David Broder

I'm delighted to be with you and to have a chance to talk about some of those wise lessons that you are taking away from this meeting. I particularly love the statement I heard about "truth is a habit of mind." It brought to mind my favorite of all of the hundreds of Louisiana political stories that we've all heard over the years. This is one that I think is in A.J. Liebling's book, The Earl of Louisiana, which is about Earl Long. But I also heard Russell Long tell the same story about his uncle. In both versions, Earl Long was campaigning for governor and went to a parish up north of here and made a promise to the local officials that if they'd back him in this Democratic primary for governor, he'd build them a road that they'd wanted to get built for a long time.

And they backed him, and they delivered the vote, and Uncle Earl won the election. But there he was, sitting in his office in Baton Rouge and nothing is happening about the road. So the county judge comes to Baton Rouge, and the secretary says, "Did you have an appointment with the Governor?" He said, "No, but he'll remember me." And so she kind of scurries around and finds out who is this fellow. She was told, "Earl doesn't want to talk to him right now." So she said, "The Governor's very busy. He has a full schedule today. You'll have to come back tomorrow."

And the next day he's back in the office sitting there obviously prepared to wait this thing out as long as is necessary. Finally the Governor's chief-of-staff goes in and says, "That fellow isn't going to leave, Earl. What in the hell we gonna tell him?" And Earl Long looks at his aide and says, "Tell him the Governor lied."

That is sort of the theme for my talk. Late in my life, I think that candor – even if it's belated candor – becomes us all. And so I want to say some things that probably when I was more concerned about my job at The Washington Post and my relations with all of you, I would have put less bluntly than I'm going to put them this morning.

Sometimes your life works itself out in ways that are just so unbelievably serendipitous that you can't imagine that you'd be this lucky. And I've had that kind of week. On Monday I had a visit at the Post from eight theology students from various divinity schools around the country who were in Washington for a week. They had come by to talk about how ethical questions are viewed in the news media. On Tuesday, I had a long-standing date to go down to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and spend an hour-and-a-half with a class that they were teaching that included about 35 police chiefs, sheriffs, state police directors, and some senior FBI agents from all around the country. They are in for a week of discussion about management problems, including their relationships with the press. A lot of what I want to say to you this morning comes very directly from the probing and often critical questions that those two groups raised with me.

There are two or three points that I tried to make with both of these groups. One is that the people in my business, the press, see ourselves as sort of guardians of other people's ethics. That focuses mainly, I suppose, on politicians and public officials. But we also feel ourselves self-appointed guardians of others who are in centers of power in this country, including those who hold significant positions in the economy and in private life. This is not a new phenomenon.

In my mind, I think of it as part of the inheritance of the journalistic side of the progressive movement at the turn of the last century with the muckrakers and the folks in that tradition who focused on corruption as a big element in American life in the industrial age. There's been that notion that lurks, I think, in the minds of almost all of us in the journalistic community about the dangers of corruption in a system of representative government, and particularly the kind of corruption that arises from money power. That's one reason why I think this whole campaign finance issue has been probably a much more salient issue on the editorial pages of this country than it has been, up to this point at least, in terms of general public opinion.

You talk about money flowing to politicians, the hair goes up on the back of the neck of almost every journalist, because we know somehow that's what we're supposed to be focusing on, that's part of our tradition. Frank Kent, the political writer at The Baltimore Sun probably expressed this sort of progressive era tradition in its most blunt and probably smug form when that the only way any reporter ever ought to look at a politician is down. And there is that sense, I think, still among many of my colleagues.

The second point I tried to make to both of these groups was that while we are very good at monitoring other people's ethics, when it comes to the ethical issues in our own business, we're much less forthcoming and much less clear about what the standards ought to be.

I'll give you just a couple of examples. One is the blurring of what used to be the fairly bright distinction between the public activities of public officials and their private lives. That was a very clear line back in the '60s when I started covering politics. It's a lot less clear now. We've had vivid examples of that, not only with the paparazzi and Princess Diana, but in a more benign way, and in a way which has been somewhat self-congratulatory on the part of the press, about how well we've allowed Chelsea Clinton to grow up with a good deal of privacy and whether she'll continue to enjoy that privacy now that she's going to be away from home and living in a dorm at Stanford.

Let me tell you that the lines are very blurred now as to what is and is not a proper matter for press scrutiny.

 

A Question of Outside Income

Second area that's been raised by a lot of people, I discussed in a book called Behind the Front Page about six or seven years ago – Jim Fallows did so in a more effective way, I blush to say, in his book – and that's the whole question of outside income and earnings for journalists such as speaking to groups like this one. What is proper for us to do, what should be off limits, what disclosure requirements should there be? It's been an easy issue at the Post because we have always had the rule as long as I've worked there that anything you do outside of the newsroom, you discuss with one of our assistant managing editors before you ever accept the thing. And it is totally disclosed within the paper.

