Mike Wallace of CBS News' 60 Minutes opened the final session by addressing the question offered by the session organizers, "Are we journalists first or something else? We are journalists," he argued, and as the session played out, the implications of that answer took on a growing importance.

"Are we journalists first or something else? We are journalists first."

"There was a book published I guess a year, year and a half ago called "Breaking the News" by a fellow by the name of James Fallows. .. In his first chapter, he started out on why Americans hate journalists so. Then he held me up as an example of why. Subordinate to me, Peter Jennings. Here's what happened.

"It was one of those Fred Friendly seminars on television and the hypothetical was that Jennings, Wallace, got the opportunity to go out on patrol with .. a North Vietnamese patrol in the Vietnam war .. with a camera crew and so forth. All of a sudden about 150 yards away, they suddenly realized there's a South Vietnamese patrol coming and with them maybe half a dozen American advisors.

"Now here you are. You're an American, you're a reporter, you've finally gotten the opportunity to cover this story, and suddenly you see South Vietnamese and more important ... Americans there too. The questioner, Charlie Ogletree, a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School .. said to Mr. Jennings, "Peter, what do you do?" Peter thought for a full 10 or 15 seconds and then said, "Well, I'd probably lose my life for doing it, but I would call, I would shout, and I would warn my American countrymen what was about to happen to them, that they were about to walk into an ambush."

"Charlie turns to me. "Mr. Wallace, what about yourself?" Well, I am a contrarian by nature. Mind you, this is live on tape, and it's going to be broadcast and you're thinking oh, come on. I say, "I'm a reporter. I'm a reporter here to cover this story." It didn't occur to me at that moment that I'd undoubtedly get killed the way that Jennings thought he was going to get killed if he were to shout. But when you are covering a story of that nature or any nature, what are you first? You are, in my estimation, a reporter."

"Incidentally, I was sitting beside, on the panel, General William Westmoreland who looked at me like a hair in his soup."

"Jennings listened to me and said, 'You know something? I'm sorry I didn't think it through correctly. Mike was right. We are reporters first.'"

"What I learned from that episode and that hypothetical was that it seemed that everybody, everybody had thought more carefully about who they were and what function they were performing -- everybody on that panel. There were military folks, there were religious figures, there were two reporters, and there must have been 20 people on the panel. And everybody had a moral code, everybody had a different kind of understanding, had thought these things through much more than we had as reporters.

"So I would like to throw that up at the very beginning to see what my colleagues on the panel feel about that, and also what the audience feels about that.

Charles Gibson: "When you said, 'I am a reporter first,' tell me what you meant."

Mike Wallace: "I'm not an American first, I'm a reporter first. What Jim Fallows was saying. Hey, Americans hate the press because of journalists' feeling that their job is holy. (His implication is that) your responsibility is to save those Americans out there. Forget about getting the story. Forget about getting the story. Be an American. Save those people whom you conceivably can save from being ambushed.

"Do you ask a doctor, when you go to a doctor, do you want to know whether he's a doctor first or a Methodist?"

Charles Gibson: "I don't mean to quarrel with the hypothetical, but we're now in a situation that wherever you stand, wherever I stand, wherever there is a television camera, that now has an affect on what's going on. Your ability to be a reporter in the pure and abstract sense may be gone."

Laurie Goodstein: National Religion Correspondent of the New York Times, argued that there are many more people of faith in newsrooms than some surveys, particularly what she called the faulty and much overstated Lichter-Rothman study of the Media Elite would suggest. But that specrtum tends to be mainstream and does not include the growing number of people of orthodox faith who are moving into the political debate in America.

"As a religion reporter, I'm privy to a little secret in the newsroom: I sit in my cubicle -- sometimes I call it my confessional -- (and) people come to me and they come out of the (secular) closet. I will...say there are many more people of faith, closeted believers in our newsrooms than is commonly believed. I know this (because) reporters, very senior editors, researchers would come to me and they would talk about their pastors, they would talk about the sermons they had heard last Sunday, they would talk about the books about spirituality they were reading, or about the soup kitchen they were involved in at the church down the street. Often it has nothing to do with weekly service attendance."

"....Who is not represented? It's the group I will call .. the ultras. The ultra-orthodox, the ultra-religious. And I don't mean ultra-orthodox Jews here. I mean people who believe in the fundamentals of their faith. We have Christians, but we don't have very many evangelicals or pentacostals or biblical literalists. We have Jews but .. not very many ultra-orthodox. And we have a few Muslims, as I said, but not many of those who you find fasting during the month of Ramadan...

"I'm going to close with a story about why this is important to have the ultras in our newsroom. This is a true story...

