In his overview of the Lewinsky-Clinton story, Tom Patterson, the Benjamin C. Bradlee professor of government and the press at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, argued that this story was a long time in the making, the consequence of years in which journalists' attempts at sustaining the investigative journalism following Watergate and the softening of the news has led to a lower threshold of what is a story, a greater reliance on allegations from unnamed sources and a rush to negative judgment by the press. This "weak form of investigative criticism" has, dulled of the public's response to news and undermined its trust in the press.

"Are there new rules of journalism and a new journalistic culture? I think a preparatory question I would ask about that question is what do we mean by new?

"The tendencies that we see in the news today- the reliance on unnamed and anonymous sources, the insertions of journalists' opinions- scholars began to recognize these tendencies in the news in the late 1970s, and they've increased with time.

"A recently published study, for example, found that in the early 1970s, 75 percent of TV journalists' own sound bytes were in the form of factual statements. They inserted facts into the story to give context. Only 15 percent were in the opinion/analysis category. Twenty years later, the early 1990s, 75 percent were in the opinion/analysis category, and only 15 percent were factual inserts. This was combined with a trend in television news in which the dominant voice in the news in the early 1970s was the voice of the newsmaker. By the early 1990s the voice that the viewers heard most often was the voice of the journalist. "...One contributing factor [is] the difficulty of sustaining the deep and careful investigative reporting that characterized the Washington Post's Watergate coverage, combined with journalists' desire, a lesson learned from Watergate, to hold officials' feet to the fire.

"The Post was nearly 50 stories deep into Watergate before it reported a fact that proved to be factually incorrect. The problem with sustaining that kind of journalism, as journalists well know, is it takes a lot of resources, it takes a lot of time. It's not an everyday thing. What we see ... from the studies is that by the late 1970s we find a substitute for careful, deep investigative reporting. Allegations that surface in the news based on claims by sources that are not combined with factual digging on the reporters' part. That tendency increased in the 1980s, increased again in the 1990s, and the mix began to change. The use of unnamed and anonymous sources becomes a larger proportion of the total, and of course that tendency emerges full blown in the Lewinsky story.

"I think the story is closer to the end of the line in this trend rather than the beginning of the line.

"This development ... of a weak form of investigative criticism, becomes intertwined in the 1980s with another development, the softening of the news because of competitive pressures, much of it owing to cable television. Sex and similar topics increasingly worked their way into mainstream news. The tendencies, unnamed and anonymous sources, reference to rumor, are more robust in these news stories than in the hard news stories because of the nature of the subject. Sex is often a second hand story. Again, it peaks with the Lewinsky story.

"A curious, and to me an important result of this surplus of watchdog journalism is that it has weakened the press' capacity to serve as the public's watchdog. The public's reaction to the Lewinsky story embracing, if tentatively, Clinton, and a backlash against... Starr, caught many of us by surprise, but perhaps we shouldn't have been so surprised... We had a heads up on that reaction in the campaign finance story. This is a true scandal that should have caught the public's attention, should have outraged the public, and did not. I think that rampant watchdog journalism applied to all aspects of public life -- big and small -- and with loose standards for what is a newsworthy allegation has at least three undesirable effects on the public.

"One, it lowers the public's expectations of its leaders and institutions and thus its tolerance for behaviors that perhaps should not be tolerated.

"Secondly, it squanders the potential of the public for action. No one, save perhaps some journalists, can be outraged all of the time. When we expect the public to respond to all of these stories about every aspect of politics, large and small, I think a predictable reaction from the public is that they'll react to none of them.

"Thirdly, it undermines the public's trust in the press, and thus its willingness to take cues from the press. This is only partly a result of the factual accuracy of specific news stories... The relentless critic, the type who finds fault everywhere and in everybody, ultimately loses the ability to get the public's ear. It's like the boy who cried wolf. I think that's the ultimate irony of this new journalism. Premised on the media's need to be a vigilant watchdog, it actually undermines that critical function."

David Shribman, Washington Bureau Chief of the Boston Globe, addressed the lessons of the Lewinsky story with three points: that today the many examples of restraint by the press are by nature unknown and unappreciated--overrun by the cases of excess. That a surplus of interpretation in the press is a major issue for the press, including in this story. And that cynicism is a key factor rather than excess.

