Breach of Faith: A Crisis of Coverage in the Age of Corporate Newspapering

By Gene Roberts and Thomas Kunkel

What has happened to the news? Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in newspaper coverage. Many newspaper executives, paring costs and badly misreading public appetites, have cut back dramatically on all types of public-affairs reporting. Fewer reporters than ever are assigned to the statehouse or the White House, to city hall or foreign capitals. Too often celebrity gossip and movie tips take the place of serious journalism instead of existing alongside it. Newspapers once operated under a mandate to provide the kinds of news that citizens need to function in a democratic society, but many corporations have changed that mandate.
 
For more than two years, legendary editor Gene Roberts led a group of journalists in an unprecedented study of the newspaper industry for the American Journalism Review. This is the second volume of their findings. The first, Leaving Readers Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering, documented the storm of buying, selling, and consolidation that is transforming the American press. This second volume explores the consequences of these changes for ordinary communities and for the nation, arguing that they place democracy itself in peril.
 
Contributors include Peter Arnett, Mary Walton, Charles Layton, John Herbers, James McCartney, Carl Sessions Stepp, Lewis M. Simons, Chip Brown and Winnie Hu.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781610750820

Gene Roberts

Gene Roberts is a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was a reporter with the Goldsboro News-Argus and The Virginian-Pilot, and a reporter and editor with The News & Observer and the Detroit Free Press before joining The New York Times in 1965, where until 1972 he served as chief southern and civil rights correspondent, chief war correspondent in South Vietnam, and national editor. During his eighteen years as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, his staff won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes. He later became the managing editor of The New York Times.

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