Moderator Barbara Cochran, the President of the Radio Television News Directors Association, began by noting how the press became more interpretive, and more skeptical, for a reason. And she saw that reason evolve in the first years after her career began in 1968.

"The newsroom I entered, the Washington Star, was one that prided itself on objectivity. It had long been the establishment newspaper in Washington and was reluctantly grappling with the notion that the Washington Post had surpassed it in circulation, profitability, and perhaps even stature....The Watergate burglary had been discovered in the summer of '72 and Woodward and Bernstein were beating our brains out with stories we couldn't confirm on a daily basis. Our White House correspondent was definitely of the old school -- the kind who in a press conference would say, "Perhaps, Mr. President, what you meant to say was..." and then go on to gracefully rephrase the President's less than cogent response.

"One morning I called to get the latest White House response to another Woodstein bombshell and he (said) he had already spoken to the subject of the story, who had assured him it was untrue. `And you know, Barbara, he's a good boy. He'd never lie, a reporter told me.' Later on the subject of the story pleaded guilty to perjury."

Fred Barnes, the Executive Editor of the conservative publication The Weekly Standard, argued that the press is a victim of a journalistic culture that is generally liberal, secular, and unconscious and in denial of its biases. That culture is perpetuated by a process of self- selection of journalists, and is now so entrenched it is unlikely to change.

"The question before the panel was can fairness be institutionalized in newsrooms....I don't have any optimism about that."

"The news business tends to be attractive to people who are more liberal and secular and who tend to think of American middle class life as bourgeois and boring and reprehensible in many ways. That's just who the media happens to attract...It is self selection."

"There is a problem with conservatives. I talk to a lot of young conservatives and religious people who are interested in the media, and I always give them the same advice. I say I'm in Washington. Don't try and start here, go out to the boonies somewhere and get a job with a newspaper, a little TV station where you can write a lot, every day. It helps. You'll get better. You'll learn some skills as a reporter. You'll learn about sources, you'll learn about writing on deadline...."

"Practically nobody -- among young conservatives -- takes my advice. They all want to stay in Washington. They want to be editorial writers."

"I do believe that liberal and cultural and kind of a class bias is incredibly pervasive in newsrooms, as well as reflected in what we see in the newspapers..."

"People...discount for it....It's one of the reasons why so many people have been driven away from the mainstream media. The news media and the Rush Limbaugh's of the world wouldn't exist were it not for the kind of bias -- political and cultural bias -- that's in the mainstream media. They have been created by this."

"Look, it's not monolithic, I know that....If you're a protectionist, you probably think you're treated very unfairly by the mainstream media in America, and you are. If you're a labor union activist you probably think you're treated very unfairly by the mainstream media. And you are. But generally, it's very liberal."

"Now all Presidents, as President Clinton suggested, are savaged. Not equally, but they're all savaged. Campaigns are a little better because there you have a tendency for candidates in big governor, senate, presidential races, to have both candidates get savaged equally. It doesn't always happen. The 1992 presidential race was an exception."

"[There are] three particular groups that I want to talk about: Republicans, conservatives and Christians.

"They all complain about the media, that it's unfair, that it doesn't understand them, they're ideologically biased against them, they're too secular. Now are they all wrong? Are they wrong in Idaho and they're wrong in Florida and they're wrong in Washington? ...Is it a mass psychosis?..."

"I have a couple of suggestions...One is that the people in the media should acknowledge the problem, if only for financial and circulation reasons. The mainstream media is losing an awful lot of (conservatives)."

"Second, I would also say watch labels. I see the label "ultra conservative" all the time. I've never seen "ultra liberal", at least used in the mainstream media."

"Third, I do believe in affirmative action. Not preferences or quotas or anything, but there are some conservative journalism groups -- the National Journalism Center, there are a bunch of them, and there are some Christian ones that chain journalists too. These might be groups that you automatically go to. Just take a look at them. Maybe they'll produce some good journalists. Try them out as interns. But don't just brush them aside or ignore them as a lot of people in the media have."

