Can Journalism Be Impartial? Session 4: A Case Study - Mayor Giuliani and the Press

Moderator Larry Grossman, the columnist, author and former president of NBC News, noted that the problem of impartiality begins with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the theory that the act of observation itself alters the event. This increasingly is a problem for a press corps that the public sees as not its surrogate, but a player in the game:

"The best expression of the dilemma of impartiality that I've heard ... [comes from] Martin Bell, a BBC correspondent... It's about a journalist [in Sarajevo] who wished to write a profile of a front line sniper."

"He came upon a sniper who was peering out from between two brick walls, looking through his scope in the forward defenses of Sarajevo... The sniper said, 'I see two people on the street. Which one do you want me to kill?' The reporter realized too late that he had embarked on a lethal project which he probably should not have even considered, so he urged the sniper, saying, 'I don't want to get involved, but I certainly don't want you to kill anybody on my behalf.' He made his excuses and he turned to leave. As he (did) he heard two shots in rapid fire succession. He turned around and he asked what happened, and the sniper said, 'It's a pity. You could have saved one of those lives.'"

Craig Wolff, a professor at Columbia Journalism school, provided a brief overview of how Giuliani's relationship with the press has evolved.

"Whatever else it is, the matter of Rudy Giuliani and the press is a struggle for power. Where does the power rest? With the information."

"When he came into office, a city government which had been run...for years...as a kind of permanent Democratic club was transformed...It became customary for the Mayor and certainly his press staff to scrutinize virtually every release from every agency. He personally got on the phone with editors and sought headline changes. The press office acknowledged that it was vetting articles. Reporters deemed unfair and critical were typically cut off from even basic access. Commissioners and mid-level managers stopped talking to reporters and supplying basic information, chilled either by explicit warnings or implicit warnings. And at the end of the Mayor's first year he...purged press operations in a variety of agencies including the NYPD, the Board of Ed, the Housing Authority, and so on."

"The Mayor's office also made drastic changes to the Mayor's management report which had always been respected as a kind of report card on city government. The Mayor's office removed many indicators on how the city was operating from response time by police officers to how many pot holes had been filled.

"Last spring when the Times did a story on how clean the city's streets were, the paper was denied access from bottom to top. Likewise, on a story about mishandled welfare contracts, the Mayor canceled the contracts, but not before he denounced the story..."

"The response from the media at large has taken different forms. News organizations are filing more FOIA requests...Editorially, most news organizations have criticized him as a control freak. Perhaps intimidated by City Hall and by a sunshine law that is not so strong in New York, ...only the Daily News has taken the matter to court...."

"As with many public officials nothing can make the Mayor more angry and frustrated than news stories which impugn motive before they tell the news. . . Stories in New York Magazine, and more recently in Vanity Fair using unnamed sources to detail an affair between the Mayor and his press secretary, have only made Giuliani and his staff feel more cornered, more indignant than ever..."

"[What's] the consequence of this tug of war? Will information that is so tightly held lose its credibility? A lack of information can help push reporters to be more diligent, more tireless, but it can also hinder a press corps' ability to ask informed questions."

Arthur Browne, Managing Editor, New York Daily News, sees ominous tidings for the press in the relationship with Giuliani. The press may share some blame, but he blames Giuliani more, for an obsession with control that may become a model for other politicians.

"The Mayor entered office ... after years of [Democratic] domination... This led to a certain narrowness of perspective ... a narrowness of debate over the policies ... whether it was in policing, budget or social welfare... We would know that Andy Stein would come down one way on an issue and Carol Bellamy would come down on another... But the differences were not great enough that they really made all that much difference to how the city was going to be run.

"When Giuliani came in with his ideas that ran against the orthodoxy of the time, whether it was selling the hospitals or instituting workfare or attacking the Board of Education, it gave the press a great deal of trouble... There were times ... the press made some prejudgments about where the Mayor was attempting to go, and about how things could be done."

"The personality of the Mayor compounds all of this. He is a difficult, obnoxious, tough, mean person when he wants to be, which is frequently. He has a way of getting the press to argue on his terms. He sets the terms of the debate, and he often sets them in kind of a silly framework. He will make some pronouncement about how terrific something is or how wonderful New York City is or some factual assertion that is probably exaggerated, and he will baffle the press ... into actually trying to pin down whether that assertion was right... He right now has a lot of people spending time trying to figure out where he went on vacation, is probably getting a great deal of laughter out of it, as opposed to having people spending time figuring out what actually is going on in the government.

