A dinosaur's view of the media

I am going to move through a few points quickly, and then I hope we can have a conversation for the rest of the hour.

Let me put a couple of things on the table that will perhaps explain and perhaps even justify some of the comments I'm going to make later on.

I have two perspectives that I bring to this thing. First goes back about 30 years now. In 1969-70 I was on a boondoggle year at the Institute of Politics up at Harvard. It turned out to be a very memorable year up there because that was the year of Cambodia and Kent State. And they struck Harvard, as they did many other college campuses -- shut the place down.

I came back from that sabbatical year to The Post having seen first hand the way in which that younger generation -- the Sixties crowd -- was prepared to challenge all kinds of institutions and all kinds of authority. And also I had some idea about the price that Harvard and other places paid for not having any institutional response mechanism able to deal with this kind of challenge.

So I came back and lobbied Ben Bradlee and others at The Post to try to find some way to prepare ourselves for this kind of challenge. It was obvious even to a reporter as dense as I am that in this new era people were simply not going to act passively, or accept on faith the behaviors and actions of decisions of large private institutions. We were going to have to explain and defend ourselves.

I think those conversations may have had, at most, a marginal impact in persuading The Post to begin our institution of an ombudsman. And over the years that we've had that job at The Post, I've had only a marginal relationship with the various people in that role, mainly because a number of them have been friends, and were friends before they came into that job.

I learned from them something about the extraordinarily difficult psychological and emotional demands that it places on professional journalists to be in but not of a newspaper setting, particularly the guy who hired me at The Washington Star 40 years ago, Charlie Seib. He did it for five years and at the end of five years I think he was thoroughly exhausted emotionally. There can't be many things more difficult than to be a journalist yourself but have to distance yourself from roomful or a building full of other journalists who are working to the best of their limitations. And you are there as a kind of a skunk in the works to call them to task when, as inevitably is the case, we fall down or fall short on the job.

I admire what you've done. I admire what you do. But the main point I want to make this morning is that I think you, like we in the newsrooms, may be overwhelmed by much larger forces.

I come to that point by way of an anecdote. Many years ago somebody -- I wish I could remember who it was -- made a comment about the New York Times coverage of the New York City public school system. It was that, for 20 years before that, The Times had reported absolutely everything that was happening in the city schools, except that they were collapsing.

And I sometimes think, on my gloomier days, that some smart-ass is going to come along 20 years from now and say that my generation of political reporters reported absolutely everything that was going on in American politics, except that public support for that political system was collapsing.

I think we got into trouble, as political reporters, not because we were badly motivated but because we were following a model that was almost too good to be true. The most dominant influence, by far, on my generation of reporters was the late Theodore White. Teddy White, in his 1960 "Making of the President" book, showed us that, even if you knew the outcome of an election, you could make a gripping story of a campaign by getting further inside those campaigns than any reporter had gotten before.

All of us spent probably the next 30 years of our professional lives trying to imitate Teddy White's technique, and finding ways to insinuate ourselves into the inside of political campaigns. By doing that, I think we gave people probably a better understanding than they had had before of how campaigns are run, how they're financed, who the insiders are, and how they operate.

In doing that, we forgot one fairly important point, a point that the late Senator Thurston Morton of Kentucky -- who for his sins had to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee -- liked to make in his speeches. It was the simple point that the end of politics is the establishment of government.

Another way of putting it is the way Jeff Bell, a conservative operative, wrote in a book two years ago. He was talking about the contrast between what the elites are interested in and what most of the public is interested in. He said the elites care a great deal about who wins an election and how they win it. Most people care about what comes out of the election and how it's going to affect their lives.

Partly as a result of the way in which we have been covering politics and government, I think you can see in all the polls -- and certainly in all the anecdotal evidence that I get from door-knocking we do regularly as part of our political reporting at The Post -- that public support for the very institutions of representative government is -- if not collapsing -- certainly more fragile and shaky than it has been in the past.