Victor Navasky, Publisher & Editorial Director of liberal publication The Nation, found unexpected common ground with Fred Barnes in seeing an unacknowledged ideology in the press. And, like Barnes, he argued that the first step to improvement was for the press to come to understand and admit these cultural, class and political predispositions.

"We tend to think the difference between the mainstream media--the New York Times, the Washington Post, the networks, the news magazines-- and journals of opinion [like The Nation] is that we are ideological and they are not. The fact is, it seems to me, that's not the main difference at all. Aside from differences of function--the difference between say a news magazine like U.S. News, Time, and Newsweek, and a views magazine like The Nation or The Weekly Standard, or National Review--is that we admit we are ideological, and they don't."

"The Nation, for example, we think of ourselves as independent, but nevertheless in the current political situation we are vaguely on the liberal left. And National Review and the Weekly Standard are on the conservative right.

"The New York Times, I would argue, has the ideology of the center. [And] It's part of the ideology of the center to deny that it has an ideology."

"Now I'd add that openness about one's value assumptions, one's ideological assumptions, puts the reader at an advantage. The reader, the audience, is then in a better position to judge whether the paper, the journalist, the network, has omitted inconvenient facts, stacked the deck on behalf of some hidden agenda...."

"There is something of a rough consensus about the content of left and right ideology. Anyone who wants to deal seriously with the ideas discussed this morning -- fairness, balance, objectivity -- in the major media, on the other hand, has to come to terms with something that's much more elusive which is the ideology of the center. What is it?"

"Tom Wicker has observed of the establishment press....that they share a sense of community. A broad common conception of the general interest. We don't want to be out in front to attack the establishment, to criticize major institutions, to be accused of endangering national security. When that happens, the prestige press, as it's known, tends to pull in its horns. Certain stories, assignments are not made; investigations are aborted; negative articles are balanced by positive ones."

"Others, like the radical critic Michael Parenti, claim that the center media tend to identify with management over labor, whites over blacks, conventional politics over dissident politics, militarism over pacifism, nationalism over internationalism, and so forth...."

"I once took a stab at defining the ideology of the center myself with the help of a group of Nation interns. Our theory was that the self-described newspaper of record, the New York Times, is at the center of the ideology of the center, so we decided to do a case study of the ideology of the New York Times by way of its editors' notes, those episodic morsels of self-criticism which appear on page two right after the correction box."

"....We assembled all of the editors' notes since they [began] and did our best to extract a working list of their explicit and implicit rules. We got about two dozen rules. They're things like Times policy requires that "anyone attacked in the news columns be given a chance to reply." The Times practice is to present the view of both sides in a controversy. The Times has a policy of omitting racial, religious or ethnic identification unless they're shown to be pertinent to the news....The Times does not knowingly assign a book review to anyone who is an adversary of the author. Then we conducted a search to see whether the rules were applied evenly across the board."

"Our preliminary findings have resulted in a series of hypotheses, that these rules don't apply to prisoners; they don't apply to foreigners; they don't apply to communists; they don't apply to terrorists; they don't apply to Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or poor people generally, especially poor people of color. So ultimately, our hope is to tease out from all of the value assumptions at the Times, the ideology of the center."

"My point is that a serious study has yet to be done on the ideology of the center and that it matters. Because if, as many commentators today have remarked, objectivity is a way of reinforcing the status quo, then it's important to know what that status quo consists of."

"The center media may think they start each day "tabular rase", as far as values are concerned, but they don't. And there's nothing wrong with pursuing the ideal of objectivity, although why one should pursue something which we know, we already agree does not exist, continues to mystify me. It's okay to pursue it, provided we don't permit the conventions which it has given rise to -- balance, narrative, neutrality and the rest -- to obscure the political and cultural assumptions of those who claim not to have any. Until we identify them, we can't have the national conversation that Professor Carey and others have said is essential to our democracy."

Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the New York Daily News, similarly believes that the press fails to live up to its goals of impartiality and fairness because of a class and cultural narrowness. The press, he argued, is particularly insulated from working people, the poor and people of color. And that should be remedied, he argued, by actively seeking new kinds of people, with different experiences and class orientations, into our newsrooms and creating a culture there that encourages, rather than squashes, debate.

"Any journalist who actually ventures outside the newsroom on a regular basis and into the neighborhoods of urban America understands firsthand the combination of mistrust and resentment, fascination and fear, that many citizens feel toward the press..."

"I would agree, from my empirical observation in 20 years of dealing day to day with my journalistic colleagues, that a majority of reporters are probably liberal in their political orientation. I would say a majority of editors are probably much more conservative in their orientation. And most owners really don't care what political party is in power, just as long as they can influence and get the legislation they think is necessary to continue their enterprise."

"The biggest problem, however, is that the American people feel there is a class divide between those who produce news and information and those who receive it, and that the class divide manifests a class bias toward most Americans, whether they are of conservative or center or liberal: if they're working class and they're poor, they're considered less important in the society. I think that's the principal bias."

"Every poll that has been taken...indicates the American people do not support the current definition of free trade that both Republicans and Democrats represented by President Clinton have been proposing. They see Fast Track as another example of NAFTA. And the surprise that most people in the media had with the tremendous showing that Pat Buchanan in the Republican primaries was a manifestation to me of the fact that they were divorced from what are the problems that are really gnawing away at everyday working Americans."

"Another example was the battle over health insurance. I cannot believe the level of irresponsibility of most newspapers and television reporting, attempting to explain to the American people--every one of whom was concerned about the problems of lack of health insurance. After the defeat of Clinton's health plan, which was impossible to understand and not explained very well, we ended up with what? Limitations of choice by insurance companies and HMOs -- the very thing that the President was criticized for."

"Another example, recently in October there was a general strike on the island of Puerto Rico -- still a possession of the United States with a population greater than 25 states in the union, the biggest source of profit for American companies overseas is the Island of Puerto Rico. There was a general strike on that island opposing the privatization of the Puerto Rico telephone company. Hundreds of thousands of people stayed away from work, gave up pay, to oppose the privatization of a telephone company, and yet there was not a single report on any major network of this event on an American territory that is so critical to the United States.

"I could go on. But if we're talking about bias, there's a class, unconscious and sometimes conscious bias toward working Americans in the mass media."

Pam Fine, Managing Editor, Minneapolis Star Tribune, was somewhat less concerned with the composition of the newsroom and more focused on the insular behavior of those once they became journalists. The press, she argued, needs to dramatically open itself to its audiences, to their concerns, to how they live their lives, but without in any way abdicating their journalistic judgment.

"I was pleased to be asked to be part of this panel because I think that acknowledging the bias is critical to getting it out of our coverage.

"I don't think there's a magic bullet to fixing the problem. I think the fix lies in hiring open-minded and fair-minded reporters and editors. It lies in building expertise, and it lies in working diligently to get various perspectives on issues and events before and after they're covered."

"That's the major point...Most newsrooms do not solicit or actively consider reaction to their coverage. Someone can write a letter to the editor ... but no one will send them a response. Few of the letters, if any, will be widely discussed in the newsroom."

"Generally neither journalism schools nor newsrooms make it a point to teach reporters and editors the importance of listening to readers as a meaningful gauge to judge whether they're being fair. As a result, our reporters are more concerned about their colleagues' views than that of the readers."

"At our newspaper we've instituted a number of programs to get more input from readers. We have a reader representative who takes anywhere from a few calls to dozens a day, and he presents these calls in a log that we discuss at our news meetings. We send that log out electronically so the rest of the staff can see it."