"As far as his policies on access to information . . . [in 20 years] I have never seen a city administration with a worse record....I think it runs completely against the welfare of the public. And the lengths to which they will go to keep their information secret is truly mind-boggling.

"We did sue him and win on one major issue... We filed a [second] suit against the police department involving the release of pistol permit license information which had always been public information. Their instinct, as derived from the Mayor, was to say no, no matter what the courts had said up to the Court of Appeals and what the statute said ... We sued, because it was such a clear case. When their lawyers got it ... they wanted to settle."

"What was important to us was to get on the record that they had so grossly violated the Freedom of Information law."

Betsy Kolbert, the Metropolitan columnist for the New York Times, believes there is a basic danger to the public welfare in the information Giuliani is withholding, such as water quality. But she worries that the press' only legal recourse, the slow and deliberate process of lawsuits, will be of little use if the public safety were in danger and no one knew it.

"I think there are two issues here...One is the way in which he makes life difficult for reporters, which may or may not have implications for the public well being. Then there are cases where I think it's pretty clear that they do have implications for the public well being."

[An example of] the way reporters' lives are made difficult is information out of police headquarters. It used to be that reporters called police headquarters, they got a rundown of pretty routine information about crime, they printed it the next day...[Now] the most basic information out of police headquarters is very difficult to get, it often comes after deadline."

"I think that you can ask the question here, what is the public's right to know in these situations? What are the public interests that are at stake?"

"The city is essentially a service delivery engine. That's what city government does. There are many groups who make it their life's work to monitor that, and you can argue to what effect, but they do, and their lifeblood is information."

"... It used to be that every year the city administration published a report on water quality indicators in all of its, I believe, 13 reservoirs. This was used by various groups to see what was happening to water quality. When Mayor Giuliani took over, these reports basically stopped being issued. The Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been a frequent litigator with the city, filed a Freedom of Information request to try to get the data. They were told either the data was simply not available, and it was left unclear whether it didn't exist or wasn't going to be made available.

"The group then came across some of the relevant information in a report that the city Controller's office made public, went back to the city and said apparently the information does exist, could we please have it now? The city said, and this is water quality data that's now several years old, the reports were still in draft form, and therefore, legally not subject to the Freedom of Information law."

"So we now have several years where we essentially have no water quality data coming out of City Hall. ... I think that most people in this room would agree that the citizens of New York do have a major public stake in knowing what's happening to water quality. And I think that while people may blame the press for a lot of the tension in their relationship with the Mayor, I think that it's not too self-serving for the press to say that we do stand in for the citizens of New York and that there are some major public policy issues here that are simply going unnoticed to a certain extent because the information is not forthcoming."

David Garth, the political consultant who helped elect, among others, John Lindsay, Ed Koch and Giuliani, argued that most politicians now see the press as a cynical and menacing hunter, that needs to be manipulated and controlled, and that is undifferentiating in its approach, no matter who is in office.

"First, I do not (currently) work for Rudy Giuliani, I do not represent him.."

"I've never seen a Mayor who wasn't involved with a lot of the same attitude that Rudy Giuliani shows ... They were afraid of the press. They were defensive with the press. They never thought for an instant that there was any sense of cooperation."

"In fact whenever they let a reporter in the door to see a briefing ... it's rehearsed. The same way that war games are rehearsed."

"[Indeed the press] are so cynical about what comes out of City Hall -- this is not Rudy Giuliani, this has been for years, they don't trust it. They don't trust the management reports. [They think] You're twisting the numbers."

"Now who sets the terms of the dialogue? ... I don't believe that the press necessarily should. You have a man that was just elected by an overwhelming group of voters. He could set a dialogue too. That has its place and the press has their place. I think there are lines you draw that haven't been drawn in many years in this country on the personal life -- whether it's a President or a Mayor or a Governor. Those lines have been really gone across because it's something you can cover, you can insinuate.

"Some of the stories in the press quite recently, very, very nasty, very sarcastic, at least as nasty as they interpret the Mayor as being.

"I have had reporters come to me when I try to correct a story. They say wait a second, it's not our job to be your promo department, to pitch your Mayor. My reaction is, it's not our job to sell your papers. Our job is to do the job that we're elected to do, and your job is to look for what's important.