"At a newspaper that shall remain anonymous .. sent a reporter to cover a prayer revival on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The event featured faith* headings, calls for school prayer. There were some condemnations there of abortion and homosexuality. It was, all in all, a pretty typical evangelical revival meeting held on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The article said that, but added this sentence. They said, 'At times, however, the mood turned hostile toward the lawmakers in the stately white building behind the stage, i.e., the capitol.' Then they quoted a Christian radio broadcaster speaking from the stage who said, 'Let's pray that God will slay everyone in the Capitol.' Slay as in kill.

"Any Pentecostal knows that asking God to slay someone means to slay in spirit, slay in the holy spirit, praying that they are overcome with love for God, for Jesus. The problem was, there were no pentecostals to consult in the newsroom. But the bigger problem was there's so little familiarity with this religious culture that no one in the newsroom stopped to doubt that these anti-abortion prayer mongers would really want God to kill all the members of Congress.

"It made for a very embarrassing correction. But that's not really the best reason that you need to have the ultras in our newsroom. You need them because they are going to tell us about sides of American life that we don't know. Unless reporters like me try and find them out. You need them to bring a perspective to any story they cover. But more importantly, you need them to undermine the stereotypes we have about each other" that their colleagues cover.

Ann Marie Lipinski, the magaing editor of the Chicago Tribune and University of Michigan graduate, argued that to fulfill the need for diversity within the apparent limits of how it can be measured, the answer must lies in remembering some of the core principles of journalism.

"When I came to Michigan and...reported to the Michigan Daily...we didn't really talk about these (diversity) issues....They were not dominating newsrooms...We talked about journalism. We talked about 'the story.' We talked about getting it right. We talked about being first and being good and being accurate...

"Shortly after I left, and for a long time thereafter...the equation reversed itself .. and there was a lot of talk about the issues that we're discussing here today. .. I think now they enjoy a balance. I don't mean to hold up my generation as having had it correctly, or the one after that as having gotten it wrong. I think we probably were each a little blind to what was not before us ..."

"I go to...focus groups and I see people who really mirror a lot of what I see in the newsroom. .. And they still look at us and don't think we're very relevant to them. That's not because they don't see their opinions expressed in the newspaper, I think it's because they don't really see their lives reported on in the newspaper, and I don't think that is necessarily because people unlike them are not in my newsroom.

"I don't know that you have to be a Pentecostal to know what the word "slay" means. I don't know that you have to be a born-again Christian to know that a slur in a news story is a slur against born-again Christians. So I wonder whatever happened to some very old-fashioned standards which go to sort of the heart of what I embraced when I first came to this campus in 1974.

"It's about good journalism, and if you don't know what the word "slay" is or if you think you might have been confused by it or if the meaning wasn't clear, or even if you think you really understood it perfectly but it sounded like a fairly outrageous thing for somebody to say, you might ask them what they meant. It might become clear.

"If you see the term "son of a bitch born-again Christians" or whatever Ashenfelder's reference was, I don't think you need to be a born-again Christian to know that that may not belong in a news report in your newspaper.

"So for those of us who might believe that by populating our newsrooms with people who believe a certain thing or believe a range of things we somehow protect ourselves from these kinds of grievances or that we can then pretend to represent the needs and concerns of our readers, I would suggest that that is not necessarily true.

"The question was asked of the first panel, I think the question was are diversity and quality mutually exclusive? Of course not, but I would also caution us that they don't necessarily one lead to another."

P.J. O'Rourke: Foreign Affairs Desk Chief of Rolling Stone, echoed doubts of others about the depth to which the groups we come from dictate how we think. He also, however, suggested that journalists should not set themselves apart from other Americans.

"I don't want to argue, I can't argue against diversity, but I feel compelled...to try and at least bring up some caveat to diversity. The objection that I would make to diversity is not about diversity per se, it's about how much we identify with the various groups that we come from, or that we claim that we come from, or that other people insist that we come from."

"As to journalist first, I don't know if I'd sacrifice my life to save other people's lives, .. but I know that I'm an American way before I'm a journalist. Journalism is just not that noble a professional. I'm a journalist like a person is a bus driver. Now you want a person who is a bus driver to be a bus driver first when they're driving that bus. Right? Especially if you're on it...You don't want them to be thinking born-again Christian ... On the other hand, if that bus is kind of cruising down the street about 15 miles an hour and it sees a badly injured person laying beside the road, then the bus driver becomes a decent human being before he's a bus driver. He can, in all good conscience, stop that bus, get off the bus, and help that person."

Omar Wasow, Founder and President of New York Online, a leading developer of online ventures:

"I am struck by how profoundly insular the news world is and how much handwringing and anxiety there is. As was said, you step outside of these walls, and most people just don't care. And it's not to say they don't care about diversity... but the world I'm in right now is full of small companies that were started by people who had been goofing around on computers for many years, and sort of got kind of the foolish idea that they could turn this hobby into maybe a business, and lo and behold, they were up and running on the Internet."

