue." The Post had waited until September 24, eleven whole working days after Fallows took over as editor.

The long knives are out a bit early, perhaps, because the tooth that Fallows drilled in his most recent book, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine Democracy, is a little sensitive. The dentist touched a nerve.

 This has been in evidence since Breaking came out in January, months before Mort Zuckerman offered Fallows the opportunity to run his newsmagazine. In the book, Fallows preaches sermons we've heard before (see "Something's Rotten," CJR, March/April): that readers and viewers are deserting us, and that this is connected to our hopeless efforts to compete with entertainment media, our notion that to be tough is to be mean-spirited, our reduction of complexities to polarized cartoons, our economic disconnect with the struggling middle class, our "buckraking" for money on the speech circuit, and our yammering on those political TV food fights to increase our marketability, and, especially, our cynical insistence on covering the tactics and politics around national problems instead of grabbing hold of the thorny issues themselves. Still, Fallows has stature enough and made the case compellingly enough to wake up the choir. He named names and gave examples.

 In his books, Fallows tends to dive serenely into deep problems of complex institutions and constructs - the Pentagon, for one, (National Defense, 1981) and the American/Japanese economic relationship (Looking at the Sun, 1994) - and come up holding a critique. The institutions and players tend to resent it.

The media are no exception. You can hear the irritation in clever putdowns (Fallows is "the rector of American journalism" - The New Republic; "At times, he seems like Carry Nation sent out to review a tavern" - The New Yorker). You could sense it in the extra glee felt in certain circles after The Washington Post's media cop, Howard Kurtz, legitimately collared Fallows's wife, Deborah, in his press column for taking freebies from New Age spas as she researched a piece about them for The Atlantic Monthly, where Fallows previously held the title of Washington Editor. Maureen "What, me cynical?" Dowd devoted a whole column in The New York Times in April to defending against Fallows that "noisy imperfect lot struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history," meaning mostly the Washington press corps, which Fallows particularly targets, and out of which Dowd labors to skewer the politicians she so loves to hate. "Americans did not become more disillusioned because the press distorted the workings of government," she wrote, "but because the press exposed the workings of government."

 The Fallows critique has had heavyweight defenders, too. Time's top editor, Walter Isaacson, favorably reviewed Breaking the News, and Newsweek devoted a remarkable four pages to the book and the issues it raises - a long piece by Jonathan Alter, a senior editor who, like Fallows, came out of The Washington Monthly; an excerpt from the book; and a series of soundbites about press problems from the likes of Mike Wallace, Dan Quayle, and Donna Shalala.

Life takes odd turns, and Fallows now finds himself in competition with those Newsweeklies. The media minister has been given a unique chance to practice what he preaches in front of some 2.2 million readers, including journalists, who have an unusually strong interest in the outcome. Some would enjoy watching him fall. The Weekly Standard, for one, imagines he'll replace the magazine's "News You Can Use" slogan with "Human Imperfections and How to Eliminate Them." Others are cheering the good reverend on.

 You can meet the virtual James Fallows at Fallows Central, his own Web site, at http://www. clark.net/pub/rothman/fallows.htm. It takes a dizzying level of confidence to put "The Work and Links of" as a subtitle before your name, and to invite the world to read your old articles, the introductions to your books, and dozens of your National Public Radio commentaries. Or to listen; with RealAudio software, Fallows tells the visitor to Fallows Central, "you can hear my voice at the NPR site." The lists of articles and commentaries (he's written 119 pieces for the Atlantic alone, by his count) show him to be someone drawn to the most complex subjects (immigration; economics; trade) as well as to the oddities of ordinary life (the joy of coffee; rock'n'roll lyrics we remember; how women throw a baseball). Fallows uses the site to try to communicate with his readers, asking for reactions to his thinking, via e-mail.

In person, in his sunny new corner office at U.S. News, he seems careful and gracious, Waspy and smart - a busy man too polite to glance at his wristwatch. About all he'd had time to install on his bookshelves by early October, when we spoke, were pictures of family (his wife and two teenage sons) and a copy of the latest version of IBM's OS/2 operating system, which Fallows has famously (some would say eccentrically) championed over Microsoft's Windows in the pages of the Atlantic. Fallows was into computers early on, writing about them when many of us still thought a hard drive was a difficult journey by car.