I've been working recently on initiative campaigns. When I was out in California before the primary there, in March, a lobbyist in Sacramento showed me a poll that had been taken for one of his clients. The questions were very simple. They listed about seven or eight of the major issues that face the state of California -- schools, transportation, environment -- you could put together the list.

For each one, the question put to the poll sample was, "Do you trust the governor and the Legislature or the people, through initiatives, to make the right choices on this problem?" The lowest percentage favoring the initiative over the elected government was about 71 per cent. On many of the issues, it went well up into 80s.

I've been out recently on a book tour -- my book about initiative politics -- and after people have listened as long as they can stand to my sort of niggling objections to some of the ways in which the initiative process has been taken over by interest groups and wealthy people with their own political agendas, somebody in literally every audience (now in nine states) has stood up and said, "But you don't know our legislature!"

I'm beginning to think that, as bad as the reputation of Congress may be in this country, the reputation of the state legislatures may be even worse.

I tell you all of these anecdotes because I want to suggest, by way of provoking some discussion, that you in the ombudsmen trade may be victims of the same kind of syndrome that we in the political reporting trade have been.

I think you do a very good job of explaining the inner workings of your papers and correcting the errors that your papers make. That is genuinely valuable work. I don't say that to pander to you. We at the Post all learn from E. R. Shipp's (ombudsman) columns about things that have happened and things that should not have happened in the paper.

But around you, the public trust in journalism and our credibility, I think, is -- if not collapsing -- certainly in a fragile condition.

The question that I would put out for your discussion is whether marginal improvements in the performance on individual papers is, by itself, going to restore some of the missing credibility and trust in the press, unless larger questions are also addressed, and larger trends -- probably out of the capacity of you or any of us on the news side -- are somehow challenged.

What kind of trends and forces am I thinking about?

Well, the first one is a familiar topic to all of us in journalism: the way in which mergers are leading to ever-larger conglomerates where the profit motive further erodes the distance between news values and entertainment values. That topic has been discussed so often, I don't think I even need to expand on that.

The second trend that concerns me, and on which I've made myself kind of a royal pain to many of my colleagues, is the blurring of the line between journalism and politics. I don't know exactly when the crossover pattern began, but certainly it has been accelerating. It's in part a television or cable phenomenon, but it's also found in print, with distinguished columnists coming straight out of the political world, and sometimes distinguished columnists going into the political world.

But the definitive moment for me -- at least so far (who knows when it will be topped?) -- came at the end of the 1996 campaign in the beginning of 1997. CNN, the all-news cable network, ran promotional ads in Washington, D.C., heralding the return of Patrick J. Buchanan to "Crossfire."

The ads showed the familiar scene that we've all watched so many times on State of the Union night, of a presidential motorcade forming up at the gates of the White House -- the black limousine, the police escort, and so on. And the camera follows the limousine and entourage up Pennsylvania Avenue, up Capitol Hill. And just about when you figure they're going to make the right turn to go into the Capitol driveway, instead they made a left turn and went to the CNN Building, which is four blocks from the Capitol. And Pat Buchanan stepped out.

I thought to myself, well now we've totally obliterated the line. Here is this guy who was a commentator on CNN news broadcasts and then became a presidential candidate. And now they're using his role as a presidential candidate to bring him back as a commentator.

Of course, now he's flipped again and become a presidential candidate once more.

I don't know how the public, watching that kind of spectacle, is expected to know what the hell the difference may be between journalists and politicians.

And of course we have dozens of talk shows now where real journalists are encouraged to behave as if they are politicians by arguing about what policy ought to be, what the president ought to do next, whether or not taxes should be cut, and any other issue that comes up. Or they are placed in a position of fortunetellers to predict what will happen next.

The third element -- and it's the one that has preoccupied me most recently, because it so much a part now of our daily lives, at least at my paper -- is the way in which commercial and technological pressures are accelerating the pace of the news operation, not always to the benefit of the quality of the news operation.

