Newspapers

Amid all the challenges, the good news for newspapers is financial, at least for now.

While declines in circulation and in the number of newspapers became a fact of life in the 1990s, the industry remained economically robust. In 2002, newspapers had advertising revenues of just over $44 billion. In the first 6 months of 2003, advertising revenue was just a little less than $21 billion.¹

The industry is also enormously profitable. According to Morton Research, a market analysis firm, in the first half of 2003, the 13 major publicly traded newspaper companies earned an average pretax profit margin of 19 percent.

While such margins are high compared to some industries (such as retail or automobiles), in fact they are lower than some others (such as software). That sort of comparison, however, may miss the point. Such profit margins are what Wall Street has come to expect of any public newspaper company, and what lenders and many owners expect of any privately held newspaper company as well.

One reason for this financial stability is that, in an age of fragmentation and information clutter, newspapers, despite declining circulation, still amass large audiences. And these audiences are people, often affluent, who spend a good deal of time with the product, especially on Sundays.

As a result, while circulation in the 1990s was declining, advertising dollars continued to grow, and at a rate that outpaced inflation. While total advertising income hit a steep decline in 2001, a slow recovery began in 2002 and the beginning of 2003, although revenue from classified ads - primarily employment classifieds - still lags behind the levels of 2000.²

Earnings improved in 2002 but only because of continued cost controls, generally, and a 22 percent decline in newsprint prices. Newsprint prices headed back up during 2003 and presumably will keep going if display advertising volume and the size of newspapers increase with a strong 2004 economic recovery.³

 

Daily Newspaper Advertising Revenue

1984 to 2002

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Newspaper Association of America data

* The 2002 figure is an estimate.

Part of the pressure on classified comes from new online competition from nonjournalistic ventures like Monster.com. In 1998, a consortium of newspapers started Classified Ventures in an effort to compete head-to-head with the new online startups for key classified ads. In 2003, Classified Ventures investors included Belo, Gannett, Knight Ridder, McClatchy, The Tribune Company and the Washington Post Company. The group runs Cars.com and Apartments.com, and connects 170 online newspaper and television Web sites.⁴

While it has been successful with these sites, it has not always been able to best the new companies. Classified Ventures' auctions.com, launched in 1999, failed to rival the online giant eBay and is now defunct. The Tribune Company, Knight Ridder and Gannett have sought to address the decline in employment advertising with their own employment online site, CareerBuilder.com, and have gained substantial ground on industry leader, Monster.com.

Still, since late 2000, newspaper recruitment classified dropped from 19 percent of total industry revenue to less than 8 percent in 2003, according to research from Goldman Sachs. One market analyst, Peter M. Zollman, founder of Classified Intelligence, an online classified consulting firm, predicts that newspapers' share of online classified will decline for "a long time." Even with the moves that some of the big newspapers have made, he contends, many papers responded too slowly to employers' needs.⁵

The problem is compounded by a loss in the 1980s of department and grocery store retail ads, which had once been the two biggest sources of retail advertising. As these stores died out or consolidated, the discount retailers that sprang up to replace them, like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, bought little or no newspaper advertising. While this has been going on for decades, it is another long-term pressure on the industry.⁶

In the long run, newspapers may have to prove themselves as a medium that can build new audience by offering something that the rivals from online and elsewhere do not. They need to cover aspects of the community, offer a depth of information, and provide a level of synthesis other media do not.

Print, uniquely, has the potential to tell people what they can trust and not trust in an age that the journalist and educator Michael Janeway has called one of "fact promiscuity, fact chaos."⁷ Or what Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation, has called a time when information is in oversupply but knowledge in undersupply.⁸

Accomplishing this may depend on the willingness and ability of newspapers to sustain their quality and diversify their content to win back disappearing readers.

The story of Jessica Lynch's rescue was one of the most covered story lines during the war in Iraq. The young soldier from West Virginia was held up as an icon of the strength and spirit of the American volunteer soldier. Her rescue mission was called a daring, made-for-Hollywood story. In recent weeks, however, the stories about Lynch's capture, her time spent captive, and her rescue have been questioned. Many claim that the original reports were filled with inaccuracies that benefited the US government by creating positive feelings about the war. Below is a detailed chronology of the major stories in the evolution of the Lynch saga.

This chronology and analysis was prepared for PEJ by journalist Dante Chinni.

The Backstory
How the Story Developed
An Assessment
A Day-by-Day Look at the Story's Changes

The Backstory
Not quite two weeks into the war in Iraq, some of the media's coverage of the fighting had taken a negative turn. In the newspapers and on television, experts were beginning to question whether the United States had sent sufficient manpower to handle the Iraqis, who were fighting harder and more cagily than expected. So were some senior commanders in the field. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld complained about media "mood swings." Peter Arnett, who was appearing on NBC and MSNBC, went on Iraqi television and claimed the US had underestimated the forces they were up against and were having to redraw their battle plans.

Into this mix came an extremely heartening bit of news. On April 1, Private first class Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old army maintenance worker who had been captured in an Iraqi ambush on March 23, was rescued from Saddam Hospital. In a night raid special operations forces entered the hospital and removed Lynch who was taken to a nearby helicopter and flown to safety. The story was heralded on front pages and newscasts across the country. And a picture of Lynch, looking tired, but grateful lying on a stretcher with a folded American flag draped over her, flooded the airwaves.