"...As you were speaking, Tom, I thought of something that Bob Byrd[sic] once said about running for office. He said don't ever run a campaign that would embarrass your mother. I think maybe the only rules that now apply, at least in the mainstream press, is don't run a newspaper bureau or a newspaper office that would embarrass your mother. That's becoming harder and harder these days.

"You spoke a little bit about the growth towards analysis. I think one of the reasons we are doing more and more analysis has to do in part with the difference in culture... and the notion [since] the 1980 presidential campaign ... where we in the pencil press felt so overwhelmed by electronic journalism... that we thought that our little niche was analysis. That we could analyze and give you more perspective than television could. Therefore, that became the thing that we thought we did very well.

"...We probably do it much like Shakespeare said of love, "He loved not wisely, but too well." We're kind of knee deep in allegations, but all of us I think who run news bureaus or have to make our own kind of judgments in our own work are more careful, I think, than the public sometimes realizes...

"People come to me, I suppose not as often as I'd like, but they do come in our bureau from time to time with stuff that seems just fantastically appealing as a newsman, and sometimes it's not as good as it ought to be, it's not sourced as well as it ought to be, and we simply can't use it. That happens more often than I think people outside this room realize, and there's from time to time an example where I'll call Matt Storin, who is the editor of the Globe, and tell him that we know something or we understand something's going on, and I basically say, I would like your permission or I'd like your endorsement on my decision that we'd like to be beaten on this story. ... I haven't been penalized inside the newspaper for that. It's something that I think once in awhile it's a provider privilege you should be able to exert.

"I wanted to talk a little bit about ... the changes in political reporting, or the death of the political reporter as Walter and I sometimes talk about. I think you can measure that in the difference between the signature campaign books of 1960 and '64 which of course were written by Theodore White, and the signature campaign book of 1996 which was really an intoxicating read but a different kind of book entirely, and that's Roger Simon's "Show Time". ...The campaign books by Theodore White ... hold up very, very well -- not only as chronicles of a campaign, but as stories about America. They are deep in demographics, they're deep in talking about the ideological rifts and the special interests within both parties... Roger Simon's book is a much different kind of book entirely. It's the kind of book that you actually laugh out loud at...

"One last comment, the cycle of cynicism. We all have, because of our experience ... cynical views of politicians these days and cynical expectations, and unfortunately for all of us, the politics has never failed to let us down. I think we're all in kind of a big cycle here in which we expect the worst of them, and then they go ahead and make our expectations seem modest. I think at some point there's going to be a backlash to this. ..."

Ann McDaniel, Washington Bureau Chief of Newsweek, the magazine that worked hardest and longest on the Lewinsky story, held this up as a case of the press working at its best:

"I don't disagree with anything that Tom or David has said about the importance of reviewing these issues and worrying about journalistic standards and whether we're applying them today in the same way they were applied 20 years ago. Although I take a more optimistic view of what's happened in the last eight weeks or ten weeks. ... I think there's reason to believe that this story has caused us to return in some ways to old standards.

"We at Newsweek, Mike Isikoff our very talented investigative reporter, began covering the Paula Jones story many years ago and first heard about Kathleen Willey and Monica Lewinsky roughly a year ago... We didn't see that it was newsworthy at that point. ...but we didn't choose to quit reporting, because we knew the Paula Jones lawsuit was moving towards a possible trial, and we knew that there was a possibility that there would be women that the public did not know about at that point coming forward and testifying under oath about their relationships with the President of the United States. ... [Mike] did it using the same standards and the same rules and the same practices and sometimes even better practices than journalists traditionally use in covering every other kind of story, serious or not.

"For example, Kathleen Willey told him that she had had this encounter with the President on a particular day, that when she had emerged from the President's private study that Lloyd Bentsen, I believe Gene Sperling, but I've forgotten the other group of economic advisors were standing outside the President's office waiting to see him. As many of you know, the President's schedule of meetings is not public. ... So Mike wanted a better idea of whether Kathleen Willey could have actually seen Lloyd Bentsen, would he have been there at the time she came out, at the time she alleged he did. He called Bentsen, talked to Jack DeVore, talked to a number of people, nobody would tell him, and most people just didn't remember...

"...He wandered in one day and said I need to go to the University of Texas. I said why? He said I want to look at Lloyd Bentsen's papers. They've just been archived there.