For those of us who work on newspapers, news used to happen once every day. We knew when our deadlines were, and we knew when the paper was going to be published and when it was going to be on the stands. It might have happened twice a day for television news operations. It probably happened once an hour for radio news operations.

But now, with all-news cable and particularly with the Internet, news happens literally every second of the day. Indeed, many of those outlets now promote themselves by saying, "You can see the news as it happens," either on your TV screen or your computer, because there will be no time break at all.

We sometimes think this has led to a major distinction between the old media, so-called, where we dinosaurs work, and the new media. But I think that distinction is being rapidly lost as those of us in the old media are being prodded to adapt to the accelerated pace of the new media.

The New York Times and The Washington Post and hundreds of other newspapers have been morning papers, which meant that we had deadlines between 8 or 9 o'clock at night until, maybe, 2 o'clock the next morning. But The Times and The Post and hundreds of other papers, I suppose, now publish mid-day editions for their Web sites, which have deadlines 12 hours earlier than the old deadlines.

What does that do to the quality of the journalistic product? Does it mean that there is less context in these stories? That there's less thought given to what the implications are, or the significance or the lack of significance of the news of the last few moments or hour, may be? Does it mean that there is less checking of additional sources before the news goes out?

I think you know the answer to that question.

The function that I think is being sacrificed most drastically in this acceleration is the one of which I have never been part -- for which I thank the Lord every day -- and that is the editing function: people looking over your shoulder, reading your copy and raising hard questions -- before the stories go into the paper.

We are blessed with wonderful desk editors at the paper where I work. They will really force you to back up the statements in your lead with evidence. They will ask you if you've talked to so-and-so. They will compare your version of the story with other versions they have read, and ask whether this point that you did not mention is significant enough to go back and write another paragraph into your story to cover that point.

All of that editing function is what really produces, I think, quality and substantive journalism.

I have to say, with no personal intention of diminishing them, that the people who process what we produce for the Web site simply don't do that. They're not editors. That's not their job. They see their job as being one of processing what they get from reporters and moving it onto the Web site as quickly as possible.

I've seen the same thing happening with my friends at CNN. Sometimes I'm over there to do some news analysis for Inside Politics. CNN is an amazing operation. The speed with which they move on a story is truly impressive to me. But the grunt work is done by 11-year-olds over there.

More than once, I've seen somebody rush in at literally five seconds before the camera goes on and put down a new piece of copy in front of Bernie Shaw or Judy Woodruff. They are so professional and so calm about it that they act as if they've had it in their hands for hours. They read that copy with great aplomb.

Sometimes you can catch a little bit of a lifted eyebrow from one of them. And at the next commercial break, because they both happen to be very conscientious journalists, one of them or the other will say off the air to the producer, "Where the hell did that come from?" Their own antennae have been tweaked by what they've just read to the world, and they're a little bit skeptical. And so, in effect, they are doing some post-broadcast editing of their own.

This acceleration problem is not a problem for us, although the day trading phenomenon in stocks, which has destabilized the stock market so many times, is another aspect of the same thing. If you watch "West Wing" on television, as I try to do, you get a sense now of what life is like in the White House. It is not fiction on their part when you see those characters on the show running from one room to another. That is the way life is like at the White House.

I had a chance two weeks ago to meet with the current crop of White House Fellows -- people generally in their 30s, from the business world, the military world, a couple of academics sometimes thrown in -- who go through an extraordinarily tough screening process. They then are hired for a year to work either with members of the President's staff, the President himself, the Vice President, or Cabinet officers.

They're extraordinarily bright, capable young people…Colin Powell was once a White House Fellow, and that will give you an idea of their quality.

I asked them what surprised them the most about their Washington experiences. The answer that came back from several was: We thought, given the experience we've had working with CEOs in our own world, whether it's senior military or senior business people, that what our bosses in government would be doing would largely involve the same kind of long-range, strategic planning that occupies the CEOs in the world that we came from.

Not true, they said. Almost everything they do is crisis management. One of them said, "And they're very good crisis managers, but they never get around to doing that sort of strategic, long-term planning."