 He's from Redlands, California - "think American Graffiti," he says - where his father was a doctor, and medicine was a career he thought he might pursue until he tried journalism at Harvard. There he edited The Harvard Crimson through 1969 and presided over a stimulating staff, including Michael Kinsley, now the editor of Slate; E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post columnist; David Ignatius, an assistant managing editor of that paper; Evan Thomas of Newsweek; Esther Dyson, the computer wizard/entrepreneur; The New York Times columnist Frank Rich; and Peter Listening to Prozac Kramer. It being 1969, Fallows's tenure may have been more stimulating than he might have preferred. Editorial policies were decided by staff votes, including one (which Fallows says he opposed) calling for a North Vietnamese victory over the Americans in the war. A contingent of Harvard faculty members, inflamed by such sentiments, lobbied the Crimson's governing board to take editorial power away from the students. The movement was blocked, largely by the persuasive power of well-known alumni like David Halberstam and J. Anthony Lukas (class of 1955), who brought up the notion of a free press.

 After college (and after two years in Oxford studying economics as a Rhodes Scholar) Fallows landed a job at Charles Peters's Washington Monthly, the neoliberal journal of political opinion that has regularly churned out big-thought writers (Taylor Branch, Nicholas Lemann, Suzannah Lessard, Mickey Kaus, Joseph Nocera, Gregg Easterbrook, etc.). Among the pieces he wrote that gained attention was an essay in October 1975 about how he and his Harvard pals dealt with the Vietnam draft, a wrenching piece about the class wars that we tend not to discuss in America. In 1969, Fallows wrote, he got himself under the weight limit (he was 6'1" and weighed 120 pounds) and won a deferment, like most of his Cambridge friends. But he could not shake the memory of the busloads of young men from nearby working-class Chelsea who walked through the examination lines "like so many cattle off to slaughter." Looking back from 1975, Fallows regretted that so many elites like him took the easy way - deferment rather than resistance - and he disparaged those among his fellow elites who privately reasoned that their contributions to society were more important than those ofhe proles, a sentiment, he wrote, marked with "utter disdain for the abilities, hopes, complexities" of the Chelsea boys. His writing helped land him in Jimmy Carter's White House as chief speech writer. But after two years he turned on the president, writing for Atlantic a piece called "The Passionless Presidency" on Carter's shortcomings - notably the lack of "the passion to convert himself from a good man into an effective one" - and their effect on the nation.

In 1980, Fallows started a sixteen-year run at The Atlantic Monthly (where he remains on the masthead as a contributing editor, as he does at The Washington Monthly). For four of those years he and his family lived in the Far East, mostly Japan, where he wrote about the culture and became a somewhat controversial expert on U.S.-Japanese trade, an advocate of a tougher American stance.

He was controversial with some of his American journalistic colleagues in Japan as well. Some of those reporters believe he was the inspiration for an unappealing character in The Secret Sun, a 1992 novel about Japan by a former Washington Post Tokyo bureau chief, Fred Hiatt, now an editorial writer for that paper. The character is introduced this way: "Zarsky was a magazine editor from New York who had spent three months in Tokyo and then written a book telling the world everything that was wrong with Japan and the Japanese. Most of what he knew he had learned by picking the brains of . . . foreign correspondents over chummy lunches at the club . . . Not that Zarsky was wrong, exactly, but he had patted one leg of the elephant and thought he'd felt the whole beast." Hiatt says Zarsky is not Fallows - "I have nothing against Fallows," he says. "I think he's a very smart fellow" - and Fallows, naturally, doesn't think he's like Zarsky, although he concedes that some of his former colleagues believe otherwise. He attributes that, in part, to a "tenderness" toward Japan that he says some foreign reporters who work in that country tend to develop, and which he was trying in his writing to challenge.

N ow and then Fallows overstates his case. In a speech on "Should We Hate the Media?" at the Aspen Institute last summer, for example, by way of showing how much more entertainment-oriented TV news has become, he asserted that Elvis Presley's 1977 death was "not announced on the network news." In fact, it was the lead story on ABC and NBC, and ran just after a lead Panama Canal-treaty story on CBS.

 Still, his points resonate with readers and viewers. Many of them see the Washington press, at least, as just another part of the problem - as "millionaires, Ivy League roommates of senators, more frequent travelers to Tuscany than Texarkana, husbands and sisters of superlobbyists, fellow parents at Sidwell or St. Albans, and fellow partygoers with the rest of the cabal," as Kevin Phillips put it in a New York Times review of Fallows's book.

