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This Just In: Media

The return of James Fallows

By Dan Kennedy

God bless Mort Zuckerman.

Twenty-two months ago he tapped James Fallows to be the editor of his flagging U.S. News & World Report. Fallows, one of the more provocative voices in journalism, was effectively silenced, as he disappeared into his office and struggled to turn around a publication that nobody cares about. When Fallows popped up on Larry King Live last week to flog his magazine's not-very-interesting scooplet on the Monica Lewinsky tapes, it only served to reinforce the notion that he just doesn't matter anymore.

Now that Zuckerman has dumped him, Fallows will be free to do what he does best: write and comment on issues that go beyond the hot news of the day. His reportage for the Atlantic Monthly and his books, on topics such as military reform, the Japanese economy, and, famously, the corrupt Washington media culture, made him one of the most influential journalists of his generation. His tenure at U.S. News, on the other hand, will be forgotten by the end of next week.

Fallows did manage to import some impressive new talent at U.S. News, and his firing of buckraking pundit Steve Roberts may have justified his entire editorship. But an ex-insider says Fallows's lieutenants angered the staff by ignoring percolating stories that were eventually broken elsewhere, such as the attempted coup against House Speaker Newt Gingrich and explosive developments in the Paula Jones lawsuit. Zuckerman's budget-slashing and ego needs are reported to have created a constant crisis atmosphere.

Then, too, Fallows didn't always live up to his oft-stated ideals of promoting ethical journalism. Most notoriously, only in U.S. News could you learn that Lucianne Goldberg, Linda Tripp's literary agent, once put an out-of-wedlock child up for adoption. That's where Goldberg's other children learned about it, too. Yuck. Presumably Fallows took a long, hot shower after running that one.

Ultimately, though, it didn't really matter whether U.S. News -- the number-three newsmagazine behind Time and Newsweek -- could reinvent itself. The magazine's archetypal reader will continue to be, as staffers say, the retired lieutenant colonel living in Phoenix, Arizona. Newsmagazines themselves are dinosaurs. Frankly, the New Yorker and Slate, to name two radically different publications, have done a far better job than the Big Three of devising new ways to wrap up the week's news with some smarts and some edge.

Fallows, though, is an original. It will be good to have him back.