So it's not just our business that's being affected by this extraordinary acceleration of the pace of things. But what I worry about is that unless we find some way to focus on what is being sacrificed, in this rush to be first, to be fastest, that the problem for us will be an increasing loss of credibility and trust. More and more errors will creep in and more and more of the significance of what news can provide for people when they talk about the effects and the context of the event of the moment will be missing.

But I also think that in our rush to do things quickly, this whole system of representative government -- the blessings of this republic with which we've lived for so long -- may very well be sacrificed by an impatience with the way in which process unfolds rather slowly in a representative government.

I am really struck by the way in which the people from the high-tech world -- Silicon Valley world -- now are using the initiative process simply to bypass representative government. They have enough wealth that they can pay for these initiatives themselves. It represents a form of instant gratification for them, to be able to rewrite the policy, whether it's in education, campaign finance or some other area. They just want it done, and they can get it done that way.

I think that we may be moving into a different kind of culture and a different kind of society, unless we pause somehow to think about what's being lost in this headlong rush into this accelerated world now available to us.

Let me stop at this point, because I've gone way beyond my charter and my time, and I want to hear what's on your mind. Thank you very much.

(Following is a selection of questions put to Broder by ONO members. Technical problems in the tape-recording omitted a small portion of the exchange.)

Phil Record, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: What's the most difficult part of your job, turning out what -- three columns a week?

Broder: Two. To be honest with you, the toughest part of the job is probably keeping (them) down to a length that op-ed page editors want to run. It's a reporting-based column. If I stopped reporting, I wouldn't have a column. What I enjoy and what I think I've learned something about, over the last 40 years, is how to be a reporter. The writing part is not difficult.

The advantage of having a column is that you can go back to a subject or a story or an event that you're interested in, and that you think would be of interest to other people, without having to find a new hard-news peg to hang it on. Most of my columns are exactly that -- going back to stuff that I've looked at or dealt with as a reporter.

Lou Hodges, Washington & Lee University: Are there things that you have in your mind that we might be able to do…to recover some of what you and I both believe we have lost as a result of this acceleration and technological change? The best way that we have worked in this country, it seems to me, is to make the thing we want to achieve somehow profitable. I wonder if there is any way we might go about making carefully edited news products really a major profit center.

Broder: The honest answer is, I don't know. It depends, it seems to me, on whether there is a public appetite for that. And given the way most people live their lives now, in which they can consume news only in small bits and on the fly, that may be very difficult to achieve.

The one thing that I find hopeful is that, as I travel -- and I travel a lot -- what's become clear in the last ten years or so is that the old distinction that used to be made between the so-called Boston-to-Washington corridor -- where people were really tuned in to public affairs and very well-informed -- and the rest of the country -- where they were presumed to be not -- is no longer true, if it was ever true.

I think the reason is that you now find in every community of every size, everywhere in the country, a kind of a self-selected group. Call it an elite, if you will, who are every bit as well-informed, every bit as tuned in to public affairs, as anybody that I would meet on Capitol Hill, or at Brookings or the Heritage Foundation.

The reason is that they are now so well served by so many sources of supply. I mean, you've got three national newspapers now -- two of which are among the very best papers in the country -- The Times and the Wall Street Journal. USA today… is on a quality growth curve of extraordinary slant. There is terrific improvement, almost literally week by week, in the quality of that paper… They've got terrific reporters, some of whom I'm sorry to say were hired away from The Washington Post.

In addition to that, you've got all the resources of National Public Radio, to which I am addicted. You've got cable news operations, including those that bring you C-Span, things as they happen, unedited. You've got all the specialized journals in the world. And you've got the Internet now, which people are increasingly using.

So people who want to be well informed can be, and are being well informed wherever they live. You can see it when you go to those communities….

But that is the positive side, I think, of what's been happening.

