It's an honor to speak to newspaper ombuds-people, although a columnist coming before a group like this is a little like a chicken addressing a meeting of the poultry sellers' association. It's kind of intimidating.

But I think your work is increasingly important because of the cynicism and skepticism that exists about our profession -- our trade, if you prefer. I think, when I talk to people -- I'm sure you have the same experience day after day -- there is enormous doubt about what we do for a living, how we deal with people, and there are a lot of people out there who feel as excluded from us as they feel excluded from politics. I think the institution of the ombudsman, ombudsperson, is one important link back to the reader that I think is more important now than it has ever been.

For someone like me to come and talk to a group like this about journalism and journalistic criticism, is kind of silly. In fact, what I should do is sit in that chair and listen to what you would have to teach me about how I should do my job.

When I'm in this position, I always think of one of my favorite Al Smith stories. When he was running for governor, there was a heckler in the back of the room. The heckler looked at him and said, "Tell 'em all you know, Al -- it won't take long." Al Smith shot back at the heckler, and said, "I'll tell them all we both know, and it won't take longer." I always think at that point I should sit down.

The other story I always like when we talk about journalism is one I heard over and over again during the Bush campaign back in 1992. I was covering it -- remember the campaign bumper stickers that said, "Annoy the media. Re-elect Bush." They sold the plates to the Democratic National Committee recently. They're using them now. You'd go into any Bush rally and somebody would get up and tell the story of Bush's beautiful little granddaughter who was visiting the White House, and there was a terrible thunderstorm, and she was petrified and went running into the President. He said, "Don't worry, dear. When someone tells a terrible lie, God thunders in heaven." She feels better and goes back to sleep. At 2:30 in the morning, the worst thunder she's ever heard goes on and on, and this time she's really scared. She goes to see the President and he says, "It's OK. The Washington Post just started rolling off the press." I always felt that when people stop chuckling at that joke, we'd be back to the days when we're played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, instead of the guys in the bar scene in "Star Wars."

One thing I hoped not to do today is make predictions, which I think is the bane of punditry these days. By the way, I admit to being a pundit, because I've discovered that the definition of a pundit is what one pundit calls another pundit while denying being one. So if I say I'm a pundit, I can't possibly be a pundit.

I discovered recently the problem with predictions is not confined, fortunately, to us. I heard the story of somebody who went through seminary, working his way through seminary by being a baseball umpire. Years later, a friend went up to him and said, "I guess you learned how to call them as you saw them." The guy looked at the friend and said, "Actually, I learned to call them whether I saw them or not." Every once in awhile, I think that might be the definition of what I have to do for a living.

What I'd like to do is really talk about -- or make four points today. I'm going to try to do so without mentioning names such as Lewinsky and Clinton, although I may do so in passing.

What I'd like to talk about first is the problem between the private and the public -- the total breakdown of that barrier, indeed a complete confusion of those two realms, which I think, can be quite dangerous to both journalism and to political life.

I'd also like to pick up on a point that Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel make in their new book, where they talk about the decline of a journalism of verification, and its replacement by a journalism of assertion, and why that is very dangerous, I think, to what we do for a living.

Thirdly, and related to that, I want to talk about the confusion between fact and opinion in so much of both not only in commentary but, I think, in what increasingly passes for journalism.

And lastly, I'd like to revisit an old debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey on journalism's duty to engage citizens in democracy. I'm going to do that without ever mentioning the words "civic journalism," although I'd be happy to talk about that later, if someone wants to.

I have been very influenced in my view of the public and the private (realms) by a writer named Jean Bethke Elshtain, who wrote a book some years ago called "Democracy on Trial." She invented an idea, which she called the politics of displacement, and she argued that the politics of displacement has two trajectories. First, everything private -- from one's sexual practices to blaming one's parents for one's lack of self-esteem -- becomes grist for the public mill. In the second, everything that is public -- from the grounds on which politicians are judged to health policies to gun regulations -- is privatized and played out in a psychodrama on a vast scale. We fret as much about a politician's sexual life as we do about his foreign policy, or we favor health care only if it pays for our own guaranteed comfort, and we oppose it if it does not. Or we see in firearms regulation only an assault on our identity as gun-toters, rather than as a way to control the slaughter in our streets without eroding the rights of hunters and others.