"Some of these calls are only good for a chuckle....Readers bring their own biases to the breakfast table, but hearing those biases can be helpful, too...."

"One reader recently took us to task for using the phrase "arch conservative" in a story. He asked us what the "arch" meant....His call led us to talk about the pitfalls of using labels rather than on reporting someone's record or positions."

"We also took some hits recently for coverage of the Minneapolis Mayor's race. We were prepared for a dull campaign when out of the blue a former City Council member decided to challenge the incumbent. In a couple of early stories, until readers complained, we said less about the challenger's eight years on the City Council than on her more recent stint as a radio host who liked to interview guests in a hot tub. It turns out she got 45 percent of the vote.

"Based on these ... calls, our reader rep also writes a weekly column and asks the editors and reporters involved to explain why they did or didn't do certain things."

"We also correct our mistakes each day, usually amounting to about 50 a month... Lots of readers judge how fair we are by our willingness to tell them when we did it wrong."

"We also tell readers daily how to reach the editor of each section in case they have a comment or complaint."

"We hold community conversations, an idea I stole from the Miami Herald, in which our reporters and editors go out into a different community each month to find out what's on the minds of citizens. We also hold roundtables with leaders of local companies such as 3M or Honeywell, and with special interests such as school superintendents, arts organizations, or non-profit groups. These help us determine stories we're missing or have blown."

"Recently we started using input from citizens to help us frame or find weak spots or omissions in some of our reporting projects. Last month we wrote a three part series on housing durability showing that thousands of new houses built in Minnesota and around the country have structural problems that cost thousands of dollars to fix or make people sick. Before we published we asked a group of randomly selected citizens to listen to our findings and discuss them with the homeowners and the officials we interviewed. That discussion led us to do more reporting and helped us to develop a homebuyers' checklist and a list of legislative measures that citizens felt public officials should pursue or strengthen."

"Before the 1996 presidential and congressional campaigns we asked 200 citizens to discuss the issues they felt were most important for those races. We reported on their ideas and, in fact, covered the issues they deemed most important. We didn't exclude other issues, we just made sure we knew what mattered most to the people we write for."

"I want to make sure you get that last point. That we didn't stop making our own judgments about what to cover just because we got citizen input. That input informed our choices. But in the end, we had to decide what to focus on."

"It's our job to make judgments about what and who is newsworthy. I'm just saying that it's a lot harder to minimize or overlook minority or different views when you find a systematic way to make sure you hear them."

Danyel Smith, the 32-year-old editor of VIBE magazine, In an increasingly diverse and fragmented America, with a popular culture increasingly defined from the bottom up, and to a new generation of younger Americans who do not connect with a masss definition of culture, this old journalism is rapidly losing relevance. Like others, she argued the solution was, first, recognition and, second, changing the nature of the newsroom:

"I wanted to really start off saying is that I feel in the minority here not just because I'm black, but because I'm really excited about my job.

I feel like where I work is about the best place in America to work. That's because -- and call me old fashioned -- it's a very integrated workplace. We have all kinds of people that work at VIBE. Most of us are younger than I. We are white, we are Black, we are Latin, we are Asian, we are gay, we are straight, we are conservative and liberal, we are married and we are single. We are churchy and we are anti-church...."

What "I like about [it] ... is that we don't all get along--at all. We fight relentlessly. We curse each other out, we are not afraid to offend each other."

"There's a guy -- a Senior Editor -- very red haired, freckled faced, white, Irish guy....We went to Berkeley together, Carter Harris. He came to VIBE under a firestorm of controversy because I guess we supposedly hired somebody white when we should have hired somebody black because we cover a lot of black things. Whatever the case, he got there."

"When Angela's Ashes was published, he brought it to work. I swear he brought everyone a copy. No one really wanted to read it. He brought it up in editorial meetings that he was mad that no one had read the book. He was feeling like his culture was being ignored, and that we didn't really care about Irish Americans. So finally at least I read it. I remember coming to work after I read it, I think I even paged him that night and said I just finished the book and I love the ending and I cried throughout...."