And part of what triggers the strong journalistic allergy to Fallows is a reaction to the media reform movement meant to address this disconnection between press and people - civic journalism. Fallows didn't explore the movement so much as ally himself with its explorers, people he sees as sharing his critique and trying to do something about it. "It seemed to me a way to get around some of the logjams that are troubling the business," he says. "I had no idea it was such a religious issue." Maybe he should have. Civic journalism holds that journalists ought to be more than watchdogs, that their higher role is to nourish public life and debate and thus help the citizenry solve public problems. Its critics, including many elders in the high church of news, see it as a retreat from objectivity or a high-toned variant of pandering.

In truth, a wide range of experiments and projects now travel under the civic journalism (sometimes called "public journalism") label. What National Public Radio has incorporated from it is not what The Kansas City Star picked up or what has been absorbed by the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It's a somewhat uncrystallized philosophy, still as squishy as wet clay, and regularly remolded by both defenders and attackers. It won't go away, and it clearly arouses fervent passions.

Howell Raines, for example, the New York Times's editorial-page editor, took up more than a third of his editorial space last February 25 with a signed column blasting Fallows in a way that was oddly personal. Fallows's mind had been warped early in his career, Raines reasoned, by his service under Peters at The Washington Monthly and his two years in government under Carter. These experiences, Raines suggested, turned Fallows into a carrier of "what might be called Washington Monthly Disease," whose symptoms, he wrote, include a "puritanical contempt for horse-race politics" and the false notion that readers "will be better served by reporters who see themselves as civic stenographers dedicated to promoting worthy policies and well-motivated politicians." Real reporters, "whose values were shaped in the newsroom," Raines explained, have developed an ethic that calls on them to "to be agnostic as to public policy outcomes, to be dogged in the collection and delivery of information for its own sake."

Richard Harwood, in his March 8 column in The Washington Post, fired back on Fallows's behalf, blasting Raines's version of journalistic disinterest as the usual "defensive rhetoric" employed when press practices are questioned and when civic journalism comes up, and wondering on which planet Raines lives if he thinks that the ethic of disinterest he described is strictly adhered to. It is nonsense, Harwood further roared, to suggest that "the only true and legitimate journalist is a strange species of citizen who betrays himself and his ‘calling' if he harbors notions of civic responsibility or cares about the purpose and impact of his work."

 Fallows certainly has not backed away from civic journalism - he blessed it again in May in a speech at the first "James K. Batten Symposium and Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism," sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a major backer of the civic journalism movement. But he shapes the concept into a form that would be hard for almost anyone to find fault with: to come up with stories that make readers "feel engaged in their public life, rather than just being spectators or objects. That may just sound like good journalism. If so, fine. It's good journalism.

"What I have in mind," he says, "is to try and make this a good magazine, not a good public journalism experiment. It's a challenge, to put my money - or Mort Zuckerman's money - where my mouth is. I have been saying it is possible to make important matters more interesting. This is a fair test of whether that's actually so."

 In his blast at the "new" U.S. News in The Washington Post, Linton Weeks zapped Fallows's second cover story, a piece on crime in America, as "the usual conglomeration of stats and statements in blah-blah-blah paragraphs that could be rearranged, like refrigerator-magnet poetry, in almost any order." A week earlier, Weeks might have read "Illegal in Iowa," a beautifully reported and strikingly written cover investigation about a U.S. company recruiting Mexicans to do the dirty, low-paying, and dangerous labor at its meatpacking plant, and, most interestingly, about the effect of that recruitment on the Mexicans, the company, and the town.

 But neither piece says much about the Fallows regime. It takes a while to shape a magazine. The current U.S. News has been shaped by Michael Ruby and Merrill McLoughlin, a husband-and-wife editing team who found a way to work for seven years with chairman/editor-in-chief Zuckerman, an owner-operator who can be challenging. Zuckerman went through four editors in five years before Mike 'n Mimi, as Ruby and McLoughlin are affectionately known around U.S. News. They were widely seen by staff members as editors who made U.S. News a stronger magazine, although some think they were starting to run out of gas. What they left in Fallows's hands is a serious and occasionally hard-hitting newsmagazine with a strong News You Can Use service side ("America's Best Colleges"; "Cosmetic Surgery's New Risks"), a muscular investigative unit, and some fine columns. On the down side, perhaps, its tone tilts toward eat-your-broccoli, and too much of its focus aims inside the Beltway. It is third in terms of circulation to its two rivals, although Zuckerman is said to be not unhappy with the "natural" circulation level. He'd like more advertising and a somewhat younger reader profile.