Elshtain goes on to say that the complete collapse of a distinction between public and private is anathema to democratic thinking, which holds that the difference between public and private identities, commitments and activities, is of vital importance.

Now I should admit up front here, that I have had some role in this breakdown in the public and the private. I'm the guy that Gary Hart said, "Follow me around" to, and I didn't. So you can put me in an almost Clintonian way on both sides of that divide. We can talk about the Hart story if you like, but I think that beginning there, or you could argue further back, but I think really beginning with the Gary Hart story, we began to have a problem making distinctions. Journalists had always drawn a very thick line between the public and the private, were very reluctant to cross it, and after the Hart episode, the line became very, very blurred indeed. I think, ever since then, in a whole series of controversies affecting figures in both political parties, we've had trouble working this through.

The scholar Ira Katznelson brought home the importance of this public/private distinction very powerfully in his wonderful book, which I recommend to everybody, called "Liberalism's Crooked Circle." Katznelson was very active with dissidents in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, during the Communist years. He tells the story of a government billboard near Krakow, and the billboard read "A socialist government unites the nation on the basis of Marxism, Leninism in all its activities." Now think of the frightening hubris of that phrase. It unites people in all of their activities; it governs all their activities. It would be as if all Catholics were ordered by the Vatican to root for Notre Dame and only Notre Dame, under the pain of excommunication. Think of the poor Loyola of Chicago fans.

The total blurring of all public/private distinctions represents -- as Katznelson says -- a great risk; it risks authorizing tyrannies, imposed either by democratic majorities or by authoritarian rulers.

I think part of the reason for our confusion on the public/private right now was the invention of the slogan, "The personal is the political." And that slogan got invented for a reason. It got invented because many people came to recognize that power could be abused in the private sphere just as easily as it could be abused in the public sphere. Sexual harassment or much worse is the obvious case of that. And so I also agree with Katznelson who concludes that the public/private split is really a compound: on the one side guaranteed constitutional rights, genuine right to privacy and insistence that there have to be some limits, and yet a never-ending contest over boundaries.

I think one of the boxes journalists are in right now is because we are stuck smack in the middle in that contest over boundaries between the public and the private. So I don't think we should pretend this is simple, but I do think it's clear that if we obliterate all distinctions between the public and the private we will go down a road that involves threats to liberty and also a debasement of democratic politics.

Now I think one of the most useful ways of thinking about this, depending on our political points of view, is to remember that this public/private argument over the several years has had a very strong whose-ox-is-being-gored aspect to it. If you looked at where people were on Clarence Thomas or Bob Packwood, a great many of the same people were on the flip side of the public/private debate in the case of Bill Clinton. I think at least one useful way to try to think about this question is that if one finds oneself on one side of a controversy like that, imagine a different political figure involved. I think that's one role that ombudspeople could play.

I think that we -- and especially I think (those of us) in the opinion world -- need to be held accountable not only for our current opinions but also for our past opinions. Information retrieval, as I have discovered on occasion, can be a very dangerous thing because people can go back and look at what you wrote a year, two years, three years, five years ago, and hold you accountable for the consistency of your view. I think that's something that you folks could do, and I think it would be a very good discipline.

When I wrote editorials for the Washington Post, Meg Greenfield had a rule that no matter how far back an old Washington Post position was, if somebody wanted to change that position they had to make reference to the old position and the fact that the paper was changing its position and explaining exactly why.

I think that's a very useful exercise for people to take. I once wrote an editorial where I discovered that the position I was taking contradicted something that was said 15 years before in a completely different context. But our rule required me to go back to those 15 years, and I think that was a good rule. It's not always a rule that we journalists and columnists follow as well as we should.

The second issue I'd like to take up is the point made by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel in their new book, which I also recommend to everybody, called "Warp Speed," published by the Century Foundation. It's a look at how the media operate in this age of continuous news cycles, the rise of web sites. It's a very sound critique. At least from my point of view, it's refreshingly old-fashioned in suggesting that there are journalistic rules that people ought to continue to follow, even under the new disposition.

