Breaking News
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Famous for his nearly forty years in broadcast journalism, Robert MacNeil is one of the most respected television journalists in America. Now in Breaking News, a blistering, behind-the-scenes novel about the savagely competitive world of television news, he writes about this world he knows best--a world where integrity is held hostage in the relentless pursuit of the bottom line.
Anchorman Grant Munro is at what should be the pinnacle of a brilliant career. Having covered every major story from the Kennedy assassination to the Clinton sex scandals, Munro has won the admiration, respect, and trust of his viewers. About to turn sixty in an industry no longer controlled by top-notch journalists but by profit-hungry conglomerates, Munro suddenly feels his career threatened--especially when Bill Donovan, a handsome reporter with little experience but a high Q rating, vies for his anchor post. Dragged into a media circus where "soft news" and tabloid television are becoming the staples of nightly news broadcasts, Munro negotiates a minefield of scheming, greed, and betrayal to hold onto what he prizes. Acclaimed for his two previous novels, Robert MacNeil is a proven storyteller, now triumphantly on his home turf. Breaking News is not only an intimate look at a fascinating industry, but a profound study of character under pressure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacNeil's previous fictional efforts, Burden of Desire and The Voyage, both struck out in unexpected directions; this one, however, is just the kind of novel you would expect from the former PBS news anchor. The decline of journalistic standards in TV's news divisions and the upswing in bubble-headed tabloid magazine shows is a topical theme, and one to which MacNeil is ideally qualified to do justice. And it is clear there is a great deal of the author in upright anchorman Grant Munro, who came to his national prominence the hard way and resents the poseurs and actors who seem to be replacing his sturdy authority image. A particularly egregious example is glamorous but cold Ann Murrow (Barbara Walters, anyone?), whom Munro's network seems eager to bring aboard even as his contract negotiations stall and the 60-ish anchor wonders anxiously whether he should put in for a face lift. Meanwhile, a writer for Time is pursuing him for a cover profile as a symbol of how TV news is changing. It's a crowded canvas, and MacNeil paints it swiftly and skillfully; the very real questions of taste, integrity and the marketplace are explored thoroughly but never tediously, and the conversations of the powerful, usually over lunch at the Four Seasons or Lutece, have an authentic ring. A subplot involving a blackmail attempt over lubricious pictures taken of Murrow in her youth is unconvincing and, in the end, pointless. But in every other respect the book is that rare bird: a highly intelligent, readable fiction about issues that count. Munro may be a bit of a stick, but his heart is in the right place.