"I'm in a meeting the next day and I said Carter, I love the book. The whole starvation thing and the famine and the drama, I'm just telling him how much I loved it. Somebody else walked in the office and said, "F... that, have you read 'Roots'?"..."

"I think VIBE is the future of what American journalism is going to be, whether any of us here really like it or not....The fact is that this is a really integrated country and the newsrooms just aren't very integrated."

"I know it's always like the black girl has to bring up the race thing, but I'm going to be the black girl and I'm going to bring up the race thing. There just are no people of color, really, in newsrooms across the country. The reason why I think we put out such a great publication is because we talk to each other. The news that we generate, the things that we think are important, we fight about. Some of them we say in editorial meetings. Why does the white person have to be the center of that story? Isn't there a black person that could say that? We talk about these things. We don't just sort of dance around them. We don't just leave it alone. We address them every day."

"...The New York Times is a great publication...I was a critic there for awhile, and I learned a lot, though it was hell on wheels....But I recall being in meetings there, and I was definitely one of two black people in the room when we were deciding on how to cover what maybe some people here don't think is very important, but pop music coverage. When decisions are being made and there's not one person of Asian descent, there's not one person of Latino descent, there's not one person of African American descent... I think that's important. Culture is at the root of all the news and everything else that we cover....I feel like there are a lot of older white editors who are very relentless about holding onto the reins of who defines culture and who defines news."

"There's a whole new generation out here that doesn't really care what the New York Times has to say about culture. We're just not going to pick it up...I find it not even frustrating anymore. I just wonder what these papers are thinking about. Because you guys are losing readers, you talk about it all the time. You wonder why."

"I was reading the letters section in El Decor the other day. There was a letter from a woman who said, 'Im so disgusted because I can't find the furniture I want to buy.' All these furniture chains are going out of business because they are not designing funriture for a new generation of buyers. I think that you all are not designing newspapers for a new generation of readers. I feel like if you don't realize this, where are you going to be? We'll be happy to take over."

Barbara Cochran: "We seem to have agreed that the problem here is not one of political ideology, it's one of cultural separateness."

Fred Barnes: "I agree even with Victor when he talks about the ideology of the center. The only thing I would do is I would place that ideology more on the left... When you look at the press' view, particularly abortion and gay rights, foreign policy, economic policy, racial issues, the role of government, the basic conception that people have of America, I think it is a liberal viewpoint."

Victor Navasky: "Who owns the paper is very important. . . Dolly Shiff's New York Post ... was this liberal, warm, fuzzy minded paper. All of a sudden it was sold to Rupert Murdoch, and overnight it became a right wing tabloid in a very different sense than it was... I take very seriously this message about diversity. The answer is not in the newsroom. The answer has to be international. These transnational conglomerates ... are the new owners. You have to find a way to make them responsive to audiences, to readers, to listeners, to viewers, and that may involve all kinds of political solutions that are not within anybody's sight right now, including international antitrust action."

Juan Gonzalez: "I was surprised when Fred mentioned ... Republicans, conservatives and Christians [because] I think that most African Americans, most Latinos and quite a few other groups in the broad strokes [also] feel that the media is biased against them. I can't tell you how many times I have been in an inner city neighborhood when the press arrived, especially the TV cameras, and the degree of outright antagonism and anger people feel that they're being exploited. . . The people who live there never see [the press] other than when something like this happens. . . and when they see the report . . .they feel [it] one-sided, not comprehensive, not a factual explanation of the situation.

"So that's why I say there's a deepening crisis of credibility for major sectors of the American people. Whole groups, that are increasingly feeling used and exploited by our profession."