"...He went, convinced the library to let him look at the Secretary's calendar from the day in question, and lo and behold, there Lloyd Bentsen was on the calendar for 3:00 o'clock and a notation that he had met with the President and the other economic advisors.

"Now that doesn't tell us any more about what happened between Bill Clinton and Kathleen Willey in that room that day. But it does tell us that she was there. If he had come back and said Lloyd Bentsen wasn't there that day, we would have had a lot more hesitation about whether to believe her or not.

"There have been a number of nuggets like that that have not been easy reporting. ... Mike and I would have conversations about once a month about what he was learning over the last year. We kept them very quiet. ...Certainly as competitive journalists we wanted to sit on our own reporting, but even more importantly, you don't want these kind of rumors going around. ... We felt that they were such serious allegations that it was important that we keep them quiet unless and until we were prepared to publish them....

"Since that time we have had more meetings than I've ever participated in in my journalistic career discussing who the sources are of events, we have double-checked reporting, triple-checked, quadruple-checked things. ...There's not been a source anonymous or named that I have not known who the source was ... how many sources we have, why we believe them....

"Definitely there are things we can do better. It's very hard in a story like this when it's such ugly accusations and so many of the sources are anonymous. But I also think we're quick to beat up on the press and quick to beat up on ourselves when in fact I actually think the story has in some ways caused us to slow down and say all right, we are dealing with something incredibly serious here and we'd better not just go off saying things that we don't think at least represent the allegations these women are making. It may turn out that they're absolutely false, but they have had an impact on the government of this country by simply making those accusations and by making those accusations not only in the media, but under oath."

Bill Kristol, Editor and Publisher of the Weekly Standard, believes that in judging whether journalism has changed for better or for worse, the determining question should be whether the public has access to more information:

"What's wrong with anonymous sources? Ann Devroy ... was certainly the best White House reporter when I worked in the White House, and maybe the best White House reporter the last 10 or 15 years. I'd bet a study would show that she used more background and anonymous quotes than most other White House reporters, and she therefore got much more information out of the White House than other reporters. ... Why is it now a principle of journalism that on the record quotation or on the record reporting is always or even usually better than background quotations or sources who ask to be described in certain ways? ...

"...There is something about all these sessions where journalists get together and lament the decline of the profession that is sort of amusing to those of us who aren't really journalists by profession. I mean every profession does this. My father-in-law's a physician, and believe me, physicians are endlessly getting together and lamenting the passing of the good old days...

"Sometimes things were better in the good old days. I'm a conservative, and I have a certain stake in that view in general. ... But it shouldn't just be taken as a premise that of course it was better when there was more deference to the establishment media, that the loss of trust in the establishment media is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a loss of some trust, especially if that trust is blind trust, is a good thing. The overview of the Committee of Concerned Journalists states concern that we've begun to doubt ourselves and the meaning of our profession. We often say that doubting yourself is a good thing not a bad thing in this country. If a bunch of businessmen got up and said we've begun to doubt ourselves when we're executives of tobacco companies or executives of auto companies in 1969, people would have said that's a good thing...

"The ultimate question is sort of on net, are we healthier as a result of these developments? The ultimate question about journalism is on net do we get ultimately more information as a result of the explosion of sources, the speeding up of the news cycle, and I think it's a close call."

Jackie Judd, an investigative reporter with ABC News who covered the Clinton/Lewinsky story argued that this story has been covered better than advertised by those doing the original reporting, but that public perception of the journalism here and elsewhere is affected by serious stories being distorted through the echo chamber of a media culture that recycles and abbreviates every story in a way that strips them of context and qualification.

"... I also believe that the Clinton/Lewinsky story has not represented a sea change in what we've been doing over the past couple of decades, but I think there are a couple of reasons that it does feel that way sometimes. Part of it is that the starting point of this Clinton/Lewinsky story was sex. That's very uncomfortable. There have been things that are distasteful to report. There have been a story or two that I have put on the air that have embarrassed my mother, particularly the one I've probably been most criticized for, and that is about the dress in which we reported that a source said that Monica Lewinsky claimed she had saved a dress that was stained as a kind of souvenir of an alleged encounter with the President. In that instance we felt it was thoroughly sourced. In the first draft of my script I did not include that anecdote because I thought oh, this is just too much over the line. We're talking about the President of the United States here. But I think that my editors rightly pointed out that if what Monica Lewinsky said was true, it would represent forensic evidence which would go to the legal issues, which would go to the core of what the story is really about. But because, as I say, the starting point is sex, we get uncomfortable and rightly so sometimes, but I think we always need to remember that the core of it, the reason mainstream media are reporting this is, as Bill said, because of the legal issues involved.

