America's great experiment in "objective" journalism, begun nearly a hundred years ago, is over. It has been replaced by a mindless flash of infotainment and attitude. Muckrakers have given way to buckrakers seeking their own fame and fortune. On a typical day, even our best journalists probably do more harm than good to America's public life.

This dire assessment, which has been documented by media critics and scholars for some time, is now emerging from journalists themselves. Why American journalism has collapsed, and what this means for our democracy, are discussed in several new books written by well-known denizens of Washington's press elite.

James Fallows's Breaking the News is a much-publicized blast that restates the obvious: American public life is in trouble, and many of the journalists who could help save it are instead accelerating its decline. The fact that so many journalists are trumpeting Fallows's ideas as if they were new shows just how cut off the media are from their own critics. Anyone who has read Thomas Patterson's Out of Order, Kathleen Hall Jamieson's Dirty Politics, Howard Kurtz's Media Circus, Adam Gopnik's media criticism in The New Yorker, or issues of the Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review, Nieman Reports, or Media Studies Journal during the past five years has heard most of this before.

 Much more interesting and original is E.J. Dionne's They Only Look Dead. If Fallows's book is gutsy for condemning the behavior of some well-known colleagues, Dionne's is more courageous intellectually. He is willing to go against the conventional wisdom to make some unusual predictions about America's political future, critiquing contemporary journalism along the way. In a chapter called "No News is Good News: Why Americans Hate the Press," Dionne begins with the conclusion that Fallows struggles throughout his own book to achieve: "The proposition that the media are complicit in the public's disenchantment with politics and its cynicism about democratic government is so widely accepted that it is barely debated." To be sure, Dionne's own analysis of the media's role is as overdue as Fallows's is overworked; the role of journalism was noticeably absent from Dionne's otherwise excellent previous book, Why Americans Hate Politics.

 What some readers might be surprised to find is that Fallows, the Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and Dionne, a political columnist for The Washington Post, aren't even talking about the prurience of local television, or the wild excesses of the O.J. Simpson coverage; they are criticizing America's most respected and powerful national reporters. Fallows takes on by name people like Robert Pear of The New York Times, Cokie Roberts of ABC and National Public Radio, her husband Steve Roberts of U.S. News & World Report, and Margaret Carlson of Time.

 Reporters should be presenting their audiences with the information they need to function as citizens, the authors say. Instead, today's most successful journalists perfect "salon skills," building celebrity status on television while offering journalism that has little meaning for the Americans they are trying to inform. Reporters all too often ask the wrong questions, find the wrong mileposts, and wreck the public policy-making process that the nation desperately needs to engage, these books contend.

 Fallows takes, as an example, the 1993-94 health care reform effort, which he says was covered by The New York Times's Robert Pear as if it were only the sum of cynical special interests rather than also a struggle to serve different visions of the public good. In addition, the widely published idea that the Clinton health reform task force was closed and secretive wasn't true, Fallows says; Congress and others were consulted all along. "What went wrong? It seems that there was one important group that was truly excluded from the task force's deliberations: the Washington press." If one combines Fallows's critique with the 1994 content analysis done by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella, which found that the health care reform coverage was two-thirds scorekeeping and only one-third about the substance, or the Times Mirror/cjr study that came to similar conclusions, the evidence is overwhelming that American journalism failed at a crucial moment of U.S. policy-making.

Predictably, national television is a major target for both print-based authors. While some excellent news programs have been done on television, the medium's overwhelming advertising and entertainment culture promotes drama over discourse and combat over facts, they observe. Television likes celebrities with passion, rather than anonymous journalists presenting facts in a meaningful and dispassionate manner.

"In attempting to compete head-to-head with pure entertainment programs the 'serious' press locks itself into a competition it cannot win. . . . The less that Americans care about public life, the less they will be interested in journalism of any form," Fallows warns.

Fallows reserves his greatest contempt for colleagues who have become pundits on Washington television shows, from The McLaughlin Group to The Capital Gang and This Week with David Brinkley. The participants aren't really journalists seeking facts to share, he says. Instead they sell mostly their own opinions and celebrity status. "When talk shows go on the road for performances whose hostility and disagreement are staged for entertainment value, when reporters pick up thousands of dollars appearing before interest groups and sharing tidbits of what they have heard, when all the participants then dash off for the next plane. . . . The message is, we don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?" he writes.