What they talk about is distinction between a journalism of verification, which I think is what most of us think of as journalism, and journalism of assertion. The journalistic tradition most of us aspire to uphold involves doing the hard work of verifying the facts, especially if those facts involve charges against somebody else. You can't just say that a politician is a crook. You have to go out and amass lots of evidence that the politician stole money or took a bribe or voted on something in the legislature that directly affected his interests.

One of my favorite instances of that is a legislator, I believe it was in American Samoa, who was accused of a conflict of interest when he voted for a bill that included money that paid him directly on a contract. He got up indignantly and said, "This is not a conflict of interest; this is a total coincidence of interests."

When you are doing a journalism of verification, you did indeed have to go to the bill and find out the fact he was, in fact, interested in it. A journalism of assertion, which we have seen an awful lot of in the last couple of years, involves -- as Rosenstiel and Kovach put it -- just digging up allegations and pouring them out for others to sift through on their own.

Now I think a journalism of assertion is very dangerous. As Kovach and Rosenstiel said, unfiltered assertions make separating fact from spin, argument from innuendo more difficult, and it leaves society more susceptible to manipulation. In fact, I'd go a step farther, and I know I've talked to Tom about this, and he agrees with this, that a journalism of assertion actually threatens the honorable work of investigative reporting.

Sleazy charge-mongering begins to intrude into the serious work of investigation. And so when somebody is out there actually proving wrong-doing, and actually showing it and laying it out, this can easily be confused in the political realm as just making one more partisan charge, and it can be shoved under the rug. It also, I think, undermines efforts to achieve government accountability, because they too are easily dismissed as partisan attacks. I call your attention to the recent controversy in Europe, in the European Community, where the entire European Commission had to resign because of all kinds of favoritism, payroll padding, and there were funny aspects to the scandal. A large AIDS report was assigned to a dentist in the hometown of one member of the Commission, who really didn't know anything at all about AIDS, didn't produce many reports, but was in fact paid quite a lot of money for it.

When you talk to Europeans about what happened, they -- and especially journalists -- would argue that there was no tradition of accountability enforced through journalism at the European Commission. Finally this wrongdoing was brought out by a couple of courageous newspapers that did break with this tradition of really not subjecting the European Community to scrutiny. I think that kind of investigative reporting must go on, and I think this journalism of assertion, the hurling of unsubstantiated charges, undermines that very kind of journalism.

There was a related point made a few years ago by a New York Times writer, Michiko Kakutani, and this is her point about the distinction between truth and opinion. I am guilty...Reinhold Niebuhr once said that original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian church, so I should begin this part by saying I am a sinner. I do appear on MSNBC. But on that kind of talk show, you can see what she's talking about very forcefully. She wrote a few years ago that throughout our culture, the old notions of truth and knowledge are being replaced by the new ones of opinion, perception and credibility. As reality comes to seem increasingly artificial, complex and manipulatable, people tend to become increasingly cynical, increasingly convinced of their own emotions, and increasingly inclined to trust their own ideological reflexes.

What we're creating, she says, is a world in which truths are replaced by opinions. Now I'm a columnist, and I certainly have nothing against opinion. But I think the danger Kakutani describes may be especially serious in the line of work I am now in. Adlai Stevenson once said of an opponent that he comes before you and says, "These are the opinions on which I base my facts." And I think one of the great dangers in opinion-writing these days is that facts are included almost entirely for support and not as part of an effort to report out a story. I think opinion writers sometimes use facts as the drunk uses that lamppost in the famous story.

I think that people with especially strong opinions owe it to their readers, more than anyone, not to let their opinions distort the facts. And they owe it to try, as best they can, to use the forums they've been given -- and I think it's a great privilege to be able to do this -- not simply to force their world view on others, but also to see their own work as part of a common search for truth. I think one of the most dangerous forms of bias in journalism these days is not that both sides of the story, or all three sides of the story, won't get reported; it's that the reporter or the commentator won't understand the side that he or she disagrees with, and will therefore present a necessarily distorted picture of the other side's argument.

In some cases, I don't think it is even an attempt to set up a straw man and knock down the straw man for the purpose of an easy argument. I think there are times when people really don't try to enter imaginatively into the other side of the argument.