Jeffrey Dworkin, National Public Radio: One of the issues that I've been thinking about, and haven't yet addressed, is the issue of the celebrity journalists. You have people, certainly inside my organization, whose basic job is to be reportorial. But then suddenly when they appear on Fox News Sunday, they explode and bloviate, and say all sorts of things that an editor at NPR would never allow them to say. What do you see is the danger to the profession of this relentless pontificating?

Broder: Well, I alluded to it briefly, and I'm happy to have the chance to come back to it and talk about it a little bit more. There is pressure on a lot of those shows to turn reporters into advocates. I don't know anything to do except to say no. I don't want to make myself an example, but I'll give you one anecdote.

Years ago, my buddy Jack Germond said, "Come on and do the McLaughlin show." I said, "I don't think I want to do the McLaughlin show." He said, "It's not as bad as you think. Nobody takes it that seriously, and you'll have fun." So I went once.

And I said to Jack, "It was worse than I thought and I'm never going back."

But that's an option that you have. I think there are still television shows where you're allowed to work either as a reporter or interviewer, as on Meet the Press, or as somebody doing what I think passes decently for analysis. Washington Week in Review, I think, does not ask people to argue about whether there should be a tax cut or Social Security privatization or not. Dan Balz of The Washington Post, a fine political reporter, was on there and explained very clearly the differences between the Bush and the Gore approaches to Social Security. I think that has some value, and is consonant with the role as a reporter.

But when you're asked, "What would you do?" then you're in trouble.

Dan Hortsch, Portland Oregonian: You said that the system of representative government may well be sacrificed by an impatience with the way the process unfolds in a representative government. What can newspapers and broadcasters do to address that -- to inform and educate people in that direction?

Broder: Well, if we're headed in that direction, your state is going to get there first, because you are more addicted to initiative campaigns even than California. I think one thing we can do and should be doing is just more reporting about the initiative industry. My impression is, most voters, even in states like Oregon where they're on the ballot all the time in large numbers, that the initiatives they see are there because some of their fellow citizens decided this was an important issue.

As you know, I'm sure, there is an industry now in this country that makes very good profits out of having lots of initiatives on the ballot. There are companies that collect the signatures for a fee. There are lawyers that write the initiatives for a fee. And most of all, there are consultants who run these campaigns for and against these initiatives, who make a great deal of money out of the process.

We ought to be writing about them. They have deliberately, I think, managed to stay below the radar.

In the state of California, there are six or eight firms that basically cornered the market on signature collecting. When I went to interview the people who run those firms, several said, "You know, no reporter has ever come around before to ask us how we do our business."

We write about individual initiatives -- the hot-button issues particularly get good coverage -- but the process itself has remained largely below the radar.

That would be a good first step -- to shine a little light of day on these folks.

Nancy Conner, St. Paul Pioneer-Press: I'm noticing an increasing number of readers who are saying, "I read something in The Washington Times last night. Why don't you have it?" And then a few days later, it will move on our national wire. What is the impact of The Washington Times on political coverage?

Broder: I don't think I can tell you the answer to that. In Washington terms, their circulation is rather small. But I think they have done a good job of identifying themselves through ads in conservative publications and other ways of identifying themselves around the country as a place where you can get news from Washington that you're not going to read in those "establishment, liberal" newspapers.

And so I think they may have more impact that way than they do, perhaps, with their print circulation within D.C. itself.

C.B. Hanif, The Palm Beach Post: Can you speak in more prescriptive terms for us as ombudsmen -- you mentioned our work in corrections and clarifications, and explaining the workings of our newspapers. Are there any more remedies that you can offer us as ombudsmen to address the problems you cite?

Broder: Well, I think one thing -- it's a cliché, but it's true: If you think there is any validity in the theory that there are large forces out there, beyond the performance of your particular staff of your particular newspaper, that are creating problems for the credibility and trust in the press, then I think you ought to be addressing those large forces, even if you can't recommend a cure for them. Simply making people aware, for example, of the tradeoffs that are involved between accelerating the news process and the quality of that news process. That would be a useful step.