"But another reason I think it may feel like we have loosened our standards is that this story more than any other I can recall, has gotten a sustained and vast interest from all media. I've covered Paula Jones and I've covered Whitewater for a number of years, and believe me, I have not seen three-quarters of the reporters in Little Rock that I see now on this story.

"I think what's happened is that the tabloid press and the mainstream media have all been put in this blender together, and we all come out looking the same. The truth is we aren't. We do report things differently. We source them in different ways. Yet I think the public perception is we're all the same..."

Judd then played a video of one of her reports for ABC News, reporting that contrary to earlier reports, Democratic fundraiser and Clinton friend Nate Landau had had numerous contacts with Kathleen Willey, one of Clinton's accusers, which raised the possibility of Willey being pressured not to tell her story.

"That's a story that we were working on for about two and a half weeks before it finally went to air, until we were satisfied ... that we had irrefutable evidence that there had been numerous contacts between Nate Landau and Kathleen Willey.

"...It shows up in other media as, "ABC News has reported that Nate Landau pressured Kathleen Willey not to tell about this alleged advance by the President." That's not what we reported. What we reported was she is making these claims, and there is evidence at least to suggest that the two of them did have a relationship.

"It goes back to the idea that it all gets put in the blender. Other media outlets take our stories and the nuance of it, the way it was carefully crafted, carefully written, is lost.

"...But I think if you go back to the news agencies that have been the most aggressive on this, you will see that by and large our reporting has been careful, with the exception probably of the Dallas Morning News, I think that none of us have had to retract any of the reporting we have done about the allegations that have been made in the Clinton/Lewinsky story. ..."

Marlin Fitzwater who served as press secretary to Presidents Reagan and Bush, argued that the press is being buffeted by a news hole it has difficulty filling, sources who have greater sophistication than ever about how to manipulate it, and a growing orientation in the news around personality driven by television.

"I'm interested in this topic, the new journalism and changes in the news media culture, because I have seen so many changes since I first went to the White House in 1983. For the last five years I've been essentially a consumer of news, and have watched even greater changes than I think took place in probably the five or ten years that I was more directly involved.

"I would summarize those changes with just three areas. One, of course, is technology. The satellite and the computer which gave us a 24 hour news cycle and now perhaps the 30 minute news cycle. ...I have bookers calling me at the rate of about 15 a day for shows I've never heard of before. (Laughter) But they all need to fill up the air time and they're all willing to consider me an expert on just about anything. My expertise comes from Jackie Judd -- rightly or wrongly, but thankfully mostly rightly.

"There is a new kind of awareness on the outside of how the media operate, and that has had enormous impact on how the media react to it.

"That leads me into ... the new media is operating in kind of a new world of manipulation. If you read "Spin Control", the new book by Howie Kurtz, you see a picture of a White House that I don't recognize. You see a White House that intimidates, that attacks the press, that threatens them with putting them out of business and never talking to them, and never giving interviews and withholding stories, and you see a media reacting to it, allowing themselves in many cases to be intimidated in ways I never really thought was possible.

"So there is a new media culture due to all these things and they all drive changes in reporting.

"...[In newspapers,] by the time I pick up the morning paper I have this horrible feeling that I've gotten yesterday's news. ... That's a terrible competitive problem for print journalism today to face, and one of the things it's done is driven them to more analytical stories, more personality-driven stories to try to compete.

"Television, by definition almost, likes personalities. They like pictures. They like people. Sam Donaldson used to tell me, "Marlin, if you don't give me a picture don't even give me the story. I've got to have something to look at." That means people and a different kind of reporting. That in turn means everybody else has got to focus on that reporting if they want to compete.

"Secondly, there are outside changes that have affected the new media culture as well. We all recognize the Vietnam War and Watergate as having immense changes in reporting and journalism. The journalism schools that tried to turn out Woodward's and Bernstein's, the investigative reporting. The Clinton experience is going to have changes for journalism as well. Because the current kind of coverup and stonewalling on information I think forces a lot of the background kind of reporting that you get. It forces reporters to go further into background to try to get information because sources are harder to come by....