"These mega gang bangs, like the OJ trial or . . . Princess Di, then blurred the distinction between news and entertainment to the point where it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Or when Time Magazine puts on the front cover 'America's Fascination with Buddhism,' and a picture of Brad Pitt and the new movie. This is a news magazine that does this."

"Every time you see an 11:00 o'clock news show hyping the mega-movie that just ended and sticking into their news program some like news angle to bring the readers from the movie into the news broadcast, it makes me cringe. Do you think people don't see how they're being manipulated?

"I would not call it the mainstream media. This is the corporate media. The corporate media is increasingly blurring the distinction between representing news and information to people and marketing and entertainment. We are allowing this to happen and not continuing to battle against it."

Danyel Smith: "How do you get people to watch a news program that they're not interested in and how then can we make news programs so that the 11:00 o'clock news isn't just filled with sensational things and isn't just filled with marketing tie-ins to the CBS Movie of the Week?"

Juan Gonzalez: "To help diversify in a class way, in terms of different experiences, our profession needs to open up from what it is now, the kids that go to J-School and then start in the small town and move to the big town. Editors have a tendency to create people in their own image. If the editor doesn't like you for some reason you don't rise... There's a self-selection process that goes on within the profession that until you break the mold and get some new blood in. .. new blood in not just gender or race but class, I think you're still going to keep producing the same things. The editors will get you that way."

"I think if you're going to change some of the composition of the journalistic workforce there has to be some kind of a program that takes people that are already in other careers."

"There was a program called the Berkeley Program for Minority Journalists, which probably put more African Americans and Latinos into the journalism profession than any other program or any other journalism school, and it ended several years back....It was taking people in careers...They had another profession, and it offered them a chance if they wanted to be journalists to train them in a crash basic training course, and then guarantee them an opportunity at a starting job.

Barbara Cochran: "Pam, when you interview new employees, how do you find out what kind of ideas they have? How do you check for any ideological bias? Do you consciously try to pick people with points of views that may not be highly represented in your newsroom?"

Pam Fine: "I don't think I'm that concerned in my interviews relative to finding out what people's ideology is. I think through the normal course of give and take you find out what people are interested in"

"It's very difficult to try to use some number or some ideological bent as the way to measure diversity in the newsroom. Moving from Atlanta to a Midwest newsroom I found offered quite a bit of change. In a newsroom with 400 reporters in it, as ours is, you have the range ... The business desk is a lot more conservative than the metro desk..."

Fred Barnes: "I'm certainly not in favor of ... some ideological test to say well gee, we have an opening for a conservative, but if you're too liberal, we're not going to hire you. I would not recommend hiring people who are not trained journalists, or at least intend to be. I wouldn't hire a businessman to be the business editor. People who are not in journalism and come into journalism, generally don't do that well. They look at the world differently.

Question: "My name is Trevor Butterworth. I'm a student of the school. I previously worked for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C."

"Neither conservatives or socialists, Republicans or Democrats, Christians or Buddhists, hold the mirror up to nature, to borrow a phrase from the philosopher Richard Rorty. If we are talking about bias, a commitment to reporting truth necessitates being independent. I think what some, certainly a lot of conservatives seem to forget is that liberal democracy allows all these things to flourish -- most importantly the free press. A journalist must, therefore, be rationally committed to some sense of liberal principles."

Fred Barnes: "I agree with that."

Juan Gonzalez: "In the attempt to recreate objective reality, does objective reality exist independently of your seeing it? And in our attempt, I always said yes. But I also understand that everyone sees objective reality with their own eyes... All we can do is to try to make as best an attempt and, hopefully, as a reader, marshal as many different perceptions of that same reality to have more comprehensive judgments."

Question: "I went upstairs and did a nexus search on all the permutations of ultra liberal, ultra conservative, arch liberal, and arch conservative... There were 378 articles mentioning all the permutations of ultra liberal, and there were, indeed, about three times as many, 1,091 talking about ultra and arch conservative."

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