Meet Grant Munro, veteran anchor of New York’s The Evening News. Fifty-something, lean and tanned, Munro is a venerable success, loyal to his wife Winona, both dashing and earnest on the screen, but a little too smart for television news. It all starts with Munro’s speech to the Radio Television News Directors Association. “What sickens me is broadcast media behaving like the Gadarene swine. You remember, Christ sent evil spirits into a herd of pigs…. In our new and insane competitiveness, in our rising desperation for ratings, in our rush to report unsubstantiated rumor, leaks and gossip, an evil spirit entered us and we became that herd of maddened swine racing towards our own destruction.”

Meet Chris Siefert, Time features writer who performs well when he’s jealous and provoked by his subject – Siefert’s boss has assigned him a cover profile of Munro.

Meet Ernie Schmidt, unemployed photo lab technician who raids his former boss’s lab for nude photos of Ann Murrow – Munro’s equivalent on another network – which he threatens to sell to Penthouse unless Murrow can cough up $100,000.

Meet Joe Steinman, agent for Murrow and other celebrities, who likes gazing down at Times Square from his office feeling like a “puppet master” who’s pulled his clients’ strings and fantasizes about Murrow’s silky wealth of leg. And meet Hollygo Lightly, perverted electronic gossip columnist whose web page specializes in the TV news business.

Intertwine the lives of these predictable characters, add lots of New York faces and places and some true-to-life White House types and you’ve got Breaking News, a fast-paced, entertaining but somewhat facile third novel by Robert MacNeil, former co-anchor of PBS’s The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.

There’s a funny dynamic stemming from MacNeil’s attempts to send a serious message about the sorry state of broadcast journalism. Sounding often like media critic Neil Postman, MacNeil slips in stats about TV viewers, and a plethora of criticism – “the industry didn’t want people who merely delivered the news; they wanted people who delivered themselves, if it captured viewers’ eyeballs.” But his cynicism, like Munro’s, is softened by the realization that he chose to play this game and evidently played it well.