"There's a sense that the media is 'the big media.'" But "there are a million different niche media emerging, and they have nothing to do with like traditional big media."

"Who is a journalist? At what stage am I a journalist? I'm going to trot out the old cliche now that everyone today is a journalist. I mean two things by that.

"The first is that as a result of the kind of radical drop in the cost of processing power and the radical drop in the cost of band width, it really is now possible for individuals to reach mass audiences with relatively little means...

"The second thing is that because there is so much media, we all need to be able to interpret media better. Or interpret information better. In that sense .. everybody needs to be a better consumer. That is not about technology, that is about a kind of bigger idea, to my mind, literacy."

"So for me, I wonder sort of why are K-12 schools in urban neighborhoods such a disaster, and I don't see that engaged as a real issue in the way that... To me, it's a horror beyond my wildest imagination, and it persists year in and year out."

Charles Gibson: "If there is this kind of fractionalization and the ability to get what you need or what you're looking for through new sources of the media, does it really make any difference to talk about diversity?"

Vanessa Williams, the District government reporter for the Washington Post and current President of the National Association of Black Journalists, offered that perhaps the key to creating journalism that reflected community was an open mind. It might even be considered one of the core principles of the profession. Yet she suggested that striving for racial, gender and other sorts of more obvious measures of diversity was necessary to keep the newsroom conversation always open.

"Why should people put faith in us? Because we've tried to make ourselves into .. some kind of man-made droids who are smarter, more righteous or altruistic or more able to control our emotions than the people that we're trying to reach. So is it a wonder that they go like who are you folks?

"I want to go back to something that I talked about this morning: people seeming to be afraid of ... differences....If you're really going to be journalists then you've got to think broad; give folks the benefit of the doubt; not be so certain as you go charging into a situation, a location, somebody's life.

"When you walk into a public housing project do you see it as some kind of vast wasteland of a bunch of lazy, slovenly people? Or do you stop to consider maybe if it didn't cost a royal salary to get a house these days, some of these people wouldn't have to be stuck in these things."

"I don't think that's being sensitive or liberal. It's just saying I don't know."

"People keep saying what difference does it make? Faces and colors and shapes and sizes aren't as important as what people think, but somebody has got to be in there to start discussion. Otherwise people probably just kind of run out the door and do what they've always done, which has not always been accurate, fair, portrayal of communities that were not white and middle class.

"So I am not ashamed at all about being an African American, a woman, a reporter, a volunteer, a friend, a daughter, a sister -- and at different times, depending on the situation, one of those will join up with the journalist in me to try to do the best I can to understand a story and to understand a situation and a person. The challenge is can you be fair and do you try to be fair? Or are you this perfect being called a journalist that never makes a mistake?"

Sandy Suaboda: "I teach journalism at Wayne State University, and it's really encouraging that we're having this conference today, but for me to personally take something really worthwhile I want to hear what I should do in my classroom with my students to make them better journalists...."

P.J. O'Rourke: "Just teach them to read and write. That's two things that an awful lot of journalists these days can't do."

Vanessa Williams: "I think you need to do a little bit more than that if you're going to be a journalist. ..[L]earn about other people, other cultures, other countries, economics, all these issues."

Ann Marie Lipinski: "Tell them to go out and have a life, perhaps before they go into journalism. Don't take a straight line from undergraduate perhaps to a graduate journalism school into a newsroom."

Joshua Benton, from the Toledo Blade: "[Does] the Internet and other media, whether that helps the cause of journalism by having lots of points of views have the ability to be out there and have an audience, or whether it hurts it by removing the filter of the cadre of editors and reporters."

Ann Marie Lipinski: "I would disagree that everybody is a journalist, although everybody certain has now the ability or the power to masquerade as one or to perform in a guise that appears like one."

Voice: "Are we going to license them?"

Ann Marie Lipinski: No. .. But to say that everybody is a journalist or to compare Drudge. That is a form of gossip... [N]ot all reporting [is] created equal, although it certainly is viewed that way by a lot of the readers .. who do not distinguish between well reported, well sourced, well resourced, well vetted information, and that which is rumor or gossip."

Charles Eisendrath: "I think if we don't consider ourselves journalists first or aim for that, then we end up going down a lot of false paths. The question was, what would you teach your journalism students in class? I would say it is a high calling. We do have the First Amendment. No other profession has a constitutional provision like that. It's a high calling. I would argue that we are journalists first, and should be."

Vanessa Williams: "That begs the question of what is a journalist? Who sets the standards? .. Whose point of view are we talking about? Everybody has a different one."