How the Story Developed
In the early evening of April 1, the night of the rescue, the 24-hour news networks broke in with a briefing from US CENTCOM in which it was revealed that the military had rescued a "U.S. Army prisoner of war held captive in Iraq." In the days and weeks following Lynch's rescue, stories about how she was captured and what happened after her capture began to circulate. The day after the rescue, April 2, the Associated Press quoted "officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity" who said Lynch had "at least one gunshot wound." That same day the New York Times cited "an Army official" as saying that Lynch "had been shot multiple times." On April 3, a front-page story in the Washington Post cited unnamed US officials and said that Lynch "fought fiercely" and that she sustained gunshot and stab wounds. "She was fighting to the death," the official was quoted as saying in the story. "She did not want to be taken alive."

That story appears to be the genesis of a spate of stories that accepted the Post sequence of events. Many articles focused on the Rambo-like firefight Lynch reportedly engaged in -- some even cited her valiant fighting as proof that women belonged in combat zones. Some stories went further saying she had been abused or denied basic care by the Iraqis who captured and tended to her. Several accounts said she had been "saved" by a courageous Iraqi lawyer named Mohammed Rehaief who risked his life to tell US troops where Lynch was.

Within days, conflicting accounts began to appear simultaneously. Some wire and newspaper accounts went with the Post account and alleged Lynch had been shot and stabbed and cited unnamed surgeons who had cared for her or family members. Other stories denied that she had been shot or stabbed. Those stories cited a specific person, the commander of the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany where Lynch was treated. Interestingly though, given the choice between the two stories, many news organizations chose the more theatric set of circumstances, even though the other version of events had better sourcing. For instance, the April 14 Newsweek, which made Lynch its cover subject, said how Lynch was injured remained a mystery and briefly reported that the hospital said she had not been stabbed or shot. But in the next sentence, the magazine reported that "Later that day, though, surgeons discovered she had been shot -- and according to family spokesperson in West Virginia, Dan Little, her wounds were 'consistent with low-velocity small arms.'" The magazine then went on for two paragraphs outlining what might have happened to her.

On April 15, a Washington Post story questioned the paper's own earlier account. On April 27 a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story called into question many of the stories from the war, including those around Lynch. And on May 4 the Toronto Star essentially laid out the entire revised account of the Lynch saga after a series of interviews with the hosptial staff where Lynch was treated in Iraq. Still, despite these pieces, the early version of the Lynch story dominated until the UK newspaper The Guardian published a lengthy deconstruction of the Lynch story written by a BBC reporter on May 15. On May 18, the BBC aired a documentary on which the Guardian article was based, reviewing the incident in depth. The BBC account began to raise questions in the American press.

On June 17, the Washington Post ran a story refuting much of what appeared in its April 3 story. Though the new piece still relied heavily on unnamed US officials, it maintained that Lynch was not stabbed or shot, that she had not killed any Iraqis because of a gun jam, and that the hospital US forces raided was unguarded.

An Assessment
Nearly two months after her capture much is still open to speculation. But some specifics have become clear. Lynch was never shot or stabbed, according to the military. For whatever reason, possibly a gun jam, the military says she did not engage in a pitched battle with the Iraqis -- though it has not been made clear how anyone would know this since all those driving with Lynch died in the ambush. The Iraqis that had been guarding the hospital holding Lynch had in fact left, meaning that special forces troops who went in did not face any significant resistance when they arrived to extract her. Mohammed Rehaief's exact role is still unclear. US troops verified that he came to them with the information on Lynch, but his story that a man dressed in black interrogated and slapped Lynch was refuted by hospital staff. Furthermore, while Rehaief claims he was in the hospital to visit his wife Iman who is a nurse, other hospital staffers say there is no nurse married to a lawyer or named Iman who works there.

The one thing that can be taken away from the coverage of the Lynch story is that when the media are hungry for a story and given conflicting accounts they will more likely latch on to the more sensational version of events.

A Day-by-day Look at the Story's Changes

The story breaks
April 1, 2003. An Associated Press story reports that Lynch has been rescued and says that an army spokesman "did not know whether Lynch had been wounded or when she might return to the United States."

The wounds become gunshot wounds
April 2. The New York Times runs a story on the celebrations in Lynch's hometown and reports that, "Details of what happened to Private Lynch were scarce. An Army official said Tuesday night that Private Lynch had been shot multiple times. The official said that it had not been determined whether she was shot during the rescue attempt or before it."

-- An Associated Press roundup story mentions Lynch in the final paragraphs. "Officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said she was suffering from broken legs, a broken arm and at least one gunshot wound."

Lynch as female Rambo
April 3. The day after it's initial story, the Washington Post runs a story, "'She Was Fighting to the Death'; Details Emerging of W. Va. Soldier's Capture and Rescue," that recounts Lynch's ordeal. The account is reprinted in other newspapers.

"Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.

'She was fighting to the death,' the official said. 'She did not want to be taken alive.'

Lynch was also stabbed when Iraqi forces closed in on her position, the official said, noting that initial intelligence reports indicated that she had been stabbed to death…

Several officials cautioned that the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed. Reports thus far are based on battlefield intelligence, they said, which comes from monitored communications and from Iraqi sources in An Nasiriyah whose reliability has yet to be assessed."

-- The (NY) Daily News reports that, "Jessica was being tortured. That was the urgent word from an Iraqi man who alerted American troops where to find Pfc. Jessica Lynch - and her injuries seem to bear out the allegation. ... Her broken bones are a telltale sign of torture, said Amy Waters Yarsinske, a former Navy intelligence officer and an expert on POW and MIA treatment. 'It's awfully hard to break both legs and an arm in a truck accident,' Yarsinske said.

-- The Los Angeles Times reports Lynch was "flown to a US military hospital at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where she was reported to be in stable condition, recovering from injuries said to include broken legs, a broken arm and at least one gunshot wound."

Questions arise about her wounds
April 4. The Associated Press reports that doctors told Lynch's father, "she had not been shot or stabbed during her ordeal. 'We have heard and seen reports that she had multiple gunshot wounds and a knife stabbing. The doctor has not seen any of this,' Gregory Lynch Sr. said."