I think the most important function that you provide overall is helping people understand why the newspaper does what it does, and therefore equipping them to make better use of the newspaper.

The questions that you relay from readers, the questions that you raise yourselves, affect the behavior of people on the newspaper. I've seen that happen so often that I'm convinced that it's true. I expect in your jobs you wonder why they don't pay MORE attention to you, but I'm here as a newsperson to tell you that you have more impact than you perhaps recognize within your own news organizations.

But the second part of the thing is to raise those larger questions, and that's what I'm hoping that the conversation that you all will have around here will do. As much as we improve the quality day-to-day of our own operations, unless we can find some way to at least recognize these larger forces, and ask ourselves what are the tradeoffs that we're being asked to make -- particularly with this acceleration of news -- the slope is going to be downhill for the credibility of the press.

I think it is almost an inevitability -- and I keep fingers crossed that it's not going to be on some really important political story that I or one of my colleagues has done -- I am just in mortal terror that we're going to put something out on our Web site that would be caught by an editor if we had an editor at the time to work on it, and that we're going to be horribly embarrassed by it, and our credibility will suffer.

George Edmonson, Atlanta Constitution: I know The Post in the last couple of years has been going through a period of trying to clamp down on interpretive leads, particularly stories that began with some sort of explanation of why somebody did something. Is that still under way? Did it have much success?

Broder: Well, I think others can judge the success, but it's certainly under way, and for me, it's kind of back to the future, because when Russ Wiggins was the editor of the paper, one of his favorite doctrines was: Let's give the readers a crack at the facts and then tell them what we think it all means. But give them the facts first, and then we'll get around to the meaning of it.

Lou Gelfand, Minneapolis Star-Tribune: Following up on Nancy Conner's question, what is your analysis of why there seems to be among the public a sort of cult thinking based on The Washington Times and stories that, sooner or later -- usually sooner -- are on talk radio, and there is an absence of that on the other side of the fence, with those who have a diametrically opposite approach to politics and government?

Broder: Well, the conservatives will tell you that the reason talk radio is conservative is because everything else in the damn media is so liberal. They needed one place where they could have a conversation that was not slanted that way. I don't buy that explanation. But I'm not smart enough to know the answer as to why talk radio has turned into a conservative medium.

Gelfand: Well, I was thinking more of the absence of that thinking on the other side of the political fence. We get lots of calls from people who are stalwarts of talk radio -- Rush Limbaugh, the Washington Times, even though the Washington Times has very few subscribers in the Midwest. But we don't get that kind of response from people who are on the other side of the political fence. Are they unorganized? Why is the political thinking on the left not as perverted or extreme as it is on the right?

Broder: Well, I guess I would challenge your premise, because I think that there's plenty of perversion -- if that's the word you want to use -- across the spectrum. But it is a phenomenon.

I bumped into Jim Hightower when we were both in Madison, Wisconsin, a few weeks ago, and he has been trying to build an audience for an avowedly liberal left view of the world in talk radio. He said it's a real struggle. Maybe it has to do with the ownership of the radio stations. Much of the conservative movement, I think, has been frustrated by what they have come to believe -- rightly or wrongly -- is a liberal slant to the press.

So when they find someone like Limbaugh, and there are lots of local Limbaughs who go far beyond where he goes, they really respond to it. When he (Limbaugh) takes off on something I have written, it wrecks my voice mail for hours. I get so damn many calls there that I can't find the calls that I'm looking for. Those folks really do twitch, and they twitch instantly and in large numbers. And it's always the same message.

Genevieve Guicheney, French public television: You called your lecture "A Dinosaur's View of the Media," as if you were talking from the distant past. We all know that freedom of information has been fought for for ages, and it has something to do, in our view, with democracy and education. You used a terrible word: You said that now you have to make a "product." So what is going to happen to newspapers and journalism is they just are there to make a product?