And at least my view has been that anytime the paper wants to make a public disclosure of that, I'm very comfortable with it. But there are many others in my business who have a very different view about that and feel that, unlike the politicians that we write about, they are somehow immune from possible conflicts of interest arising from outside activities.

A third issue that I've been very much involved with and that's gotten me at cross-purposes with many of my colleagues is the question about what I regard as the blurring of the line between politics and government on one side and journalism on the other, with many high-profile people now jumping the fence from government positions, either policy positions or press secretary-spokesperson positions, into high-profile positions in the journalistic world. On this issue, I've been clearly spitting into the wind because the trend grows more vivid every year, and there are more and more folks who say they don't see any kind of a problem with this.

 

No Consensus on Ethical Issues

The main point I would make on all of these ethical issues that arise within the journalism community itself is that there is no consensus. There is no clear standard by which everybody can say, "OK, here's what we're supposed to do in a situation like such-and-such. Here is the rule that applies." And it illustrates a point that someone – I wish I could attribute it correctly, but I can't – made probably 50 years ago. It was probably Irving Kristol but don't hold me to that, who described journalism as "an underdeveloped profession," one which has some of the attributes, or aspires to some of the attributes of a true profession, but which doesn't have the licensing standards, the clear entry procedures, and the sort of overall guidelines that the law or medicine, and other professions have.

Beyond these things, there's an issue that concerns me which I talked briefly about with both groups earlier this week and which I would just note for you because in my mind it may be is an even more critical issue for those of us in the press, and it certainly bears on your responsibilities. The main function of the press in a small "d" democratic society is obviously to equip the public with the information that it needs to perform its role in a democracy where we would hope that public opinion is ultimately the arbiter of public policy.

The press doesn't have a monopoly on this informing role. Presidents, among their many hats, are the communicators-in-chief of the country. And I think every elected official has a responsibility, in a way, to be a teacher in his or her constituency, as well as being a representative. But since the press does not write laws, does not carry out or administer the laws, we do not arbitrate disputes as the courts do. The one thing that is special and unique to us is that informing function.

And as far as I can judge, we are performing so inadequately in that role these days that it is the main professional challenge that I think we face. I'd put the proposition to you in fairly bald terms. In the last few years in this country we've had major debates about three domestic issues of overriding importance to the American people: health care, welfare, and now, currently, education. As far as I can judge – not just from the polling but from the door-knocking kind of precinct-walking conversations in living rooms that are part and parcel of our routine of reporting politics at the Post – in none of those three cases have we in the press managed to make clear to a sufficiently broad range of people what the alternatives were that were really being discussed and debated in Washington so that general public opinion could come into play as an arbiter of what was going to be decided by the policy-makers.

Our failure has opened the door for interest groups of all kinds to discover and use the tools of modern mass-communications and mass-political mobilization. We've left the debate of public policy much more to those interest groups. And the press, which is, at least in theory, a disinterested source of information, has largely defaulted on our responsibilities in this area.

I'll give you just one example. Early in '96, the Post's polling people in collaboration with the people at the Kennedy School up at Harvard and the Kaiser Family Foundation did a series of polls in much more depth than we normally do when we're paying the whole bill ourselves, which looked at public attitudes on policy questions, but also sought to probe the information quotient on which those attitudes were based. And one of the things we did – this is a very simple example – was to replicate a question that had often been asked before by social scientists. We said simply to people, "Tell me what you think are the three or four biggest programs in the Federal Government?" Do you know what the answer was, number one? Foreign Aid. Foreign Aid.

 

Failure To Inform Has Policy Consequences

Now this is where the failure of our business to inform really does have important public policy consequences because if you're a member of Congress, and you're getting pressure back home and from the media to balance the budget and end the deficit, but you've got a constituency in which large numbers of people believe that the single-biggest element in that budget is foreign aid, consider what the risks and rewards are likely to be if you go home and say to them, "Folks, if you're serious about balancing the budget, we're going to have to do something about these big entitlement programs." That's where our failure, I think, has a direct bearing on public policy-making.

The final point that I'll make, and I stressed this particularly talking to the law enforcement officials yesterday in Quantico, is that, as they have discovered from their line of work, involvement with and enlistment of the community is a key to effectiveness. Those on the press side have also become aware, to our distress, that we've allowed a huge gap to develop between our world, our way of thinking, and the way the world in which most of our readers, listeners and viewers live their lives.

