It’s not possible, of course, but if “Bad News” (ReganBooks, 262 pages, $25.95), Tom Fenton’s farewell to an industry in which he spent his adult career, were released in a vacuum, it might make a case for recommended reading. As it is, Mr. Fenton, 74, who just retired after 34 years as a foreign correspondent for CBS News, is covering the familiar turf of nightly news broadcasts at the television networks, which are attracting fewer viewers each year.

Maybe this is a final strawberry to his employers, but Mr. Fenton’s repetition that television today is dominated by reality shows, politically partisan talk shows, and celebrities – he traces it back to Barbara Walters – is not an original topic.

The release of Mr. Fenton’s indictment of corporate-owned television stations has been published, coincidentally or not, as his longtime associate Dan Rather steps down from his controversial perch as CBS News’s anchor. Mr. Fenton claims there is no connection – he started writing the book a year ago – but the problems of Mr. Rather are a key component of “Bad News.”

Mr. Fenton reports that CBS icons like Walter Cronkite, Don Hewitt and Andy Rooney don’t even watch Mr. Rather’s evening broadcast. In fact, the 88-year-old Mr. Cronkite, who’s the object of hero worship in “Bad News” (which certainly isn’t unique to Mr. Fenton; in his dotage, Mr. Rather’s predecessor has been nearly elevated to the status of FDR by liberals countrywide), has the nastiest comment about CBS’s “Nightly News.”

When asked why he doesn’t tune in, Mr. Cronkite tells the author: “There’s nothing there. There’s nothing but crime and sob sister material. It’s scandal sheet stuff, tabloid stuff for the most part, I find.” So much for loyal colleagues in a foxhole when the fighting gets tough.

Curiously, while Mr. Fenton’s stated intent for writing “Bad News” is to wake up the industry to what he sees as a perilous “dumbing down” of television, the vast majority of those people he interviewed are network veterans themselves, mostly over 60. Filled with opinions from the likes of Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Mr. Rooney, and “Nightline” producer Tom Bettag, “Bad News” comes off as a coffee klatch for wealthy older men who indulge in nostalgia for their glory days. It’s also strange that Mr. Fenton didn’t talk to Brit Hume, a onetime ABC reporter who now anchors the much-derided Fox News nightly report.

Mr. Fenton does have legitimate points to make. For example, he advocates, somewhat quixotically, the expansion of the networks’ nightly news broadcasts to an hour and the restoration of the vastly reduced number of foreign bureaus that operated most notably in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s doubtful the owners of CBS, NBC, and ABC will ever justify financially the largesse that Mr. Fenton and his fellow correspondents around the globe once enjoyed, but there would be merit in revamping the current format of nightly news.

It would take more creativity than is currently evident, but switching the evening news to 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., with long, enterprising reports in the second half-hour, might catch on with an audience that’s demographically different than it was two decades ago. I know very few people who watch a 6:30 evening broadcast: It’s too early in the faster-paced 21st century; Americans are just returning from work and have no patience with a dated news format. The networks still attract millions of viewers, but that won’t last forever: Just as afternoon newspapers fell victim to an evolving medium, the evening news will have to alter its format or just fade into oblivion.

Mr. Fenton also provides a few jarring examples of television incompetence. He recounts the reaction of “60 Minutes” reporter Steve Croft, who, when pitched a segment about Russia attempting to exert control over former Soviet republics, asked, “Where exactly is Central Asia?” And although Mr. Rather tells the author that China “is the best story going,” Mr. Fenton reports that in 2004, “CBS Evening News” did exactly four stories about China, two of which involved pandas.

Yet Mr. Fenton isn’t the proper messenger to radicalize television news. With due respect, his career is nearly over, and his book is the work of a cranky old man. He takes a solipsistic view toward reporting – not uncommon among his peers – that simply doesn’t withstand scrutiny. While he correctly criticizes both the Clinton and Bush administrations for at least public inattention to the growing Islamic threat against America before September 11, he blames the press as well.

“Serious journalists should have felt that the disaster spoke directly to them,” he writes. “In short, they should have pangs of guilt [because] it revealed the abject failure of the news media.” I certainly don’t mind Mr. Fenton giving his professional brethren 40 lashes, but in truth, the press by itself isn’t so powerful that it can anticipate and prevent the acts of terrorists and crazed dictators. That’s why it’s called news in the first place.

Mr. Fenton says, rather grandly, that the media “betrayed the trust of the public,” “fail[ing] to warn the American public of the storm clouds approaching our shores.” But it’s not a newspaper or television station’s duty to “educate” the public; those who choose to be informed about current events will find a way. It’s condescending to think otherwise.

Mr. Hewitt also goes beyond the pale when he maintains, with the author’s tacit approval, that political advertising be banned from television, even if that would violate the First Amendment. Hewitt: “Maybe we could insist on a warning on paid political commercials like they put on cigarette packs: ‘Watching a paid political commercial is injurious to your health.'”

Mr. Fenton concludes “Bad News” with a call to Americans to “demand more and better news” because “It might save all our lives.” Talk about self-importance. It’s fine for Edward Murrow’s successors to reminisce about their long and in some cases exemplary careers, but Mr. Fenton’s book offers precious little wisdom about the quickly changing industry that’s left him behind.

Mr. Smith last wrote in these pages on the Contract With America.