Mike Wallace: "What do you mean, point of view?"

Vanessa Williams: "You don't have one?"

Mike Wallace: "Of course I do, but that doesn't have to bleed over into the kind of things I put on the air."

Tom Rosenstiel: "I've had the benefit of going to all of these forums, all three of them so far. This question of point of view has come up repeatedly. We've learned, as the consensus from the 60 or so panelists that we've heard from in the course of three of these, and many more people in the audiences, that point of view is actually not one of the central questions about journalism. Standards of proof, belief in fairness, principles of accuracy, principles of some sense of distance in the sense that you're not secretly a propagandist..."

Mike Wallace: "That is a point of view. That's a journalistic point of view."

Tom Rosenstiel: "Right. .. But the question of so-called objectivity or what is your authorial point of view is not essential to the decision of whether one is a journalist."

Afternoon Session's High Points

James Spaniolo, Dean of the College of communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University, was invited to offer some reaction to the day.

James Spaniolo: "The ambience here during part of the day was reminiscent of the '60s on this campus and other campuses, so it was a reminder of those kind of exchanges with people of different points of view."

"We've really been privileged to listen to some very honest and even personal conversations here this morning. I've been attending meetings of journalists for many years, but some of the comments that have been shared have been more personal and more probing than I've heard on almost any occasion.

"We've certainly heard a lot about whether diversity in journalism really matters. There may be no consensus about how to do it, but there does seem to be a consensus that we need to strive very hard to reach out and to understand the communities around us, the people we're reporting about and writing about."

"Good journalism must necessarily include a full understanding of what's being reported about, and it's a most difficult role, as all of these journalists would be quick to admit. But I have to express a personal opinion as I listened to the discussion about whether journalists are journalists first or they're African Americans or evangelical Christians. To me a journalist who ceases to remember that he or she is a human being is in trouble, and I really think that comes first."

The Day in the Context of the Committee of Concerned Journalists Series

Tom Rosenstiel, the vice chairman of the Committee and the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded by trying to summarize the direction of the day's discussion.

"Today I think we heard the rationale for diversity: that out of diverse opinions we are more likely to get to the truth. The Hutchins Commission asked, can the news media represent constituent groups of society in a way that makes the stories we tell more true? Without diversity, we don't have the context to ask the right questions...

"So, we can't have great journalism perhaps without diversity. News judgments are made as conversations between journalists.

"But 20 years down the road we also have some lessons .. among other things, that numbers aren't enough. That you have to change the climate of the newsroom. That we still tend to hear the loudest voice, the shrillest voice, and cover that. Diversity in the standard ways that we measure it doesn't seem to include class.

"And perhaps more importantly today, diversity is also overrun with other concerns. When Ray Suarez talks about the bias in newscasts towards the rich, towards the people that advertisers want, diversity almost seems like a kind of quaint issue sometimes to be holding a conference about.

"Del Warner said I thought with great personal credibility, that so long as the bottom line is the bottom line, diversity will be a dream. That employers can accommodate it, but that's a different thing. Warner had to go out and find her own sponsor to have a program about seniors or a segment about seniors on her program.

"Perhaps indeed the whole rationale that we use for diversity is too limited. Peter Bell [said the emphasis on] physical diversity .. suggests that race and gender are the most important forces in shaping our lives. [What about] class, education, family, religion and all the other things that [shape us]? Are we reducing the question of diversity to something that's skin deep?

"Bell called race and gender "Crude proxies for ideas". Can the problems of diversity be solved with hiring practices? Can we get into the ideas of the people and the beliefs of the people that we're trying to hire? Clearly here we got into areas that were very problematic. Everybody said no. Basically, it's not practical, it may not be legal.

"Linda Foley I thought with great eloquence talked about the point being what's the purpose of journalism in the first place? The failure that we have in terms of diversity is that we've forgotten, we've lost our conviction and the idea that our job is to give people information to self govern. She said our job is to engage them by giving them information, not to make them feel helpless."

"John Hockenberry suggested understanding community is what we're really about, and that if we balkanize our communities, if we create demographics to a ludicrous extreme, it leads us to the same problem that we have when we .. create journalism by market research. You create little stories that seem to be generated for a particular mathematical audience, but it doesn't seem real and it's not the way that people live their lives.

".. I'm not sure that you can give up on the notion of race and gender diversity because we may have no other door in, but what we have to understand, it sounded to me like, is that the aim here has got to be true intellectual diversity. And simply creating a newsroom with the right number of faces or the right kind of faces serves little purpose.

"It also is a little more daunting because it means that even if you created a room full of journalists who were capable of the conversation that you wanted to create, that if you worked for a company that wasn't much interested in the product that that conversation would produce, that that might not do any good, either.