Jim Carey started this program this morning by referring to the rise of the idea of objectivity early in this century or late in the last century. Indeed, that happened.

I disagreed with him on one thing. He suggested that it arose out of the thoughtfulness and concern of journalists, but in fact, if I can disagree with Jim, it came from the top. Several owners, very famous owners -- Pulitzer and Scripps and Ochs -- decided that it was in their economic interest to have credible newspapers, so they began demanding a far greater degree of accuracy than they had been accustomed to.

I'm going quote Pulitzer a little bit. "It is not enough to refrain from publishing fake news or to take ordinary care to avoid mistakes. You've got to make everyone connected with the paper believe that accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a woman."

Ochs talked about the need to give the news impartially, without fear of favor.

Scripps instructed his managers to "always see that the news report is handled objectively, as far as it is humanly possible. You must not be biased or take sides in controversies."

That was pretty revolutionary language at that time because it referred to a business and to practices that had been famously partisan and unreliable since the first newspaper appeared in this country. Nevertheless, the need for objectivity became a popular theme in those early trade publications and early journalism schools at the start of the century, and the idea became a cardinal and often unexamined principle in most of the newsrooms of America.

One of the early skeptics was Walter Lippman who, after some considerable thought, came to the conclusion which I think we can all agree with, that news and truth are not the same animal. The function of news is to call attention to an event. The function of truth, Lippman said, was to make a picture of reality on which man can act.

The journalist at the New York Times told us the other day that the New York Giants lost a football game by a score of 20-8. Now that was a small piece of truth. But the story of why the Giants lost can be told in 100 different ways. Each story being written through a different lens that is fogged over by stereotypes and personal predilections.

I noticed that Bill Keller said this morning that in an analysis you want a reporter to tell you whether the Reno decision hurt or helped Gore. The question I would have, how would this reporter know? How would he know?

In any event, the subsequent critique, versions of the Lippman critique, have been summarized by Michael Shudson who's written the book, "The Discovery of the News" that I know Tom is familiar with. One later version of Lippman stated that, "The content of a news story rests on a set of substantive political assumptions whose validity is never questioned. Journalists," he said, "acquire these assumptions from their own upbringing, from fellow journalists who constantly check and tutor their news judgments, and from the officials they regularly report on."

He's got a great quote from Jack Newfield. He said, "The men and women who control the technological giants of the mass media are not neutral, unbiased computers. They have a mindset. They have definite lifestyles and political values which are concealed under a rhetoric of objectivity. Among these unspoken but organic values are belief in welfare capitalism, God, the West, puritanism, the law, the family, and so forth."

I can't think of any White House correspondents or network television analysts who don't share these values, and at the same time, who don't insist they are totally objective.

Other critiques of objectivity have focused on the conventional forms and processes of news -- how we write stories, and the conventions of journalism. And they construct an image of reality, Shudson tells us, which reinforces official viewpoints.

A somewhat different approach to this question was taken in 1937 by Leo Rosten who published a landmark sociological study of the Washington correspondents. It focused on personality traits and class origins. "Objectivity in journalism," he concluded, "is no more possible than objectivity in dreams. What the newspaper man tells, what he considers worth telling, and how he tells it are the end products of the social heritage; a functional relationship to his superiors -- the editors and publishers; and a psychological construct of desire, calculation, and inhibition."

The correspondents, who he found were children of the bourgeoises were drawn to journalism by the opportunity to project personal hostilities and feelings of injustice onto public persons under the aegis of journalistic duty. They had inter-drives for power and action that led them to secret lives of intense political involvements behind the scenes. Their newspaper careers are an amateur sport by comparison with their unknown and unwritten activities, and he gave many examples.

In more recent years there have been other efforts to classify and explain journalists and their particular biases in terms of personality and class loyalties. A German sociologist a few years ago, Helmut Schelski, described a salvationist personality that was sort of characteristic of European journalists. This salvationist, you believe that the world ultimately can be fixed, but it can't be fixed unless in your present life you trash the hell out of whatever exists, the status quo. So you have a vested interest in negative news.

The other point he made was that in trying to identify with what may have been or may not have been problems of the working class, the salvationists in European journalism don't realize that the next class conflict is going to be between them and the workers because the journalists, as is the case in the United States, don't produce anything except meaning, and the meanings they produce are not necessarily acceptable to the people who have hard hands and produce goods and do the dirty work of society. So he thinks the meaning producers are going to replace capitalists as the enemy of the working class.

Actually, a somewhat similar prospect is held out in the United States in the writings -- it's in non-Marxist terms, but in the writings of Robert Reich, Christopher Lash, Charles Murray, and others. Their focus is on what is called the cognitive elite. That is this 20 percent minority of the labor force who are educated in our most selected universities -- this is one of them -- and who control the international flow of money and information; they preside over the philanthropic foundations; they preside over the institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production -- including the mass media, and thus set the terms of public debate. Reich calls them symbol analysts, which is another phrase for meaning producers.

In this new pecking order, the masses are destined to be locked forever into non-cognitive jobs, doing everything for society from sewer repair to nursing home duties.

Journalists, as members of this cognitive elite, derive their world views, mindsets and biases, from their peers. Their work is shaped to suit the tastes and needs of this new upper class, and I must say there's a lot of evidence that the mainstream press is staking its future on this class because it's increasingly going upscale and rejecting what is sometimes called tabloid journalism, but is certainly rejecting or losing working people, lower income people, etc. And brags about it.

The New York Times, courting advertisers, is running ads all over the world saying that its readers are the "most intelligent, affluent and influential in the country." Not most representative, or not a voice of the people, but the most affluent and influential.

Other papers are doing the same. The Economist tells advertisers, "We choose not to write to a broad, lowest common denominator readership. Those that benefit from reading The Economist are those who are in the enviable position to make decisions, call for action, and elicit change." This is the audience for PBS and NPR.

Even the networks, Peter Jennings, who was accused recently, ABC was accused of too much soft news. He said, "A year or so ago we decided we were going to be more populist, but to put it nicely, I don't think it helped us. It blurred our identity." Now ABC is back on the track.

I will close with a quote from Morris Ernst, a civil liberties lawyer who represented the Newspaper Guild in the 1930s. In a legal brief he noted, "The Constitution does not guarantee objectivity of the press, nor is objectivity obtainable in a subjective world. The question really raised is not whether news shall be unprejudiced, but rather whose prejudices shall color the news." I think that's where we are today.

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