I also think another common ploy -- again, one you folks could try to save us from -- is to find the strongest presenter of one case and the weakest presenter of the other side. I used to think that when Fay Wattleton of Planned Parenthood appeared on television with Randall Terry, the argument was over from the beginning, because what you're doing is presenting someone who is incredibly articulate, presentable, very mainstream-looking on the one side of that argument and someone who automatically turned off a significant group on the other side of that argument. If you're going to have an argument about abortion, which is a morally serious issue, it seems to me you really want that argument to be joined in as clear a way as possible, so that people actually can see that, even if they feel very, very passionate on the pro-life or the pro-choice side, they can see that the argument they are fighting against is not as easily dismissed as they might think.

When we in the opinion world try to offer arguments, we do have an obligation to try to answer the strong rather than the weak version, and I think it also means that we should try to acknowledge facts that are inconvenient to our case. I should say right now that since I am speaking to ombudspeople, I'm sure you can go through my columns and find cases where I violated these rules, where I have made what you might regard as a cheap shot, where you might say you missed this argument, and I'm sure that's the case, but I think that, as I said, these are the principles, a kind of code of conduct that we ought to try to live up to. I at least I try -- and I stress, imperfectly -- to do it myself.

The philosopher Glenn Tinder has a lovely idea, and he talks about creating the attentive society -- a society, he says, in which people listen seriously to those with whom they fundamentally disagree. This society, he says, is the proper setting for freedom. An attentive society, he says, would provide room for strong convictions, but its defining characteristic would be a widespread willingness to give and receive assistance on the road to truth.

I've read that line a lot to myself, and I've thought that a widespread willingness to give and receive assistance on the road to truth is actually a good description of a well-operating newsroom. It doesn't always work that way, as we all know, but it is an interesting idea to keep in mind.

And so inspired by Glenn Tinder, I'd like to turn to my last point, which is journalism's obligation to promoting engagement among citizens in the public argument. I think people who write for newspapers especially need to keep in mind that if you look at polling data, one of the most powerful links to the decision to vote is whether somebody reads a newspaper or not. There's a very high correlation between newspaper readership and voting. I think that fact not only suggests that higher turnouts would be in the interests of everybody in this room, but also it brings us back to the fact that journalism, whatever else we do -- and I love the sports pages -- and, as you can see, I love recipes and I love everything else we do -- but journalism is fundamentally about public issues and public engagement. That's where our roots lie. In fact, our roots lie in a very partisan press. And that is why I think people come to us in the end.

My own view is that we will not survive as an entity -- and we're going to have all kinds of challenges in the coming days -- if people en masse decide that they're going to skip out of public life and decide that public life has nothing to do with them.

Now there's a great tradition in the argument among journalists on this question of what is the purpose of journalism. It's a debate that Jim Carey of the Columbia Journalism School has written about very well: the debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Walter Lippmann, who gave us many rules that we revere about fairness and objectivity, was someone who believed that readers came to journalists for facts. He was very, very worried about the infection of newspapers with opinion. He did a big study of coverage of World War I, and discovered newspapers gave massively biased accounts of what was going on in the war. They were not simply patriotic accounts, but they distorted the news on the ground in order to present a certain picture of our country.

He wrote a book about this, and it sent him off on this search for some notion of objectivity. His commitment was to the idea that we primarily are conveyers of facts to readers.

And around the same time, John Dewey -- and this was back in the 1920s -- took Lippmann up on this and made an interesting counterargument. He argued that the thirst for facts actually comes from engagement in a public argument and in public life, that people come first to a concern for the debate, a belief that the debate is important, a belief that public life matters. Once they made that commitment, they became assiduous searchers after the facts, sometimes perhaps in the ways I described earlier, to support their own opinions, but sometimes simply because the act of engagement led them on their own particular search for truth.

When you look back on that debate, Dewey had the better of it, in this sense: When you look at the requirements for public life and what we do for a living, and the fact that journalists themselves are very committed to a public enterprise and to public argument and public debate -- at least we ought to be -- that Dewey had a point. That point resonates very much right now. I think, for example, that one of the reasons talk radio has become so popular is that so many people from different points of view -- largely but not exclusively the conservative point of view -- feel that there aren't any good forums for them to engage in public argument. They're searching for forums they can use to engage in public argument.