-- But later that day, a different AP story reports that:

"Dan Little, a cousin who held a news conference Friday night in West Virginia, said he had talked with her doctors and they had determined she had been shot. He said they found two entry and exit wounds 'consistent with low-velocity, small-caliber rounds.'

They also found shrapnel, Little said."

These two conflicting accounts would go on to give the story of Lynch's wounds new life.

-- The New York Times in a story on TV coverage of the war reports that, "Pfc. Jessica Lynch shifted overnight from victim to teenage Rambo: all the cable news shows ran with a report from The Washington Post that the 19-year-old P.O.W. had been shot and stabbed yet still kept firing at enemy soldiers. … Later yesterday, her father said she had not been shot or stabbed."

Enter the Iraqi lawyer who saved her life
-- Several news organizations, including the Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times have quotes from interviews with an Iraqi lawyer named Mohammed who reportedly led the special forces to Jessica Lynch. Some accounts tell of Mohammed's witnessing a black-clad Iraqi paramilitary who interrogated and slapped Lynch that spurred him to action.

April 5. An AP story reports that there is mystery about how Lynch was injured, but deep in the piece says, "Lynch's family in West Virginia said doctors had determined she'd been shot. They found two entry and exit wounds 'consistent with low-velocity, small-caliber rounds,' said her mother, Deadra Lynch."

The story begins to grow
April 7. The April 14 Newsweek hits the stands with Lynch on the cover. The piece briefly mentions that the commander of the hospital in Landstuhl Germany, where Lynch was being treated, says Lynch was not stabbed or shot. But then goes with the Lynch family account, including the part about "low-velocity small arms." "The unpleasant implication was that she might have been shot after she'd been captured, rather than wounded in combat," Newsweek reports. The account also raises the possibility of mistreatment in the Iraqi hospital and quotes her father as saying "she survived for part of her time in the hospital on nothing but orange juice and crackers."

April 10. The New Orleans Times-Picayune runs a piece about Lynch's boot camp friend that pushes the boundaries of Lynch's experience further. "When she heard that Pfc. Jessica Lynch survived being shot, beaten, then left for dead in Nasiriyah by Iraqi soldiers who had killed eight of her fellow soldiers, Pfc. Marcia Wright of New Orleans believed every word."

The questioning of what actually happened begins
April 15. The Washington Post runs a piece on page A17 that questions its earlier account. A physician from the Iraqi hospital that treated Lynch calls the rescue "a big show. … There were no bullets or shrapnel or anything like that." At the hospital, he said, "She was given special care, more than the Iraqi patients."

April 18. An AP story begins to back off some of the earlier accounts of Lynch's story. The AP report says the Washington Post story on the Lynch gunfight, "has not been confirmed, military officials said Friday."

"One account said the soldier who emptied her weapon had been shot and stabbed with a bayonet. Lynch wasn't stabbed, which suggests the soldier in question was Pfc. Lori Piestewa, 23, Lynch's roommate and the first woman to die in combat during the war, one official said. …

[Lynch] was listed in satisfactory condition Friday, with a head wound, a spinal injury and fractures to her right arm, both legs, her right foot and ankle. Gunshots may have caused open fractures on her upper right arm and lower left leg, according to the hospital."

April 20. The Washington Post runs a column by Ombudsman Michael Getler outlining the confusion and conflicting accounts behind the story. "My initial reaction, even before the comments of Rubenstein (the head of the hospital where Lynch was taken in Germany) and Lynch's father, was that a more qualified approach in the headline and the lead of the story was merited because of the cautions in the article and because of the thin sourcing used."

April 27. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs a long piece looking at the stories that the media got wrong in Iraq, including a large section on Lynch:

"News accounts based on military sources said that the 19-year-old Lynch, a supply clerk with the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, had been shot repeatedly and stabbed when Iraqi forces ambushed her unit on March 23 and that she was then tortured before Navy Seals and Army Rangers stormed the hospital April 1 and brought her out.

Key elements in the story appear to have been wrong. Lynch's father and her Army doctor have both said there is no evidence that she was shot or stabbed. There is as yet no substantiation of any torture. Doctors at the hospital say that when the rescue team swooped in the building was undefended; militia forces had fled the day before."

May 4. The Toronto Star runs a 1,500-word piece on the Lynch rescue strongly questioning the accepted account:

"Branded on to our consciousness by media frenzy, the flawless midnight rescue of 19-year-old Private First Class Jessica Lynch hardly bears repeating even a month after the fact.

Precision teams of U.S. Army Rangers and Navy Seals, acting on intelligence information and supported by four helicopter gunships, ended Lynch's nine-day Iraqi imprisonment in true Rambo style, raising America's spirits when it needed it most.

All Hollywood could ever hope to have in a movie was there in this extraordinary feat of rescue - except, perhaps, the truth."

The reconsideration of the story picks up steam
May 15. In a piece by a BBC reporter, the London daily The Guardian deconstructs the Lynch story in an 1,800 word story that calls her account "one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived." The story quoted several Iraqi sources who claimed that Lynch had not been shot or stabbed, that she received good care, that the US military had been told the Iraqi paramilitary guards had left the hospital before the raid, and that two days before the raid the hospital had tried to return Lynch to US forces nearby, but were fired upon and returned to the hospital.

May 18. The BBC runs a documentary on the Lynch's capture and rescue. Based on the Guardian story, it reiterates its charges and creates a more serious round of questioning about what really happened to Lynch.

May 19. On his website journalist Andrew Sullivan attacks the BBC piece on his website. "Meanwhile, the latest BBC smear is against Private Jessica Lynch. Glenn has the goods. I remember the reporter, John Kampfner, from my Oxford days. He was a unreconstructed far-lefty. No doubt these days he's a reconstructed one."