Arthur Browne: "The idea that the press is out there to get a Mayor ... (is false) ... I think the election results speaks for the fact that the public understands successes in City Hall or what they perceive to be successes in the city government. They understand what the papers and TV and radio has reported about the crime rate, the economy, and other major aspects of life in the city... . They learned that through the media. So it is not an endlessly adversarial relationship or an endless game of gotcha.

"We started this in terms of impartiality ... How do you remain impartial or objective in covering this administration when their policies on preventing you from having the information are so infuriating and wrong? There, the press can run into the danger of getting so pissed off that it will ... love to see the failure"

David Garth: "I didn't try to say what is ... I'm telling you how it's perceived inside."

"I also think that a lot of the accomplishments that Rudy Giuliani has made got out because you had to cover certain things ... Those are pretty hard things for anybody to ignore, and the press didn't.

"The adversarial position has been there for four years, and I think it hasn't been very effective. He just won a tremendous victory."

McLean Greaves, CEO, Executive Producer, Cafe Los Negroes (on-line): "[Is this] a situation that could possibly set a bad precedent that could be adopted by future Mayors, and possibly also Democratic Mayors?"

Arthur Browne: "This is a quantum leap over past Mayors ... This isn't the issue of getting into some briefings or watching Deputy Mayors sit around a table, or even having one on ones with the Mayor. This is just asking for the records of the government."

"In our suit for the Department of Investigation records, we want one particular report ... into a very, very serious aspect of potential corruption in government. We know the report has been completed ... But what they've done is not have the commissioner sign the document, and until it's signed, it isn't legally finished. That will stay in draft form until the Mayor is out of office, I believe.

"So these problems are worse. And other governmental officials are taking lessons. George Pataki ... the MTA ... I think the closed governmental disease has spread far beyond City Hall and its agencies."

Betsy Kolbert: "The Mayor did just win an overwhelming victory and I think that's abundantly to the credit of his administration and what they've actually done. ... But it also could be read as that the public doesn't really care about the issues, [of whether] we get information ... It has, in some sense, politically validated that approach... This has set a precedent and it probably won't be rolled back."

Author David Halberstam, at heart sees tabloidization, celebrification and the abdication of the managers of the media for creating an environment where the public has lost allegiance to or even respect for the press. This is what makes a mayor like Giuliani get away with it.

"I was asked talk a little bit about the Vanity Fair article, which is not entirely comfortable for me because it's a magazine I occasionally write for, and it's written by a writer whose work I usually like. But I remember reading it and thinking ... it was out of line. That if a national magazine like that really did think that Giuliani was worth writing about, that this was a facile kind of journalism, sort of medium paparazzi, pegged at what is now perceived to be the character issue, but really isn't character. It's about trying to get scandal on public figures without really enlightening anybody very much."

"I think Giuliani's character is very interesting, because out of the complexity of character you get these tensions, this need to control, this anger, rather than a sense of pluralism. He sometimes seems to me to not know how well he's doing, and to be shooting off his own toes, most memorably in the recent campaign when he was really on his way to about 70 percent, and [made] a really regrettable, unacceptable comment towards a sinking opponent.

"That kind of character is well worth writing about. It's much harder than picking up what's in the Daily News and the Post and recirculating it ... We have the example of Richard Nixon who was, in terms of sexual misconduct probably as ... tidy as anybody we've had in the White House, but whose character was an abomination ... But if you did this kind of treatment of character, then Nixon has high character as opposed to going out and really working very hard and getting a very good sense from people around why politicians do the things they do often when it isn't in their own best interest."

"We have here a larger issue which is the tabloidization or the celebritization of larger, more important media in the society. I think we can feel the edginess in print. Print is in decline, and therefore the standards of television, which were set in another better generation from people who worked in print and respected those standards, those standards in television are self-evidently in decline, particularly on the television magazine shows. We got a very nice sense of it the other day with Andy Lack saying that NBC now has the greatest team of journalists in the history of mankind because they had signed up Geraldo. Now that's insulting to everybody at NBC, everybody at MSNBC. It's insulting to every working journalist. It may even be insulting to Geraldo, if it is possible to insult him.

