As half of the team behind PBS's The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Robert MacNeil enjoyed a number of luxuries not afforded to his network counterparts. Free from commercial concerns, his show featured fewer stories, longer news segments, substantive commentary—in other words, the appearance of actual journalism. MacNeil left NewsHour in 1995, but his third novel, Breaking News, reads like a rancorous open letter to his former colleagues under the thin guise of fiction. Though most of his points about the broadcast media's swandive into sensationalist excess should be obvious to even the least discriminating reader, he creates a fascinating character in Grant Munro, an aging network anchor trying to negotiate the rapidly shifting waters. With his precarious grip on his integrity (and dignity) slipping by the day, Munro continues to fight for hard news stories, but plummeting ratings and the industry's voracious appetite for lurid melodrama begin to feed rumors that he's on his way out. Predictably, Breaking News is most effective when it stays in the newsroom, where opportunism and ruthless back-biting threaten to undermine the most basic journalistic values. MacNeil juggles more subplots than he can satisfy, and his prose style gets a little too workmanlike, but as a roman a clef, Breaking News is pointed and undeniably entertaining.