May 23. The Washington Post runs a piece by ombudsman Michael Getler about the New York Times and Jayson Blair with a few paragraphs about the Lynch story and the Post:

"In the Lynch case, for instance, The Post sent a correspondent to the hospital in Iraq where she had been held. Doctors there said she had not been shot or stabbed but had suffered broken bones. Other stories quoted the commander of the military hospital in Germany where Lynch had been taken. He also said she had been neither shot nor stabbed. Her father, Greg Lynch Sr., said substantially the same thing.

But none of those stories got the play of the first, and none of them specifically said, 'Look, folks, we're not so sure anymore.' Instead, the caveats and doubts were folded into other stories. The reader, like a CIA analyst, had to read everything to understand what The Post was saying. It seemed to be backing off its original account, but not in a forthright way."

May 26. The Chicago Tribune runs a piece that reexamines the Lynch story. The paper sent staff back to Nasiriyah to look at the story from the ground up. Its conclusion: There was hyperbole on both sides of the story (the Lynch-as-hero and the Lynch-as-propaganda side). But the story says the Lynch saga is "the story of how a modern war icon is made and perhaps how easily journalists with different agendas accepted contradictory self-serving versions of what happened to her."

On June 10, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer does a segment looking at "whether the American media too willingly accepted the story of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch as presented by the Pentagon."

June 17. In a lengthy front-page story, the Washington Post prints an investigation of its own April 3 story on Lynch. The new story finds:

"Lynch's story is far more complex and different than those initial reports. … Lynch tried to fire her weapon, but it jammed, according to military officials familiar with the Army investigation. She did not kill any Iraqis. She was neither shot nor stabbed, they said. …

Two US officials with knowledge of the Army investigation said Lynch was mistreated by her captors. They would not elaborate. …

The Special Operations unit's full-scale rescue of the private, while justified given the uncertainty confronting US forces as they entered the compound, ultimately was proven unnecessary. Iraqi combatants had left the hospital almost a day earlier, leaving Lynch in the hands of doctors and nurses who said they were eager to turn her over to Americans."

-- That afternoon, CNN airs stories that essentially recount the Post's story. "According to the accounts that are now coming to light at the Pentagon, Private First Class Jessica Lynch got some very decent medical attention from the Iraqi doctors at the hospital in An- Nasariyah, where she was taken. … [I]t appears that all of her injuries were from that portion of the incident, that she did not suffer gunshot or stab wounds but rather very serious concussion fractures, if you will, from this incident."

June 18 and after. Other news organizations, including the New York Times, raise questions about how the Post's account made it into the paper. Some ask how much the government was pushing the story.

Thank you. It is an honor, and pleasure, to be here for the Ruhl Symposium. It was also, I have to add, moving to be here for the Payne Awards. Hearing the stories of the winners, of the hardships these journalists had to overcome, including death threats, legal pressure and government coercion, to follow the facts and do public good, it renews your faith in the craft we all care about. It is stirring. And we are not loved for this work.

That said, I am not sure whether to be pleased or worried by the crowd. Apparently you've heard out here about all the talk lately involving the professionalism of a paper out East, near New Jersey. When you planned this event who knew that ethics in journalism would be so topical.

That's one of the problems with being someone who comments on press ethics. When business is good, something is wrong.

The subject of professionalism and ethics is timely for other reasons as well, however, beyond the NYT.

A year ago, the new President of Columbia University made headlines by declaring that journalists in America should be better educated.

Actually not just headlines. The reaction, as the New York Times reported in May 2003, was "a firestorm."

And when Columbia President Lee Bollinger finally issued his fairly innocuous statement of his educational goals for journalists, the most noted public response was even more brutal.

It didn't come from a populist talk show maven like Bill O'Reilly. It came instead from Robert Samuelson, the thoughtful, award winning columnist from the Washington Post and Newsweek. Journalism has a "new nuisance," he wrote, and his name is Lee Bollinger.

"Bollinger's vision" is "journalism by an elite for an elite," Samuelson seethed. It is "snob journalism."

"He believes," Samuelson continued, that "most journalists should be credentialed by universities…." (That means they should have college degrees.) And "Journalism should be seen (and should see itself as a profession)…."

"These are bad ideas," Samuelson went on, "that, if adopted, would reduce journalism's relevance and raise public mistrust. They might also worsen journalism's central problem: loss of audience."

I am not here today to endorse anyone's plans for Columbia, or what the new Dean there, Nick Lemann, has in mind. Samuelson, frankly, doesn't know.

I am here to talk about something bigger than that. Samuelson is making an argument against professionalism and ethical standards in journalism. It is an argument we have heard before. And that is what makes it worth examining.

Why do professionalism and a thorough discussion of ethics and high standards in journalism scare people? What about that is frightening?

This anti-professional attitude in journalism is nothing new, but it is, I believe, stronger today than it has been in generations. The subject also intersects, of course, with the Jason Blair New York Times scandal. But I will get to that later.

At its essence, the argument against professionalism and more rigorous discussion of standards and ethics in journalism is this:

Professionalism would give a few institutions the power to limit and standardize journalism. This inevitably would make journalism elitist, which in turn would put it out of reach of the common citizen.

Journalism must remain a craft, something marinated in the street and forged by doing it rather than thinking about it. Only this will make it responsive to the public, and ensure its economic vitality.

It's an interesting argument and certainly an enduring one.

But Samuelson's case and the anti-professional argument generally are grounded on two fundamentally flawed ideas. And these faulty ideas are undermining journalism today.

The first of these ideas is that professionalism in journalism equals elitism.