"The other day ... when [ABC] signed Connie Chung, and [Roone Arledge] said, "We now have Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters and Connie Chung. We've got the greatest team of women journalists in the history of broadcast." I'm thinking wait a minute,. Yeah, you've got some very good journalists there -- Jackie Judd, Lynn Sheer -- they're really journalists. I'm not sure the people that you've just mentioned are in the same business that I'm in. It's the same thing about Roone Arledge. Talk about a man who's probably the most talented man in television in recent years, but who has dramatically blurred the line and used his star people to seem to be journalists and blurred the line more between entertainment and news than anybody around."

"There was a very sad piece in Vanity Fair by David Margolick when Roone was under assault by a man who would be Roone, David Westin, that showed Roone grouping with all his people. Well, they were all stars, and I thought there were probably two real journalists of the seven or eight people having dinner. There was Peter Jennings, and he's a journalist; and Ted Koppel, and he's a journalist; and the rest of them I'm not sure. I think the jury is out.

E.R. Shipp, the Columbia Journalism Professor, saw opportunity in Giuliani's approach to the press, for it challenged a bias she sees towards laziness, institutionalism and a narrow definition of news. The press, however, may not be living up to the challenge.

"I also am looking at this as a starting point being the Vanity Fair article. It seemed to me that Rudy Giuliani's love life, or lack thereof, or hope for it was really payback for his changing the rules for how we do our jobs.

"The story that appeared in Vanity Fair, I thought, invited as much cynicism about us as it probably did about him...I actually think that Giuliani is forcing us to do what we tell ourselves we came into this business to do in the first place, which is to gather the information.

"We're not in this business to wait for the Mayor to issue a management report or to wait for the Mayor to hold a press conference. We're in this business to find the news.

"I've already heard on this panel something that makes me feel optimistic that we're doing our jobs better -- the idea that we're paying attention to these civic groups. How many of us have heard from these people--good government, change the courts, fix the world groups--and we say, right, we'll get around to that. Well now we have to listen to them because they are gathering data, and we can work with them to figure out how this data matches what we're being told by a City Hall that's controlling information. It's making us do our work."

"From the perspective of living in Harlem, nobody took many of these issues seriously until you couldn't get a press release from City Hall. Now we want to know more about response time from the fire department or asthma rates in the South Bronx...Rudy, I don't know about your love life, but I think you're doing all right in terms of making us think about the issues and maybe find alternative ways of doing the work that we should be doing."

Arthur Browne: "Until [the Vanity Fair] article came out, the press dealt with the issue very responsibly. The rumors about the breakup of Giuliani's marriage and the rumored affair with Christine Latagano had been around for ... well over a year. ... At the Daily News running them down consumed huge amounts of our resources and time and effort. Talking to people, following people, staking people out. Almost every one of the rumors that came our way, we tried to run down.

"Why would we do that? We would do it because the allegation was that the affair had taken place between Rudy and one of his subordinates, which we think is a serious issue, particularly when the subordinate had received substantial raises.

"I know that we, chased [the allegations] and other organizations chased them. I can't tell you how vigorously, but I know that they did.

"The standards that we applied were one, that we would need to see some public action by one of these figures -- Donna would have had to hire a lawyer, would have to move out; he'd have to move out; something would have to happen before we could report on it or one of them would have to talk, one of the participants would have to talk on the record about what had taken place. That's why we never reported anything about it until the Vanity Fair article came out. Then we were in a position that what would seem to be a credible national public magazine had placed on the public agenda the startling claims. We could not ignore that they were out in the public for discussion. So we reported that Vanity Fair had printed that story, and we did it in our own aggressive style. But we also reported with it the fallacies in the reporting and ... pointed out that they were unnamed sources, that it was all unverifiable, and that there were significant questions about the accuracy of what had been reported..."

"The Vanity Fair piece was a terrible work of journalism. It should never have been published. But in the end it got a significant part of the truth out about the state of that marriage. It's now generally accepted that it's a troubled marriage. The Mayor more or less tacitly acknowledges it."

E.R. Shipp: "Why did you have to wait for Vanity Fair, and then to do an analysis of Vanity Fair and add to what it included?"

Arthur Browne: "As I said, we did not have the evidence..."

E.R. Shipp: "But we didn't have it with Vanity Fair either, right?"

Arthur Browne: "The only thing that changed was that the allegations were out there on the public record... and I didn't think we could ignore them."