"It also forces ... journalism to focus more on the character of politicians. When it does that, it's going to change the nature of reporting again. We'll have less of the kind of factual reporting and more of the motivational reporting. ... It strikes me that people are not as concerned about the media if you're a decision maker today, because you have more weapons at your disposal. You have advertising, you have money, you have paid television, you have the ability to stonewall and get away with it. ... One of the great tragedies of this whole Clinton thing for journalism is that it's worked...

"Lastly, I think anonymous sourcing and leaks are all absolutely legitimate avenues of conducting journalism, and of finding out information. I think the real debate is going to have to be how do they compete. How does a news magazine compete with a Drudge report? In this case they couldn't. The Drudge report beat them and it had essentially the same story...."

Jackie Judd: "The discussion about sources and how we characterize them [has] been a frustration in covering this story... Sources are supposed to be anonymous. And I understand also that we need to be giving our audience some indication of what point of view the source might be coming from. But in this story there has been such a finite group of people who would have the information that we would be collecting that to characterize them would either give them away or be forced to characterize them in such a general way that the information would be useless to our audience.

"One day when I was sitting at my computer struggling with [how to] define a source in this story. I said well, knowledgeable. Of course they're knowledgeable. Why else would I be including them in a story? That doesn't help a viewer.

"But I think I agree with Bill that there's nothing inherently awful with just saying a source. Usually in the context of a report you can guess which side the person is coming from...."

Walter Mears: "There's been a lot of controversy in such forums as this about the Post's deposition. Nobody argued with the accuracy of the deposition. What difference does it make who put it out for what motive if the information is accurate and..."

Jackie Judd: "Since this story broke some of the most esteemed members of our profession in Washington have said I'd rather have one golden source than ten mediocre sources. You do have to think about is this a primary source? Is this a person who either was a party to an event or witnessed an event? If that's the case, then obviously you have to give them more weight than ten people who have second or third-hand information."

"We make judgements like, have we worked with this person before? What kind of track record do they have? How strong is their agenda?"

Walter Mears: "One common denominator of our remarks up here was the differentiation between the mainstream press and other media. I wonder if there is such a differentiation in the minds of the people who consume the information anymore, or whether it's all, as Jackie said, in a great blender...."

Ann McDaniel: "I think that in fact the public probably sees us all as part of the blender...

"At the same time when they read the information and hear the information, they evaluate it in different ways. They don't read and evaluate what they read in the Star the same way they read and evaluate what they read in the Boston Globe or Newsweek or see on ABC...."

David Shribman: "This notion of the construct of the press is something that we talk about at forums like this ... [But] I think the people who buy our newspaper, get our newspaper every day, know us and trust us... We have, in their minds, a character and a personality that is if not trustworthy, then slightly predictable. I don't think there's a huge crisis of confidence among the people who are our regular customers...."

Tom Patterson: "I think there's a connection that we ought to think about between sources and some of the other things that have been talked about. Jackie talks about the way in which news stories sort of work themselves down the news chain. The subtlety of the news story begins to shift and then if you think about the public, that transformation is even more dramatic. The public doesn't make large distinctions between anonymous sources and confirmed sources and they grasp at what they see to be the essence of the story.

"That means we have to think hard about the factual accuracy of stories because as they move down these two chains, they take on a life of their own pretty much beyond the control of the originator.

"...Thinking about anonymous sources, they're obviously important to the news process, probably essential to the news process, but stand alone, I think they're not very good sources. They have to be coupled and in all cases they're not, with some additional digging on the part of the reporter...."

Marlin Fitzwater: "I think one of the more interesting aspects of the new journalism to me is not so much how they handle background information and off the record information, but how we handle on the record information. That seems to me one of the big changes over the last five years, particularly because you have all these lawyers, for example, in recent cases, who will go on television. The cameras are waiting for them when they emerge from the courthouse. There's no kind of immediate editing, especially if it's live coverage. A lawyer walks out and says whatever is most advantageous to his client. A lawyer has no allegiance to the truth in that situation. His only allegiance is to furthering the goals of his client. On the other hand, he has totally usurped any editing prerogatives of the press by utilizing that on the record and on camera situation. His words then become a part of the lexicon, a part of the understanding of the problem, right or wrong. And you can have many of these.