"Journalism is a job, a craft," Samuelson writes, "best learned by doing it." It is no profession. And since working practitioners, not people sequestered in intellectual universities, are best suited to teach craft, "At best, journalism schools are a necessary evil."

We have certainly heard this before. When Robert E. Lee as president of Washington College in Virginia proposed 50 scholarships for young men interested in journalism, Frederick Hudson, the managing editor of the New York Herald answered by saying, "The only place where one can learn to be a journalism is in a great newspaper office."

Among others on record denouncing journalism education are such thoughtful journalists as H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling, Robert Benchley, Walter Lippman and Ted Koppel, who in the late 1980s said "Journalism schools are an absolute and total waste of time."

I am not advocating that one needs a journalism degree to practice journalism. I don't agree with that. But the bias against journalism degrees is part of something bigger that I do take issue with.

There is a long vein of thinking of journalism as something instinctual, some kind of mystical art, a kind of news voodoo-and voodoo and instinct cannot be explained or theorized about. News is something you smell, or taste, or sense. "He has a nose for news," people say. No one says he has a mind for news.

I even once had an editor tell me he liked me because I walked like a journalist.

Tom Goldstein, the former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has described this as a deep strain of "anti-intellectualism."

Where did this anti-intellectualism and anti-professionalism come from? There are many causes. These ideas are rooted in journalism's blue-collar traditions. They are rooted in the now largely dismantled apprenticeship system. They are rooted in the needs of the market. They are rooted in the romantic ideal of the streetwise reporter not fooled by the high and mighty.

But most important probably, this anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism is rooted in the crucial idea of journalistic independence. To protect this independence, journalists have wisely avoided one of the steps taken by other professions, licensing.

The problem is Samuelson and others mistakenly think that licensing is the distinguishing factor of professionalism.

That is why Samuelson denounces journalism education as "credentialism."

This is wrong. What links professions like law, medicine, civil engineering, and-once-accounting is that they involve public interest obligations that rise above commerce.

Licensing is merely a means to ensuring that end-a way but not the only one of establishing professional standards and aspirations. But it is this public responsibility these aspirations are designed to serve, not licensing, that makes these careers into professions.

Journalism cannot escape professional responsibility. By failing to recognize itself as a profession, journalism hasn't avoided developing norms and standards. It has merely failed to think them through thoroughly.

The result is that journalism has operated as something of a tautology: journalism was whatever journalists did.

If CBS outlawed checkbook journalism, others followed suit. The reasons for or against the rule were less clear. You didn't do it simply because it wasn't done. This kind of unthinking approach didn't make journalism more flexible, it made it more dictatorial.

This craft orientation, this anti-professional attitude, has had profound consequences on the way journalism has developed and is practiced.

One consequence is that a more developed theory and set of understandings about journalism, as exists for other professions, never fully developed.

This has restrained the growth of a deeper, more thoughtful and contextual literature about the press from within the profession. It has helped blur the idea of journalism in the public mind. And it has stunted its place in the university.

The theory of journalism remains latent and unarticulated in most people's minds, even journalists. Journalism is a "mindset" or an attitude. It is hardly a philosophy or theory, words that might make journalists uncomfortable.

Most journalists are vague about basic concepts like objectivity. Having only half-formed ideas about it-most of them murky--they substitute it with words like balance, but know that has problems, too. We confuse neutrality (a technique employed by some journalists but not others) with independence (the real principle underlying journalism).

Larger questions, like the responsibility of the journalist in a national crisis, the social value of the press, the journalist's connection or lack of connection to community, are de-emphasized. Many journalists arrive at their notions of these things on their own, privately. Though they are not entirely absent from journalists thinking, they are inexplicit, indistinct, usually private and, sometimes unconsidered altogether.

A second consequence of this is that many journalists think of journalism as fundamentally a series of techniques.

If journalists could not agree on what journalism was-indeed really didn't want to engage in the discussion-they could agree on what journalists did. Thus journalism is the inverted pyramid. Journalism is the neutral voice. Journalism is going on TV. Journalism is satellite uplinks, cutaways, live shots, learning to type. This is a mistake. These are tools of journalism, but not its core principles.

This tendency to define journalism as a series of techniques rather than responsibilities and principles has added to many of journalism's contemporary problems.

It has encouraged the balkanization of the news media by medium, (Print guys think TV isn't real journalism, since real journalism is writing. TV guys think print guys can't tell stories. And both look down on online).

Confusing technique with principle tends to make the profession more static, less able to grow and develop, not freer in the way that Samuelson and the other "craft" advocates imagine.

Confusing the principles of journalism with the technique also makes us vulnerable to imitators who want to hitchhike on the credibility of journalism by looking like it but who are fundamentally engaged in different work, such as commercial propaganda or infomercialism.

This confusion of technique with principle has also contributed to what New Yorker media Ken Auletta has called "The Bimbo Factor." By Bimbo Factor, Ken does not mean putting good-looking women with empty heads on TV. He means producing stories that look good but are empty of meaning. The Bimbo Factor is why we see so much technically slick and skillfully put-together journalism that is empty, unthinking, and unimportant.

It's exposes into stinky hotel sheets, killer bras and "will your ice tea kill you?" It's the tendency to reduce our understanding of the war in Iraq to tear-jerker interviews about joy and relief with family members of returning soldiers; its merchandising stories like Lacey Peterson's murder into non-fiction soap operatic drama on morning and prime time TV news magazines. These are slick stories that tell us too little about our lives and our society.

Most journalists don't know the history of their profession, have not read great works of their predecessors and have not read even the small number of major philosophical works produced by journalists.

When psychologist Bill Damon and his colleagues were researching their book "Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet," they found they had never studied a profession that did as poor a job as journalism of handing down the collected wisdom of one generation to another.

