What is Journalism? Who is a Journalist? Session 1: Journalism at the Millennium

Jack Fuller, President of the Tribune Publishing Company and the author of News Values, spoke in the third session in the morning, due to a scheduling conflict. His presentation was intended to set an overall tone for the day. He described journalism as a search for truth on behalf of the citizen, and said the crisis in the craft is not about what we should do but how we go about it. He suggested we were not clear enough about our principles and that we had drifted too far apart, too, from our readers.

"To me, the central purpose of journalism is to tell the truth so that people will have the information that they need to be sovereign. That definition is terribly important in a self-governing political system in which there is maximum freedom of choice with respect to economic, social, and other decisions--The kind of society that we aspire to be and to a great extent are."

"So what are the problems? Why are we concerned?"

"We're losing trust significantly, I believe, not because of what we do, our purpose -- which most people would share that it's an important purpose -- but because of how we do what we say we're supposed to do. There are a number of dimensions to that."

"One is . . . the first amendment reflex: we trot it out as a banner for everything we do, including the things that we do that are not very nice."

"Another factor is that, and this is our problem, things shade into each other. . . When somebody goes overboard in some way or another, does something that is troubling, we look back and we find it difficult to find the line between that and some other thing that we do that we would find acceptable. Then we all beat ourselves on the breast, strip ourselves naked, run around, talk about the apocalypse and say we're all the same. We fail to make the distinction, and then have the confidence to adhere to it. While if we operate on principle and we are trying to honestly make these distinctions for ourselves we ought to have the confidence to say, no, it's not all the same."

"The thing that is concerning to us as journalists in the loss of audience is that it is related not only to fragmentation, but it's related to a distancing between the public's taste and our tastes. . . This gets expressed as a conflict between new corporate values and journalistic values. Now I'm not here to try to define for you let alone debate the conflict between journalistic values and corporate values. That can happen. It happens. But it's not the essence of this issue, in my view. The real conflict here is the conflict between our tastes, our idea of what information people should have, and the people's idea of the information they should have. If we want to attribute this to the new form of ownership or the growing form of corporate ownership in the media, all I ask you is in your nostalgia, remember how the great sole proprietors of newspapers built audience. I've got to tell you this, it wasn't by turning up their nose at the Marv Albert trial kind of story. They built it by appealing to the tastes of the public that we find most uncomfortable."

" I think it takes all the collective intelligence and creativity that we can muster in our profession to create a new rhetoric for journalism. And I think it will never happen until we open our minds to the idea that this is our responsibility -- finding the way to reach people with these messages is our responsibility. Even if it means challenging many of the things that we've come to take for granted as part of the credo of our business."

Laura Washington, Editor and Publisher, The Chicago Reporter: "I wanted to pick up on your comments about the loss of trust in the media. I think some of the reasons for that...are a disturbing trend I see in the use of gossip, the use of innuendo, the use of unnamed sources, the analysis that parades as news in news stories, opinion that parades as news in news stories."

Jack Fuller: "I think being very clear about what your standard of proof is and applying it to everything is a useful exercise. Then there's the other thing. Is it the right subject? Is this pertinent? That comes back to the issue of what are people interested in? We publish things like that. We publish stories because people have a fascination with them, and I'm not sure it's wrong to publish stories that people are fascinated with."

Audience Questions: The executive director of the Chicago South Side NAACP asked, "Most black reporters complain to me that editors won't let them write positive human interest stories about the community unless there is some conflict. Can you explain?"

Jack Fuller: "I think there is a specific dimension concerning the question of race and how minorities are depicted in our newspapers and whether we'll tolerate positive images or whether we constantly perpetuate negative images, which I think is an appropriate question on a number of dimensions. The one I like the best is that if we are truly trying to be accurate and depict reality as it is, that kind of stereotype runs afoul of our basic truth function. We should avoid it."

Laura Washington: "That's a wonderful goal to have. I think unfortunately, and that's not to single out any particular institution, it's not fulfilled too often. We've seen the studies and read the studies, there's a lot of stereotyping of minorities in the media. I think part of it is due not just to the issue of what editors will let reporters do, but who's doing the reporting..."

"If you want to be more diverse, if you want to have people who are in all communities, you simply can't just have a black face or a Latino face and then everyone goes home. You have to look at who those people are who are being hired, what their own economic and social backgrounds are, because many of those people are not any more equipped to cover the landscape of an African American community than maybe some of their white counterparts."

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