Former CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton releases Bad News.

“…because we have dumbed down the viewers, so they don’t even know what they’re missing. We have trained them to accept the coverage they’re getting. We’ve got to sell foreign news, we’ve got to get people interested again.”

With that in mind, Bad News isn’t so much a media-bashing book as a highly readable crash course in stuff you didn’t know you never knew - a sort of Global Affairs for Dummies.

“I want readers to be surprised at what they don’t know, through no fault of their own,” says Fenton. “Most Americans get their primary news, God help them, from television. We’ve got to do something about TV news.”

But what? For one thing, Fenton proposes that journalists form a pressure group to shame the media stewards into fulfilling their public trust - “a lobby for better news.”

“We need to get the debate going, to get people to start thinking about the news they’re missing, and how important it is,” he says. “We in the media have less credibility now than at any time I can think of, and the country is so polarized, I can’t believe it! But the real story of the news isn’t what’s left and what’s right - it’s what’s left out.”