We remain stuck, as we were more than 50 years ago, when Time Magazine founder Henry Luce passed a note to University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins asking him at an Encyclopedia Britannica Board meeting: "I know what my freedoms are under the First Amendment, but what are my responsibilities?" Hutchins scrawled back this answer: "I dunno."

As a result, journalists fail to articulate to the public even basic concepts of professional responsibility that other professions make easily clear.

We understand, for instance, that lawyers have a professional duty to offer even the worst man in society a strong defense-and can be sanctioned for failing to do so.

Yet when it comes to journalism, even those who practice it are repeatedly confused about even the most basic professional concepts. Are you an American first or a journalist? What is the meaning of journalistic independence? With each crisis-the war, the sniper, the missing child craze-professionals face the same questions anew, as if they have never thought about them, or as if such questions are so abstract and theoretical that they could not possibly be resolved.

No wonder the public has trouble distinguishing between good journalism or bad, or whether there is any ethical difference between The O'Reilly Factor and Meet the Press, or Wild On E-Entertainment and 60 Minutes.

We need to connect the craft to a larger purpose, a social theory, a history, an epistemology, a discipline of inquiry, a definition of integrity and of intelligence.

Every journalist, and every journalism school graduate, should be able to answer--or be on his or her way to forming an answer--the question the public increasingly asks: why do you do it this way?

We need to make the reasons behind the craft more explicit. We need to make the journalism more conscious.

Melvin Mencher recently quoted a colleague in journalism education as putting the challenge of the future of the profession this way: "The major emphasis should not be…on how to write but on what to write, lest the prospective reporter become an empty flask, all form and no content."

This brings me to the second big idea in the argument against ethics, professionalism and education. It's that elitism in the press is the cause of the loss of audience for news.

"Journalists' self-importance stirs public resentment," Samuelson writes. "Insisting we're a profession…would make it worse."

Is this true?

Here, we do not have to guess. The decline in public trust, and audience for news and trust in journalists goes back roughly about 20 years, and has grown in a consistent way.

Nineteen years ago, Times Mirror first commissioned Andrew Kohut to get to the bottom of the emerging "credibility crisis" in the press.

Through a series of in-depth interviews he found the public at bottom thought the press was, and I quote, "too sensational, too pushy, to rude, too uncaring about people and the public."

But, "major news organizations were still believable to the overwhelming majority of Americans, and most people saw journalists as moral, professional and caring about the interests of the country."

By 1999, 15 years later, people were even more disturbed by the sensationalism and behavior of the press. But now, they also distrusted journalists as well. The number of people who thought journalists cared about people had dropped from 41% to 21%. The percentage that thought the press got the facts right had dropped from 55% to 37%.

Only 24% thought the press when covering political scandals was just reporting the facts. A shocking 72% thought they were driving the scandals.

As Kohut puts it, "the public views the merchandising of scandal as pandering rather than attempts to protect the public interest."

What had shifted most was the respect for media values. In 1985, 54% of Americans saw the press as moral, and only 13% saw the press as immoral. By 1999, the public was evenly split 40% to 38%.

The percentage that thought the press lacked professionalism has jumped three fold, from 11% to 32%.

In 1985, the public saw the press as a caretaker of democracy by a two-to-one margin, 54%-to-23%. Today, Americans are divided, 45%-to-38% on this basic question.

The major credibility studies by the Urban Institute for the American Society of Newspaper Editors found the same answers. The public is angry with the press for sensationalizing stories to sell newspapers and build ratings and doing it either for money or to enhance their personal careers.

Samuelson is simply wrong in his facts. Rather than self-importance, survey after survey and focus group after focus group shows that it is a perceived lack of professionalism that stirs public resentment.

The credibility crisis in the press at root is a question of motive. Journalists like to think they are serving the public interest. The public looks at the media's recent performance and thinks journalists are either lying or deluding themselves. They increasingly think journalism is about money or personal ambition.

The answer to the crisis is in the very thing Samuelson fears most-ethics and professionalism.

Some time ago, the University of Missouri journalism school asked former Missouri Congressman James Symington to deliver a lecture on journalism to its students. He prepared by attending a panel discussion by prominent Washington journalists. Sitting there, he was surprised by the vehemence of the panel against the idea of articulating professional aspirations in some kind of canon or oath. Such oaths, they argued, were often observed only the in breach.

"Equally true, it could be said, of such other fragile attempts to influence conduct, as the Constitution, the Ten Commandments, and the Sermon the Mount," Symington said. Yet "each is a tether to higher purpose." If such goals are as unreachable as the stars, so be it, Symington countered. "The stars are what we must sail by. If the print and electronic media have suffered any dimunition of public respect, it may be in part because the crowd senses the absence of a governing principle, any set of granite guidelines to chart the course of newsgathering, dissemination and commentary other than the bottom line demands of the what it properly perceives as a business."

Here is where the anti-intellectualism strain founders.

Professionalism does not equal elitism.

The yearning for professionalism is finds it start, rather, in a desire to ground journalism in the public interest, above the interests of business. It is based on the idea that if you bind the press to the interests of citizens-and by citizens I mean members of the society rather than in the legal sense-people will better recognize why journalism matters to them.

In that sense, far from elitism, professionalism in journalism is closer to a kind of populism.

Professionalism defines the relevance of the press in the public interest.

Ethics and professionalism provides the journalist with a brand, and something to sell to the public.

Professionalism offers journalists the tools, and the map, to avoid succumbing to cheap gimmicks, to jingoism and pandering and quick commercial tricks like sensationalism and infotainment.