U.S. News is less likely to feature trends or movie-star cleavage than Time or Newsweek. It is also somewhat less likely to feature the latest news. This is partly because Time and Newsweek usually close Saturday and, in order to cover late events, often go for an expensive late close; U.S. News usually closes on Fridays, missing late stories. Its issue dated October 14, which hit the stands October 7, for example, had nothing about the October 6 Dole/Clinton debate. Time and Newsweek's October 14 issue did. Newsweek, in fact, put a debate photo on its cover. Fallows won't change this, and in fact, seems likely to head even further away from the heavily traveled ground of breaking news.

 Toward what? He started making changes quickly at the magazine, bouncing several people, including Steven Roberts, the high-visibility political columnist. (In Breaking the News, Roberts and his wife Cokie of ABC and NPR were exhibits A and B in Fallows's brief against journalists milking the lecture circuit. U.S. News will henceforth regularly print what its people earn that way). Fallows appointed new editors from within for several sections of the magazine, and rapidly stole some talent from other publications - including Timothy Noah, who'll cover business, from The Wall Street Journal; William Holstein, a senior writer, from Business Week, where he was world editor; Maryanne Golon, the new director of photography, from Time, where she was deputy picture editor. Lincoln Caplan, a former New Yorker writer and Newsweek contributing editor, became deputy editor of the U.S. News section of the magazine.

More telling, perhaps, he began hiring a number of contributing editors from around the country - "first-rate writers with particular areas of expertise. People who can greatly enrich what's in a news magazine but who don't want to work full-time for one" - many of whom will produce one of Fallows's favorite forms, the short reported essay. They do seem to be people with an extra ingredient. Among the early hires: Charles McCarry, a former CIA employee turned novelist and nonfiction writer, who'll write on espionage and foreign affairs; Garrett Epps, a Washington Post reporter turned novelist turned law professor, on the law and other matters; Debra Dickerson, a sharecropper's daughter who went through the Air Force and Harvard Law School on her way to becoming a writer, on race and other subjects; and Randall E. Stross, a business-history specialist and professor, on technology. As an example of what he wants, Fallows holds up an October 7 Stross piece on PointCast, the hot Silicon Valley company that has developed a novel way to deliver news via computer. It's a piece that gives not only the business tale and the interesting technical history, but also stops to wonder about the social value of a product "whose unceasing yammer drowns out the possibility of reflection."

In short, Fallows seems to want context. In his book, he makes much of the journalists' duty to "see life steady and see life whole," as the turn-of-the-century British newspaper editor he quotes, Charles Prestwich Scott, put it. U.S. News can be expected, under Fallows, to go deeper into explanatory journalism, the "civic journalism" part of which, as far as I can tell, means not a lot more than avoiding the Beltway trap of focusing so intently on the great political game. "The main point," Fallows wrote in a September 14 memo to his national staff, "is to use the political skirmish as an excuse for explaining the problem itself, rather than the other way around." He listed in the memo a number of such problems, including: polarizing incomes, the entitlements morass, the debate over how to control drug use, the size and purpose of the prison-industrial complex, narco-corruption in Mexico, and the souring relationship with China.

Eat-your-broccoli? Fallows suggests that these can all be made fascinating. "Making what's important interesting," he told the staff, is "the real purpose of journalism." This is his mantra, actually. Once again, it's a sermon that new editors have preached before. But it is a homily that Fallows himself has been able to embody in the best of his own work. He repeated the idea in a speech before the graduates of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism this past spring: "Violence. Sex. Mystery. Death. Beauty. Greed. Betrayal. Gossip. It is no challenge at all to interest your audience in these inherently interesting themes. Nor, on the other extreme, is it much of a challenge to make important topics seem dull. Journalists do it every day! The test of your skill - indeed the measure of your ultimate impact as journalists - is to bridge those realms and make people care about what counts."

 He gave the speech when he was a writer. Now he's an editor, up high on a different kind of wire.

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