Next there was an open discussion among the panelists. Some of the excerpts follow.

In discussing the problems associated with the mainstream media and how it deals with fringe journalists, Bradlee said, "The crazy wing of journalism is responsible for some of the loss of esteem" with the public. Oreskes said the answer was for news organizations to "stick to your own standards. If you can find out it's true in some other way, fine, go ahead with it, but if you can't, leave it alone. There has to be a line somewhere."

Asked if there were any stories in the Lewinsky matter he would have spiked, Doyle cited the blue dress as the best example:

"My first reaction would have been, it's a tawdry story. If I miss it, nobody is going to say in my obituary, Doyle was a great guy but he missed the blue dress story. If it's wrong the very well may say in my obituary, this is the guy...I would have looked at the sourcing and said ... I don't think we quite have it, let's not go with it."

Panelists Doyle and Isikoff disagreed on the value of Steve Brill's article in Brill's Content. Doyle thought it was a good piece which raised questions, especially the use of leaks coming from the Independent Counsel. Isikoff challenged the accuracy of the piece because it made "a broad claim that all these stories out there were being leaked by the prosecutor." He said the White House was skilled in pushing stories to put their own spin on events.

Oreskes: "There is a difference between facts and interpretations... Good reporters try to present facts and separate those from the spin, the interpretation, the lies... It's not always easy to do, but ... that's what good reporters tried to do here, sometimes successfully and sometimes not." On the subject of reliance on second-hand sourcing for the eyewitness story, Ms. Sproul said, "ABC had multiple sourcing and second hand sourcing... The fact that no eyewitness has come forward doesn't really mean there isn't an eyewitness."

Oreskes: "We [at the Times] do not rely on anybody with whom we have not had some sort of a history with, a very clear understanding ... of what their knowledge is of the story, and what their credibility level is. There are real quality issues that come into play in that. I don't think you can separate them."

Isikoff: "[There] is a way to use a secondary source. Always trying to sort of identify as best you can how it is you know what you know. And I think if you do that, you're most of the time going to be okay."

Doyle: "A fair amount of the press did a number of Vernon Jordon that would not have been done if they were not getting the stories that said, Vernon Jordon has got a bullseye on his back. ... Both Time and Newsweek did profiles in which their descriptions of Vernon Jordon, the womanizer, is incredibly graphic. And then 60 Minutes picked up on that."

Doyle noted the extreme differences between coverage of Starr and the special prosecutor during Watergate: "There was very little information out there from the Prosecutors on this whole subject. ... Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Procedure were taken extremely seriously. It's beyond my imagination that any Federal Judge would have said to Archibald Cox or Leon Joworski or Henry Ruth... you're going to have to show cause order that you shouldn't be held in contempt for violating the Rules of Federal Procedure."

In the question-answer period, Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News raised the issue of identifying sources. In the adversarial nature of the Lewinsky matter, he said sources should be identifiedÐif not by name then by which side they are on. Isikoff said he would "take leaks from anyplace I can get it, including if Starr wanted to, you know, shoot me over copies of grand jury transcripts... I'd print them in a minute and I wouldn't identify where I got them if that was the ground rule."

Oreskes: "Some of the biggest mistakes [in the Lewinsky story] were the failure to be sure that your second source was truly a second source. ... what can you do to help your reader understand what's going on ... and not to come across as if we are the ones who know what's going on... That's were we lose a lot of our credibility, frankly. I think we've got a big problem and some of it comes from a lack of at least projecting what to me is the most important human quality which is humility."

Doyle: The press did not adequately cover Starr's "promiscuous use of subpoena, leaks and abusive process." While there had been some stories, he said the press had really neglected the subjects.

Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post asked: "I felt from the beginning and feel today that the talking points could be a smoking gun and that this is really an example of Starr's failure, that they just did not get to the bottom of it. ... what was your conclusion after going through all this [material]?"

Doyle: "I don't think I would disagree with your judgements, but what upsets me ... is the way that story flowed for a couple of months, it was finger pointing, this the obstruction case. We took the reporting and compared it to the Starr Report. It is astounding how little there is in the Starr Report. ... For two months, the talking points were out there as an enormous piece of suspicion in all the newspapers and then they drop out."

Isikoff: "We have a text of it."

Doyle: "There are three different texts out there..."

Isikoff: "Some news organizations, including a stupid mistake made by a Newsweek art editor in New York who couldn't fit the text on the page and without telling anybody in Washington, then retyped it to try to fit and left out a couple of words ... was the basis for the differing text."

Bradlee then offered that the trend of reporters going on television shows and offering opinions on the subject they were covering was wrong and was too prevalent today: "Factually, when this first came up back in the sixties or fifties ... you couldn't deny that to a reporter. It wasn't the 50 bucks he wanted, it was the exposure... The first day you appeared in this town on Meet the Press, people treated you differently. You had arrived. Larry Spivak had blessed you. ... Now you go a step further to lectures and nobody monitors what these people say..."

Isikoff said he made appearances on television but was careful about engaging in opinions and speculation: "... News magazines encourage you to go on T.V. and radio to promote stories that are in the magazine... I at least try to stick to ... talking about stories I"ve written ... and not use it as a forum to voice opinions and engage in the kind of babble you see on Geraldo.

Oreskes: " The news magazines are the most aggressive about it, but certainly other news organizations want their people on television... I don't see the medium as the evil here, anymore than I see the Internet as an evil. It's what you do on it that's the problem. [In the last ten years] these shows are utterly different. They have created an environment where it is very difficult to watch that line between opinion and analysis that we all understand and believe in."

Isikoff offered the point that the various types of media differ so much today that it is difficult to talk about them as a whole: "I don't know how to define [the news media] anymore, I really don't. I think that all attempts to collectivize out behavior and to analyze what we do in some general way that is meant to extract rules and guidance ... is destined to fail because we are so different now... If two people at the Washington Post did what Sam and Cokie did, either in January or August, they would be history. We just have completely different standards now. And we need to help the world understand that. We need to understand it better ourselves."

Oreskes followed up on that thought: "You heard everyone here talking about the difficultly of standards, but recognizing that there is something between journalists and other people who communicate. One of the driving forces behind the committee is to accept and celebrate freedom of speech which we all have. And to defend freedom of speech which we all have to do. But inside that free speech there is a territory called journalism that is free speech with a purpose."