Recounting how such highly regarded journalists repackage themselves for the lecture circuit, Fallows zeroes in on Steve and Cokie Roberts, questioning their ethical judgment in accepting up to a reported $45,000 for joint speaking engagements. He criticizes them particularly for agreeing to lecture for corporate host Philip Morris, which was wooing them with an estimated $30,000 as speakers while at the same time working to thwart investigative journalists from ABC, Cokie Roberts's home network. "The Gravy Train" chapter is the strongest contribution of Fallows's book, one that builds on some of his earlier writings. But his absence from most of the media debate over the past few years really shows, particularly when Breaking the News is held up against Howard Kurtz's fact-packed new book, Hot Air, which also is about the talk shows' impact on journalism (see page 52).

In an aside, Fallows complains that scholars have retreated from the public debate. This critique seems completely off-base, as the Clinton administration (full of academics), former teacher now Speaker Newt Gingrich, and the best-seller lists (full of conservative scholars' latest offerings) prove. And it is ironic for Fallows to make this claim since so many media scholars before him have struggled to get the press's attention as they made the same points Fallows now makes in Breaking the News, including not just Patterson and Jamieson, but George Gerbner, Michael Schudson, Daniel Hallin, Kiku Adatto, and others. Relying more on anecdotes than on the actual existing research they've done that would validate his opinions, Fallows writes as if he's just returned from Mars to write a book from the clips, and he's shocked! shocked! to find that American journalism has gone to hell.

What are Fallows's other well-worn observations? That too many stories about Washington are negative, and this matters because journalists have stepped in to play the issue-shaping, information-providing roles that scholars and politicians used to play. Public life is covered as if it were sports. There is a "strange, motiveless irritability of today's press." The press talks down to the public, rather than talking with them. Journalists are obsessed with politics, and thus miss reporting on the real content of policy. Scandals are replacing real news.

If his critique is familiar, Fallows nevertheless performs a service by getting publicity -- thanks to his standing among his fellow journalists -- for these important issues. He also makes a contribution by recommending that his colleagues get off the celebrity circuit and start serving the public discourse more deliberately, nurturing a "public journalism" that connects more to citizens' concerns. "Today's journalists can choose: do they want merely to entertain the public or to engage it?" he writes.

Yet even in this recommendation, Fallows repeats what is known about public journalism and misses the ground that truly needs to be covered: Why is it so controversial among journalists? What works about it and what doesn't?

E.J. Dionne, who is one of Washington's few original thinkers, also laments the "mishmash" that now defines American journalism. But to Dionne, journalists are more confused than greedy: they "no longer know what we're doing; there is no consensus on what the goals of journalism really are, nor is there agreement as to whom or to what we are obligated," he writes.

 Dionne views this as a once-a-century moment of truth for the media establishment. The last time journalism so completely reinvented itself, during the Progressive era of the 1920s, political reform and nonaligned, "objective" journalism emerged. Now it is being replaced by opinion journalism for several reasons, Dionne suggests. Conservatives pressured the mainstream press to balance its purported "liberal" bias with overt conservative commentary. Newspapers, which had lost the headline function to television, provided "analysis" as their unique service. Stenographic journalism seemed inadequate during the Joseph McCarthy allegations. Watergate, Vietnam, and other government lies necessitated a more skeptical press corps. "For many reporters, being 'fair-minded' or 'objective' came to mean . . . challenging official versions of events that were obviously neither," Dionne says.

Dionne laments that his colleagues have abandoned Walter Lippmann's ideal of scientific detachment without gaining the advantage of Thomas Dewey's model, which "would seek to promote genuine, reasoned, and engaging debate." Instead there is journalistic mission creep so unchecked that it wrecks the enterprise: "to be neutral yet investigatory, to be fair-minded and yet have 'edge,' to be disengaged from politics and yet have 'impact,'" Dionne says. This has left a vacuum in the political culture, which negative campaign ads, rumors, and radio commentators have rushed to fill. "Without either information or reasoned debate there is -- cynicism," he concludes.