People's Witness: the journalist in modern politics by Fred Inglis

When giants stalked the newsrooms

When the press was at its height, publishers regularly produced books on the "Great Correspondents" and "Historic Broadcasts". Now journalists have joined estate agents and politicians as the least-trusted professions in the country, few would dare presume such titles.

So it is unexpected, not to say reassuring, to have Fred Inglis, a professor at Sheffield University, produce just such a book. Although professing to use his gallery of journalistic heroes as "exemplars" of trends and truths in society (which leads to the occasional paragraph of sociological theorising), this is essentially a jolly canter through the stories of great reporters.

And what a collection they are: Martha Gellhorn, the feminist heroine for her war reporting in Collier's; Ed Murrow, summoning up the impending tragedy as Hitler moved on his neighbours and then, after the war, lifting the stone on America's institutional scandals; and Walter Lippman who, late in age, became the students' hero for his questioning of the Vietnam War.

Harold Evans, Walter Cronkite, Ben Bradlee, Alistair Cooke: they are all here, with lesser-known figures such as the splendid Konstantin Paustovsky, who reported the Russian revolution from the bottom as well as the committee top. As an academic rather than practitioner, Inglis is primarily interested in those he can read and read about. Not for him the Ben Hecht or Evelyn Waugh world of cunning, dissolute reporters, outdoing each other in the ebullience of their prose and the imagination of their invention. His heroes are firmly on the left, anti-establishment and relentless in their pursuit of "Truth".

How genuinely important were these figures, and will we see their like again? Inglis subtitles his book "the journalist in modern politics", but in reality it gives neither the political nor the journalistic context. Yet these contexts raise interesting questions about the role and power of the press. Except for the occasional major scandal, journalists tend to influence politics less through public opinion than through their effect on the political élite. Their role has been that of the interlocutor between events and the body politic.

As politics has become more concerned with presentation, it has sought direct influence through the mass media. The interlocutor has been marginalised. So too with the press. The effect of CNN is to demand that the camera be at the scene of the action; the face and voice are less important, so long as they seem pretty and enthusiastic. Even broadsheet newspapers are getting rid of experienced specialists in favour of young reporters who can repeat the TV experience of bringing drama to life. In the banking business, it is called "disintermediation"; in the media, early retirement.

Fred Inglis would like it to be different. Considering the events of 11 September, he praises the BBC News 24 for its coverage. But most in the business think that it was Fox that took the honours for its pictures, and that old-fashioned commentary is just out of date. I wish Fred Inglis was right, but I fear that he fails to understand the trends.