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BACKSTORY: INSIDE THE BUSINESS OF NEWS
By Ken Auletta
Penguin, $24.95, 320 pages
REVIEWED BY CARLTON SHERWOOD
When I was a young newspaper reporter in the late '70s I was convinced lawyers would be the ruination of the press. That was before diversity, the Internet and 24-hour TV cable networks inflicted themselves on newsrooms across the country.
In his new book, "Backstory: Inside the Business of News," Ken Auletta, media critic for the New Yorker, makes the argument that greed, or, more to the point, corporate greed has corrupted news organizations in general, newspapers in particular. That's not a hard sell, as most working journalists know.
But Mr. Auletta also makes a case, unintentional I suspect, that the scandal-plagued New York Times is no longer a credible news organization but a dysfunctional social experiment run amok, due largely to the radical leftist dictates of publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.
Like some of Mr. Auletta's previous works, "Backstory" is a compilation of several rather windy articles publishedin the New Yorker. For those who don't normally read that magazine, Mr. Auletta's reports, taken as a whole, provide fresh insight into the ever-changing and troubling state of American journalism, especially the liberal media elite, of which he is a card-carrying member and, necessarily, an advocate.
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