AS journalists, we spend our lives communicating basic facts to the public, yet somehow we’ve done a poor job of communicating the basics of journalism itself. Its values. What news is and isn’t. Why journalism matters to the broader good. Why it’s the quality of journalism, not necessarily the quantity, that matters most — a notion that journalists have had a hard time communicating even to the executives of their own publicly held companies.

Rarely will you see displays of this divide more vivid than in James O’Shea’s new book, “The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers” (PublicAffairs, $28.99).

The subtitle seems misleading, as do so many these days. Mr. O’Shea, a onetime top editor at both The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, tells the story of these two papers’ magnificently botched corporate marriage — a fine tale, though from the subtitle it would appear that his publisher didn’t want to market it as such, perhaps thinking that no one much cared.

And the publisher is probably right. Many Americans may worry deeply about presidential elections, hurricanes and other major news, but I suspect that they care far less about the slow degradation of the newsrooms that provide it.