Here, too, is where the New York Times scandal becomes relevant. Whether you believe journalism is a profession or just a craft, no one thinks fabrication and plagiarism that Jayson Blair perpetrated at The Times are acceptable.

But the paper has so far failed in its public response to the scandal. It has suggested that the problem was Blair alone, and that management of the paper should not be considered to blame. Yet the paper's own reporting has shown that judgment to be inadequate. Blair's supervisors were waving red flags. Top management not only ignored them, they rewarded this young man because he was providing what the new leaders of the paper wanted, provocative copy that created buzz and broke news, and high production of it. Because standards are murky and unarticulated, the leadership at the Times is trying to gut it out, let it blow over.

The reason the scandal has not blown over--indeed it has intensified--is because readers, and journalists and even more so people inside the Times itself expect more of the New York Times. They consider the paper's response insufficiently professional and lacking candor. They are saying that journalism is more than craft. Like any profession, it must be guided by higher ethical principles.

The father of modern journalism ethics was a man many of you may never have heard of. His named was Norman E. Isaacs.

Norman was the furthest thing from an elitist Bob Samuelson worries about. Like many great journalists, he was an immigrant and working class. Unlike Bob Samuelson, Harvard class of '67, Norman never graduated from high school.

He left to become a sports writer, was a managing editor at 27, editor of four papers, publisher of one, eventually a professor. Profane, crude, and intimidating, Isaacs once said, "I am paid to be an SOB, and I do a good job of it." And he had that quality most important in a journalist, and most frightening in a teacher: an incredible instinct and zero tolerance for bull shit. High standards yes. Elitist no.

Oh, and here are some of the things he introduced to American journalism. Ombudsmen. Bans on press junkets, freebies, gifts and other payola. Serious corrections boxes, daily book reviews, ethics policies and more.

In 1986, Isaacs wrote a book ahead of its time, called "Untended Gates, the Mismanaged Press." In a chapter called "The Gathering Storm," he wrote of a great crisis he saw coming for the press, a crisis now here. He begins the chapter by saying "arrogance, hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism," in the press "have tarnished the great dream of Jefferson and Madison." The answer is to make sure "an ethical conscience" governs journalism.

"What it all boils down to is values…." Isaacs wrote. "The only way democracy can work successfully is through a value system that puts honorable public service in the reporting of events as accurately as possible, interpreting them honestly, and analyzing them fairly. That kind of journalism can win back the confidence of the citizenry."

That, in a nutshell, is professionalism. Why does it scare people? Because it limits the freedom of journalists to do whatever they want by allowing the public to have a basis for judging us.

That, accountability to the public, is what makes ethics and professionalism intimidating. It is also our best hope.

My colleague Bill Kovach was originally asked to deliver this lecture today. I want to close with something I suspect he would have said. I call it his benediction. It is simply this: Western Civilization has offered among all its ideas to the world one idea more powerful than any other. It is the idea that people can govern themselves.

As that idea was forming, something evolved naturally, unplanned, to make that possible. It was called journalism. And it has a single purpose: to put information that was once held by the few into the hands of many so they could be sovereign. Without journalism democracy is not possible. Without democracy, journalism has no purpose other than profit. Journalism and democracy will rise and fall together.

So it is important what you do here. And we honor you, particularly the young, for your belief in and pursuit of it.

Thank you.

Good News for Editors
Small, medium papers that invested in newsrooms see higher revenue
As part of the first phase of a plan to look at the relationship between journalistic quality and profits, Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel presented initial data at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in New Orleans on April 9, 2003

The presentation also included the following remarks:

Introduction: Why measure quality?
From ASNE president Diane McFarlin.

What 35 Years of Academic Research Tells Us
On news content quality, newsroom expenditures, circulation/penetration, and revenues.
Esther Thorson looks at the research. All of it.

News Staffing and Profits
The business case for better journalism.
Rick Edmonds writes about staffing and news capacity.

Finding the 'Sweet Spot'
Newsroom staffing can haunt profitability when too low or too high.
Phil Meyer correlates quality to economic performance.

How aware is the American public of the debate currently taking place about changing the rules over media ownership in the United States?

The great majority of Americans, 72%, have heard "nothing at all" about it, according to new survey results released today. Only 4% of Americans say they have heard "a lot."

The findings may have some bearing on whether federal regulators are moving at the right pace in their policy making. The Federal Communications Commission has proposed sweeping changes in the rules governing how many media outlets corporations can own.

Critics have argued, however, that the public is largely unaware of the proposed changes. One reason, they contend, is that news organizations have failed to cover the debate, both because it is a technical regulatory agency matter and because there is an inherent conflict of interest for the news media in covering their own industry. Another reason, critics argue, is that the FCC has proposed only a single formal public hearing on the matter, scheduled for today, February 27, in Richmond, Va.

But some Commission officials have countered that broad public hearings are unnecessary because the regulatory review on this matter has been ongoing for years, because the public comment period at the Commission yielded broad public input and because of a groundswell of attention recently.

How aware is the public?

To find out, the Project For Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with the Pew Research Center for the People and The Press, decided to ask Americans. The Project is a research institute on the press affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The Center is an independent polling institute that specializes in matters of public awareness of press issues. Both groups are funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

"How much, if anything, have you heard about a Federal Communications Commission proposal to reduce current limits on the number of news outlets one company can own," the survey asked. "A lot, a little, or nothing at all?"

In all, 72% of Americans said they knew "nothing at all" about the proposed FCC changes.

Only 23% said they had heard "a little."

A scant 4% said they had heard "a lot."

The survey also asked people generally whether they thought relaxing the rules on media ownership was more likely to "have a positive or negative impact on the country, or wouldn't it make much difference."