David Halberstam: "To what degree does the private nature of the Mayor's marriage ... affect really how the city's governed?"

Arthur Browne: "I think in terms of this Mayor it's not so much the state of his relationship with Donna Hanover, but it's the purported affair with the subordinate who has very close access to the Mayor and has an influence over the day-to-day operations of city government and did receive substantial pay raises during the time ..."

E.R. Shipp: "That would have been a legitimate story, though, even before Vanity Fair."

Arthur Browne: "Only if you do have the affair. We weren't able to prove that there was such an affair."

E.R. Shipp: "Whether it's an affair or not, if she's exerting so much influence over government in whatever ways, isn't that a story that we could have gotten out?"

Arthur Browne: "I guess that is a story, but ... so are many others in City Hall."

Tom Rosenstiel: "To what extent do you think that the celebrification of the press, the straying towards what you called, David, medium paparazzi ... has contributed to the public accepting the Mayor's strategy? They don't see us as a public surrogate, but just another actor."

David Halberstam: "I think the question on the larger issue of celebrification and diminution of our credibility is maybe the best we could probably ask today because I think we are selling -- not us but the people who run these news organizations -- they are selling our good will, our legitimacy, our integrity. They're doing it in these crummy magazines. They're saying that they're selling out the classic definition of an editor that he or she will balance what you need to know with what you want to know ... We are clearly dumbing down. People out there know it. The ratings may work. They don't really work. People are angry, and they know they're being cheated...

The networks are moving back from a historic responsibility with these great freedoms. [The people] may not have liked us during the civil rights movement or Watergate or Vietnam, but by God, they knew we were doing our job. Now they don't like us and for the first time they're right. ... We're not doing our job. We're cheating. We're cheating them, we're cheating ourselves. We're selling our own pieces of our integrity in a new corporatization. It's by people who have no sense of the obligation, no sense of the responsibility, no sense of why we have these freedoms.

"You read that Michael Eisner made $500 million today. We didn't get those freedoms from the founding fathers so that Michael Eisner could make $500 million. There is a payback."

David Garth: [The press] liked David Dinkins, and he was open to them ... This wasn't Koch -- wise guy. This wasn't Giuliani -- tough guy. This was David Dinkins -- decent guy. How did you handle that one? And what light did you shine on that administration?"

E.R. Shipp: "We look back with fondness not only at Ed Koch--God forbid-- Judge Koch, but we're looking back saying that David Dinkins really started the decline in crime. He didn't get any credit for that during his administration."

Betsy Kolbert: " To a certain extent you're right. Shoe leather can make up for a certain amount of information you can't get. But I don't really think anyone would suggest that you can collect your own water quality data. That takes a lab and a tremendous amount of expertise."

E.R. Shipp: "Well, you've got the National Resources Defense group and all those people..."

Betsy Kolbert: "But they can't get the information ..."

Larry Grossman: "Somewhere in there there's someone being screwed. Those are the famous words of Scotty Reston when he was doing the Dunbar and Woods conference. Look for the unhappy ones." (Laughter)

E.R. Shipp: "There you go."

Audience Question: "If I may, very quickly. It seems to me, though, that you mentioned today, sitting here just now, some of the other stories that could be told while this information is being withheld, and it doesn't seem to me that some of those stories are being told."

Betsy Kolbert: "How many times do you write about your own problems? Legitimately or not, [people are] not necessarily interested in reading about the umpteenth Freedom of Information request that the Mayor's office turned down."

David Garth: "There's an assumption that the press is fabulous here. I think there are good reporters. There are an awful lot of bad reporters. The press secretary just told me about a couple of hours ago that it wasn't just giving them the story, it was explaining the story to them. There's a lot of shoe leather that's not worn out in this city."

Question: I'm Matt Storin from the Boston Globe.

"Where [did] the deterioration of the relationship ... between politicians and the press begin; what is happening elsewhere in the country outside of New York City, and maybe what we can do to, if we need to improve it?"

David Halberstam: I think it begins with the coming of the network television and the instinct for politicians who have always, by and large, disliked print people, that they can go over their heads."