What I think we need to do is to salvage Lippmann's devotion to accuracy and fairness by putting these virtues to the service of the democratic debate that Dewey so valued. I think we do need to preserve the Lippmann ideal. I think that Kakutani's point on separating truth from opinion is extremely important, both as a philosophical proposition, if you will, and to journalism. But I also think we have an obligation to the broader public in the sense of doing things that will bring them into the public debate, and will engage them in it.

Christopher Lasch said a wonderful thing once. He wrote in his last book that if we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient form of government, but as the most educational form of government -- one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible. If democracy is in fact to be the most educational form of government, then newspapers have to serve as the forums and the textbooks and the laboratories of the educational process that is called democracy. They need to be open; they need to promote strong views and vigorous debate, but they also need to hold fast to very old-fashioned notions of truth, accuracy and fairness.

In the school of democracy, ombudspeople, I believe, should be seen -- perhaps not as cardinals or bishops -- although maybe that's appropriate -- but certainly as principals and headmasters, the appeals juries and the moderators. Yes, your work serves journalists and it serves newspapers, but it also serves democracy, and that's why we need you doing what you're doing.

I thank you very much.

(The speaker was asked several questions from the audience. Here are two that related to ombudsmanship.)

Question: Why are there so few ombudsmen?

Answer: In some ways I think the people in this room are better qualified to answer the question. I've always had the sense that some editors say, "Look, every editor is supposed to be an ombudsman, and if we are not doing this particularly job we are not doing the totality of our job." I think also, a lot of people in newsrooms worry about what an ombudsman might say about them, especially in print. I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's a very hard job, as you know, and it's a very hard challenge to throw into a newsroom. I think the job has become more important because of this public cynicism and the notion that people at least have an outlet in which they can talk to somebody whose job it is to say, "I actually looked into this complaint," and who has the capacity to bring this complaint to the public. A letter to the editor might do it, but the ombudsperson can give a kind of authority to a criticism and force people in a newsroom to take it seriously in a way they didn't. But that's a difficult and dangerous thing, and I think a lot of people look upon the ombudsman as a kind of outside position...that has nothing to do with what newspapers do. As for television, I think the problem is scarce airtime. If you could prove to a station that the ombudsman would draw substantial ratings, you might get an ombudsman put on television....The holes for certain kinds of news are shrinking quite a bit and I wonder how much opportunity you'd have for that.

Question: Are there any hopeful signs concerning raising the level of public discourse?

Answer: If you judge this problem by the proportion of conferences held in nice places where journalists ritually whip themselves in the back, then you would say that this problem should be going away, because I think there are more and more and more conferences going on all the time, and I've heard many of my colleagues say very self-critical things. I've said self-critical things. That's all going on, and then the question is, well, how is all that affecting the product? In terms of the more general public discourse, I do think that that self-doubt does seep into the consciousness of newspapers. For example, in the Clinton scandal where in fact you did see caution, where people didn't leap out on the story that turned out not to be true -- President Clinton's alleged love child....Drudge reported it; it was all over the English newspapers. I didn't hear about the love child until a very conservative friend called me and said, "Hey, what about the Clinton love child," and I didn't know about it because it never made the mainstream press, and I don't habitually read the Drudge Report...But most newspapers held the line on that story...partly because the child in question took a DNA test and so you could establish the truth or falsity fairly quickly. Who knows how long the line would have held if weren't that easy to check it out? And then that story didn't see print until it was proven that in fact this was not President Clinton's alleged love child. And a few media outlets wrote about it as how a story like this can get into circulation.

But in terms of the public dialogue, some days I'm optimistic, some days I'm pessimistic. When I watched the debate on Kosovo I must say I got rather pessimistic, because what was so striking about the debate was the extent to which it was infected with the backwash from the impeachment debate. So much of that debate was still extremely personal about President Clinton. There are plenty of arguments to make about President Clinton's conduct of this war -- all kinds of things you can say -- but the style of that debate was not about those things, but was about why should we follow this draft-dodger into a war. What was being said on talk radio was reflected in the halls of Congress, with a little of the hard edge taken off...