Among all Americans, most of whom had heard nothing about the debate, 11% thought relaxing the rules would be positive. A plurality of Americans, 46%, thought, "it wouldn't make much difference." A third of Americans, 34%, thought the result would be negative.

In all, 72% of Americans said they knew "nothing at all" about the proposed FCC changes.

Only 23% said they had heard "a little."

A scant 4% said they had heard "a lot."

The survey also asked people generally whether they thought relaxing the rules on media ownership was more likely to "have a positive or negative impact on the country, or wouldn't it make much difference."

Among all Americans, most of whom had heard nothing about the debate, 11% thought relaxing the rules would be positive. A plurality of Americans, 46%, thought, "it wouldn't make much difference." A third of Americans, 34%, thought the result would be negative.

In general, knowing more about the debate tended to push people slightly more in the negative category.

Among those who had heard either a little or a lot about the debate, 41% were negative (compared with 34% of all Americans), and 13% were positive (up slightly from 11% of all Americans.)

The number who thought the rule changes would make no difference went down slightly (to 39%, from 46% of all Americans).

The results are based on a survey of 1,254 adults conducted for the Pew Research Center from February 12-18. The survey has a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points.

In general, knowing more about the debate tended to push people slightly more in the negative category.

About the Survey

Results for the February News Interest Index survey are based on telephone interviews conducted under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates among a nationwide sample of 1,254 adults, 18 years of age or older, during the period February 12-18, 2003. Based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, one should bear in mind that question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of opinion polls.

Without much notice, the federal government is moving toward the most sweeping change ever in the rules that govern ownership of the American news media.

This shift could reduce the independence of the news media and the ability of Americans to take part in public debate. Yet because of meager press coverage and steps taken by the Federal Communications Commission in its policy-making process, most people probably have no idea that it is taking place.

Having seen how totalitarian regimes moved the world to war through domination of their news media, the government during the 1940's put restrictions on how many news media outlets one company could own, both nationally and in a single city.

Though those rules have been relaxed in the last 20 years, companies are still blocked from buying a newspaper and television station in the same city or from owning more than one TV station in the same market.

Three weeks after it proposed eliminating those rules, the F.C.C. released a series of reports about the current media marketplace. But the reports focused almost entirely on the economic impact of relaxing the ownership rules. They largely ignore the public's interest in a diverse and independent press.

The F.C.C. argues that technologies like the Internet offer Americans access to more information than ever and thus worries about monopolies are unfounded. But studies also show that most Americans receive their news from a handful of outlets. Beyond this, much of what appears on the Internet is repackaged from those outlets. The number of operations that gather original news is small and now may become smaller.

The question of concentration is most acute at the local level. In most communities, even those with television and radio stations, the vast range of activities are covered by only one institution, the local newspaper.

What will happen to communities if the ownership rules are eliminated? Among the possibilities is that one or two companies in each town would have an effective monopoly on reaching consumers by being allowed to control the newspaper, radio, TV, billboards and more — with costly consequences for businesses that need those outlets for advertising. Such a monopoly on information would also reduce the diversity of cultural and political discourse in a community.

The precedent in radio is telling. Since the rules on ownership of radio were last relaxed in 1996, the two biggest companies went from owning 130 stations to more than 1,400.

The F.C.C. chairman, Michael K. Powell, has scheduled only one public hearing, in Richmond, Va., on the proposal, and the public comment period will close at the end of this month. It is a small and brief opportunity, but one that the public should seize if it cherishes an independent press.

Four months into the war, a review of news coverage reveals that over time Americans are getting fewer facts and more opinion -- a narrow range of opinion, at that -- from newspapers, magazines and television. At the same time, polls show the press losing a measure of the respect it had gained in September, when the public overwhelmingly applauded the timely, comprehensive and informative news coverage it was getting.

The trend away from fact-based reporting is clear in a new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute affiliated with Columbia University and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and Princeton Survey Research Associates. The study examined network, cable and public television; Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Fresno Bee; and various TV talk shows. Overall, straight factual reporting dropped to 63 percent of coverage in November and December from 75 percent in mid-September. The remainder of the coverage is analysis, opinion and speculation.

The study also found that the fewer the sources of information consulted in preparing a news report, the more likely it will be filled with opinion and speculation -- the very kind of reporting that people consistently tell survey researchers they resent.

Yet despite all the commentary, the range of viewpoints Americans are offered is remarkably limited. Less than 10 percent of the coverage evaluating administration policy offers significant dissent. Most contains no dissent at all.

The findings help explain why polls from the Pew Research Center for People and the Press show only 30 percent of Americans rating the news media's performance as excellent in mid-November, down from 56 percent in September.

One reason factual coverage declined as the story moved overseas and became more complex is the restrictions -- the most stringent in history -- that the Pentagon has imposed on the press. Reporters are rarely allowed to be with American troops in the war zones, where they can see for themselves what is happening. We know little firsthand about the risks our soldiers are taking, how well they are equipped and supported and whether they are well led. We know almost nothing about standards of conduct being applied in this new kind of warfare.

This press policy serves no one well. History suggests that the more government restricts press coverage, the less the public is likely to sustain support of a war effort. Pictures of body bags on television did not lead to public disaffection with Vietnam: there were few if any body bags on television. The problem was the government's deceitful accounting of the war, which led to what popularly became known as the credibility gap.

But it is too convenient simply to blame the Pentagon for the backsliding in coverage. Network cutbacks have left television news hard-pressed to sustain in-depth reporting that keeps up with an increasingly complicated story. Cable networks have substituted talk for reporting. And local newspapers, the study found, have pulled reporters off the story.

It's interesting that public enthusiasm for the press's performance began to decline even while the press was overwhelmingly supporting the government. It suggests that citizens intuitively know that the best and most reliable work of the press comes when it is providing independent information.