"The backwash from that is unfortunate, and that is an instinct on the part of print, as it gets left behind, to attract attention do a kind of gotcha journalism so that ABC, for example, will reward Sam Donaldson far more than it will reward a distinguished reporter like Jim Wooten. Certain things begin to work, and you begin to respond because you're being looped over by. So the tensions between the two groups seem to grow. I think it's a part of the dynamic of contemporary society."

E.R. Shipp: "Part of the problem is the narrow idea of what is news and who is newsworthy?"

"We've allowed those we focused on -- the Mayor, the President, whatever -- to learn to become specialists, to learn how to counter what it is we're looking for, while we're still ignoring all those other avenues to find out what is really going on out there. I think that's where we missed the boat."

Question: "My name is Amy Costello and I'm a student here.

"Mr. Browne, I was struck by your comment that what you called an unpublishable article that appeared in Vanity Fair was kind of the gateway for your paper to finally publish your own story about the alleged affair... Is the appearance of an unpublishable article sufficient reason for another reputable paper such as yours to go ahead and publish?"

Arthur Browne: "At the time that we looked at the Vanity Fair article when it first hit the stands, there was no way really to know how credible or incredible it was. It was just out there, about our Mayor. We made the judgment that we would go ahead and report what they had reported with the proper qualifications.

"If it had clearly been that it was very, very dubious, then we would not have done it. But we invested that magazine with more credibility than we should have at the time. In retrospect, I don't think we did the right thing. If we'd known more, we probably would have handled it a little differently."

Amy Costello: "So at what point did you decide the article that appeared in Vanity Fair was unpublishable?"

Arthur Browne: "If I remember correctly that circulated late on a Sunday afternoon which changes the equation to a certain extent because it gets all the more difficult to verify... It took us until probably late Monday to actually track down people ... to figure out if the affair had actually taken place."

"Now we're, say, 24 hours late, but we do publish that, print that significantly the following day about the questionable nature of those allegations."

Larry Grossman: "Was there anything you didn't know, Arthur, in that article?"

Arthur Browne: "Objectively, right now, because the things, the affair as described did not take place, no, there was nothing that I didn't know. But I did not know whether it was true or false, and as I said, we gave it more credibility than it may have deserved in the beginning."

Larry Grossman: "Does that make Gresham's law apply? The vulnerability of the press is that it's subject to the weakest link? And inevitably, you have no choice but to go that route?"

Arthur Browne: "Well, we did have a choice. We could have said no."

Question: "My name is Mary Jacobson and I'm a student at the J-School."

"Given what sounds like a very slippery slope of inaccessibility to information, what can be done to reverse that trend?"

Arthur Browne: "I don't think there's much you can do ... in terms of this administration, this is a very well thought out strategy."

"I think you have to approach things differently. You come around from the back door issue by issue, because there are always people on every issue who are wired, who have a vested interest. They know people in government and they know [who are] the unhappy ones and you work it at the back door."

Betsy Kolbert: "I'd like to object to that. We're talking about cumulative city data. Yeah, you can have a lot of anecdotal data. I think that's a very legitimate way of going about stories, and you'll produce a lot of great stories, but you cannot collect cumulative city data. That is a job of city government. If they don't make it available, then I don't really know what you can do.

E.R. Shipp: "You can do a lot of things. People sue all the time. They've got documents. You can go and dig with that. You can also talk to real people ... at a certain point that will force ... the Mayor or whoever, to address these issues you're raising. We give him too much power when we say that we can not cover certain issues effectively because we aren't getting data from the city."

Betsy Kolbert: "I basically disagree that we're not covering the issues effectively."

"But we are being denied basic data from city government. Those are just facts. So a certain kind of story isn't getting written."

Arthur Browne: "We attempted to take a look at consumer affair complaints involving a particular industry... It is impossible to get the complaints. It's impossible to get the number of complaints...

"Now you can say well, go find somebody ... [to] leak it to you .. but there are volumes of data that no one person is going to have.

"Second, no matter how screwed someone is in one of these agencies, I believe that this administration will screw people worse if they give the information out. The retribution will be swift and clear..."

David Halberstam: "Greater the retribution that the United States Army would hand out in Vietnam to those who talked to reporters? Come on."

Arthur Browne: "These people would lose their jobs. Quickly..."

David Halberstam: "The Army people lose their careers. I think those things... I'm sorry..."

Arthur Browne: "David, if this simply 'May I have a public record?' and they give it you, they're out. They're out."

