"Killing the Messenger" examines how the concentration of media ownership denies access to the public, how the media inadequately police themselves, how reporters could be better trained, and how the press sensationalizes on the one hand and censors itself on the other. Tom Goldstein has selected five areas of concentration: reporting on private matters, journalists and their biases, the power and limitations of the press, making better reporters, and the techniques journalists use to portray reality. Some of the selections have been taken from books that have been long out of print, orfrom official reports. Others come from magazines of speeches. The contributors include Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph Pulitzer, Upton Sinclair, Louis Brandeis, Spiro Agnew, and John Hersey. The editor has provided brief introductions and headnotes to each section.

Tom Goldstein has chosen these articles to encourage contemporary journalists to look at themselves more closely, to apply the same skepticism to themselves that they readily heap on city councilmen, police chiefs, football coaches, movie directors, and heads of state. According to him, journalists have not shown much appetite for self-analysis during a crucial time when they should welcome, not recoil from, criticism of their own performance.