He is a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter for two years was the youngest person ever to hold that job.

He wrote for the magazine about immigration, defense policy, politics, economics, computer technology, and other subjects.

(The Atlantic, November 2002), which was published six months before the invasion of Iraq and laid out the difficulties of occupying the country.

It described the "draft physical" day at the Boston Navy Yard in 1970, in which Fallows and his Harvard and MIT classmates overwhelmingly produced reasons for medical exemptions, while the white working-class men of Chelsea, Massachusetts were approved for service.

[11] In the 1980s and 1990s Fallows was a frequent contributor of commentaries to National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and since 2009 he has been the regular news analyst for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered.

Starting in the 2010 academic year, he is a visiting Professor in U.S. Media at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

More recently, he has written about the design of the Open Source Applications Foundation's information manager, code-named Chandler.

In September 2021, Fallows launched a Substack site called Breaking the News, whose title was based on his 1996 book of the same name.

[17][18] According to journalist Howard Fineman, Fallows also wrote policy memos to Democratic President Bill Clinton.

[19] An article in The Futurist, a publication of the World Future Society, identifies Fallows as a radical centrist.