Broder: I thank you for the question. I wish I had as good an answer as the question. I used the word "product" advisedly, because I think, to be honest about ourselves, we have to recognize that we work, most of us, in private, profit-making institutions which are in a competitive marketplace.

What we drop on the doorstep in the morning, or what we put out on the Web, is a product competing with other products.

It happens to be a product of a private business that is also performing a very important public service with a minimum of the kind of regulation that most other businesses have to endure from the government. So that's an additional responsibility, because we have a privilege that very few other private profit-making organizations are accorded.
I am inherently optimistic about the future of this country.

What I see among the younger people coming up in our business gives me immeasurable confidence about the quality of the people who are going to be practicing journalism. They are far better trained and far better motivated, and I think that frankly, in many cases, they have a better balance than my generation of reporters did about how to balance their private lives, their family lives, with their work as journalists.

Too many of my friends sacrificed their friends and marriages for their work. In many respects, I think things are very positive.

But you have to ask yourself, I think, given the erosion of public trust in politics and the political process -- given what we know is the rather low state of trust and credibility in the press in general -- whether or not we may be approaching the point where people simply are not prepared to delegate to others either the lawmaking responsibility or the informational responsibility.

In these recent forums that I have been in because of the book, I've had young people say to me -- and I think it is a generational thing -- "Look, you're talking about the past. We live in a consumer-driven culture. It is a consumer-driven economy. And it's going to be consumer-driven politics. We are not waiting for other people to make our decisions for us. We're not going to permit that any longer."

I think that implies something of some significance for those of us who work in news organizations where we basically try to process raw information…before we pass it on to readers or viewers. If they don't trust that processing process, they're not going to use our product.

There are greater implications, I think, for government and politics. If there is no bond of trust -- if the people no longer believe that those that they elect represent them -- then there is no way of sustaining this system of government. Something else will replace it. One of the things that, as a political reporter, I feel we have done very badly is to give people a realistic enough sense of what happens, particularly in the legislative process, so that they can at least judge what the values are that may be sacrificed if we make a decision that we no longer trust representative government.

I think that we're tied together. I think that the decline in trust in the press is very closely linked to the decline in trust in politics and in government. It seems to me that, one way or another, we ought to be talking about this subject. It's hard to do without sounding like you're blowing the alarm whistle all the time.

But I think we may have reached the point that at least we ought to raise the warning flag and say, "Where are we headed with this kind of deterioration?" It's not simply a problem for incumbents in politics. It's not simply a problem for those of us who represent incumbent institutions in the press. There is a public interest in the question as to where we're headed, and I think we ought to find some ways to discuss that with the public.

Richard de Uriarte, Arizona Republic: What is the counter-argument that you would use to the kind of journalism of assertion, where we're getting charges that are "out there?" I can remember the recent story from Salon magazine about Bush's cocaine problem and prison. I felt that our paper shouldn't publish them, but he denied it in Phoenix. And so what do you do? Is there a lowest common denominator below which we wouldn't go? Because most readers think we're trying to hide something.

Broder: I think it comes down to a question of values. A newspaper organization has to be prepared to judge what it does on the basis of its own values. It's much harder because of the kind of phenomenon you were talking about, where readers will call up and say, "The Washington Times says such-and-such. Why aren't you doing it? Or Salon magazine says such-and-such. Why aren't you?"

Yoichi Kagaya, Asahi Shimbun, Japan: There are indications that the influence of newspapers and the interest in reading them in the United States is decreasing. What can be done about that?

Broder: I think in some respects it is as great as it ever was, but it is being exerted through different channels. Almost all of us now realize that we have as many people reading us on line as we do in print. In some respects the influence of the paper that I work for is probably greater because it's been impossible to get The Washington Post outside of Washington, D.C., for the most part. Now we have readers every day all around the world. So maybe our influence is bigger than it was.

I'm not so much worried about whether the influence of the newspaper is declining. People will find sources of information that they find useful. As you've heard me say more than once now, I'm quite concerned about the quality of that product.

Good luck on the rest of your conference, and thank you for inviting me.