Tom Rosenstiel, the vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, took a few minutes to attempt to summarize what was heard though the day.

"I think this morning we heard that impartiality may not be a philosophical possibility, but that it does seem to be, to most journalists, a valuable practical goal. Just as it is for juries to come to honest verdicts or teachers to teach honest lessons. And that journalists have various systems in place at their news organizations, or can have or should have, to live up to that commitment.

"Impartiality doesn't necessarily mean not exercising judgment, nor does it even mean freedom from having a point of view. It should mean, however, freedom from passing judgment. It should mean more than fairness. It should mean a scrupulous, passionate commitment to accuracy, to telling facts, to verification. Even opinion columnist Maggie Gallagher said that journalistic journalism to her means maintaining some kind of detachment from her sources, from partisanship, from who wins. It means to her a commitment to what she called the whole community. Her goal is to inform and persuade honestly, but not to manipulate. She sees a clear difference between herself and a propagandist -- a difference that has to do with journalism. A difference that has to do, if not with the word impartiality, with a kind of intellectual honesty.

"However, we also heard throughout the day that we don't seem to do a very good job of living up to that commitment. We are victims of a cultural and class isolation that Dick Harwood in one phrase called the cognitive elite; we are also increasingly victims of a kind of journalistic subculture which tends to attract liberal, secular people. It's a subculture which is increasingly cynical, which is oriented towards conflict.

"We heard in one marvelous phrase of Juan Gonzalez, "Editors tend to create newsrooms in their own images." And I think to some degree we heard that the journalistic subculture tends to be lazy, at least in the sense that it covers process rather than policy, it covers things that are easy to glibly characterize.

"I think we heard from David Garth, a lesson that maybe he didn't even mean explicitly when he said that we covered "wise guy Koch and sweet guy Dinkins and tough guy Giuliani." The journalistic subculture treated these three different Mayors fairly similarly. The subculture seems to be undifferentiating.

"We can create, as Pam Fine talked about, more systematic ways of bringing audiences in -- something I think we are uniquely inept at doing and have been resistant to doing, for good reasons. But now [how to] create systems where you can do that responsibly.

"Create an atmosphere, as Danyel Smith talked about, of intellectual openness perhaps even, at times, a kind of combat so that everyone is not created in the same image and that you're not punished for having a different point of view.

"To break the class and cultural mode, to undo the subculture, by going out to different kinds of places to attract reporters in. People who have lived different kinds of lives. But there also seems to be a consensus that we should stop short of asking people explicitly about their political ideology or how they would vote. We should approach this somehow culturally.

"We also heard, I think in the last panel, that all of these problems which there seemed to be some consensus about, have contributed to the way that politicians increasingly are able to deal with the press, maybe effectively from their point of view, but maybe not necessarily in the public interest. And that Giuliani's relationship with the press may be a warning, of a kind, that we should take steps to broaden the subculture of journalism fairly quickly. That the clock is ticking on us in terms of not only our ability to have a role in this debate, but perhaps more importantly, to have a relevance for the audience for the role that we have. And that attempts that we have made to popularize the news, or to perhaps broaden the product of the news rather than broadening the culture of journalism, have been counterproductive. That celebrification, tabloidization, infotainment are potentially undermining our ability to be relevant to people, while they may have temporarily juiced up audience at some of our publications. Although, as Halberstam notes, there are signs that that juicing up is not real.

"As David Halberstam said, people didn't like us during the civil rights era, but they knew we were doing our job. Today they don't like us, and they don't think we're doing our job."

"When I heard Fred Barnes and Victor Navasky agree that the problem of the press is that there's an ideology of journalism, and their only disagreement was whether they should identify it as centrist or center left, I would say that we've achieved some sense of consensus. We can take this, and I hope move along to Michigan to the next forum. This is an evolving phenomenon. Not only substantively in terms of the content, but the process. The value of it is it's dynamism, that you have a role and can participate and shape it. You did so today by coming, by talking, by listening."

In the end, the day probably offered a fair attempt at clarifying what impartiality meant, why we do not always live up to it, and steps we might take to change newsrooms to do a better job. What was less adequately explored, perhaps, is which journalistic techniques tend to pull journalists across the line of impartiality. One suggestion was we're often led astray by the growing tendency to infer the motives of people in public life. There is much left here for further examination in later forums.

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