 

Public Journalism A Promising Concept

One of the responses to that has been something that I see you've talked about a bit, this movement that's very new and, I think, still very experimental in the press, called civic journalism or public journalism. Basically, the idea of it is very simple. Pay some attention and give some respect to the things that are on the public's mind. Don't get so caught up in reporting official news that you forget that you're really supposed to be a voice for the community, not just for officials who want to use your voice or medium to speak to the community. For example, an organization that's engaged in civic journalism would tell the education reporter, "Before you go to the school board meeting, go to some PTA meetings. Listen to what the parents are saying. Listen to the questions that they're raising about what's going on in the schools, and then take those questions to the school board members and see how they respond to what's on the public's mind." The experiments are all over the lot. The record in terms of the evaluations that have been made is very mixed at this point. But it does, I think, at least reflect the beginning of a healthy awareness in my business that the status quo is not something that we should take such comfort in that we just say, "Well, we're just going to keep on doing it exactly the way we've been doing it all of our institutional lives."

One of the key questions that I got from both groups that I spoke to this week is, "How much of the shortcomings and the failures of the press is due to monopolies in local communities or to corporate ownership of news organizations, or to those old bottom-line pressures that operate on any private institution? Second question that I thought was something that we need to be thinking about in our business came from one of the theology students who said to me, "You said it was an underdeveloped profession. Is that good or is it bad that you are less than being a profession?" I had not thought about that. Clearly it means that people from unconventional backgrounds can find work in journalism and bring a different perspective, a different voice than if we were, for example, a law school or a medical school and we had accreditation in terms of graduating from a particular kind of graduate school, or an examination that you had to pass, which a group of gray-beards like me had written out in advance?

There's some advantages in being an underdeveloped profession. The disadvantage is that almost every decision that is argued out in terms of ethics and performance is an open question. We had a protracted debate for two weeks at The Washington Post about whether a thoroughly reported story about an extra-marital affair that Senator Dole had had during his first marriage back in 1968 was or was not a news story for The Post. In the end, the editor of the paper, Len Downey, said "No, that's not a news story for us," knowing that it was going to get into some paper because the woman who had been involved in the affair wanted it to be known at that point. But that's the kind of thing where there are no clear guidelines. Everything is done on an ad hoc basis.

 

Ombudsmen Has Been Effective

We have an ombudsman who has been part of our lives for a long time. I think that that kind of in-your-face, in-your-own-office kind of confrontation with a smart, tough critic has been very effective for us. I welcome the fact that at least in the Minnesota context, the News Council has worked. I don't know how many other places other than Minnesota that kind of device would work.

But the final question, and the one that was put to me most directly by the sheriff of Kent County, Michigan, who said, "We know who we're accountable to. Who are you accountable to?" And I said, in, I hope, a clearly facetious tone, "Well, I'm accountable to Marilea Schwartz, who is the political editor of the Post, and to Karen D. Young, who is the assistant managing editor for national news, then to Bob Kaiser, the managing editor, and Len Downey, the executive editor.

But if you're asking me about public accountability, I said, we don't have that. And we don't have it for a pretty clear reason because the people who wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights thought that even though this is a private business performing an important public function, we're not going to treat them as if they were a public utility. We're not going to regulate them because we think that even an irresponsible independent press is somehow preferable to a government-regulated press. So whatever accountability we're going to find, we're going to have to find through our own conscience and through the criticisms that come to us from the outside. That's a challenge that, I think, none of us in my business can afford to ignore.

 

Q&A

In a wide-ranging question and answer period following his remarks, Broder was able to elaborate on the role, values and responsibilities of the press. Here are some of his observations:

We are all subject to peer pressures which leads to a lot of group thinking and a common view of the world. One of the hardest things for journalists to do is examine our own assumptions. Assumptions not questioned get us in trouble.

We have to take responsibility for our behavior. Real journalists have to stop protecting those who are giving the profession a black eye.

One government official told me he is getting tired of reporters with a pre-conceived mindset calling and looking for a particular sound bite. Part of the problem is time pressures. But that's not a good excuse.

The press is institutional anarchy. You can't call a meeting. So you have to deal with it, one newsroom at a time.

You need to be on the backs of the people who own and manage news organizations. Absentee ownership is very frustrating to those working there.

We have an obligation to listen to our constituencies. Listening is not a threat to our First Amendment rights. Talk radio and letters to the editor are good ways to let people express their views. In my opinion, the most powerful educational tool for journalists is the ombudsman.

Vitae: David S. Broder is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post. His twice-weekly column on the American political scene is carried by more than 300 newspapers around the world. He appears regularly on "Meet the Press" and "Washington Week in Review."