"The OJ Simpson trial, one of the interesting things it showed was the lawyers there every day knew how to go up and make the right statement that they wanted to make to set the stage for the trial and public attitudes towards their clients. Now we see that in every case that comes up..."

Audience Question: "How much time do the journalists that you have known spend talking socially with non-journalists? How much contact do journalists have with non-journalists?"

Tom Patterson: "I think the question had to do with the disconnect with the public and whether it related to sort of the social circles and friendship patterns and the like that journalists have.

"We recently did a five country study in which we looked at journalists in the United States, Britain, Sweden, Germany, and Italy. One question we asked, how many of your closest friends are journalists? We also asked how many of your closest friends work in government and politics?

"American journalists were at the top in both of those categories. I do think that there is an insularity to journalism and to politics in this country that's part of the disconnect I think that the public feels."

Bill Kristol: "But what does the disconnect mean? Is the standard now that if people happen to be more or less interested that we therefore don't or do pursue a story? Some of us think this is a genuinely important story and others don't. ... I take it we're all supposed to be making news judgments, not simply trying to be "in touch with the American people". If you wanted to be in touch with the American people, we would be doing hard copy and we would be putting Seinfeld on the cover every week, and selling more issues.

"...Just because Clinton's done well in the polls doesn't mean this isn't a legitimate story about behavior in the White House. ..."

Ann McDaniel: "...I do think, though, that the polls and the contact you have with people who aren't so engaged in news gathering sometimes causes you to ask questions that are important. ... Are we missing something? Are we focused on something here that isn't really important? Are we doing the right thing? ..."

Audience Question: "Let me just offer from a non-Washington perspective, from 3,000 miles away. It's interesting to listen to this discussion because everybody seems to be saying we're doing fine, there is no problem. But that's not the perception in California or across the country. The perception is there is something wrong.

"There was no stained dress, right Jackie? You reported the allegation, but there was no dress."

Jackie Judd: "I've not retracted that story. ... I know what was included in the committee's report, and with all due respect, it was reported incorrectly. The FBI did take some dresses and other belongings of Monica Lewinsky to be tested. The dress I reported on was not among them. The materials that they did test came back clean. The clothes we were told that had been tested were dry cleaned. But the dress that I reported on was never in the hands of the FBI or any other authorities."

Audience Question: "I see. Here's my question. If we're doing such a good job, if folks are doing such a good job here in Washington, why does the public think we're doing such a crummy job? ..."

David Shribman: "I'm not so sure that our business ought to be finding out what people want and delivering it. ... We have a role as educators, in a way. We have a role as citizens. We have civic responsibilities in our community and in the national community as well as in the world community, and I'm not so sure that by finding out what people want and delivering it we're satisfying that.

"... I wonder whether we're giving the public a little bit too much soft stuff, and that part of the reason we're valued and part of our historical heritage is to do something else. We all benefit by the first amendment. That's a right and a privilege that was given to us not by the founders, but in the first breath of our republic. And I think unless we live up to some of the responsibilities that are implicit in that, we probably ought to give the first amendment back."

Audience Question: "Ms. Judd made a statement that you have to know where the source is coming from... I think it's much more important to know where the journalist is coming from.

"For instance, the journalist who advocates going to war against let's say Iraq, has that journalist ever been in the military? Is that journalist's children in the military? Or is that journalist talking about sending other people's children to fight a war in Iraq? ... I believe if we know where the journalist is coming from, then we'll have a pretty good idea as to what kind of sources that journalist seeks out."

Tom Patterson: "If you look at what [the public is] saying about ... what they don't like about the press, and this has been showing up in polls throughout the 1990s, they think journalists are too negative, they're too intrusive, too cynical, too opinionated. The public would like to be able to be in a position to make up its own mind about a lot of these things and not be given prejudged information about situations.

"... As the press has moved into these areas, questions about where journalists are coming from, what their opinions are, their relationship to other institutions, political actors, the willingness and interest of other actors to make use of the press. All of those have become much larger and larger issues and I think are a real threat to the capacity of the press to inform the public and have the public think it's being informed about issues of public policy."

Bill Kristol: "...I think my answers to almost all those questions would be yes. I think it's better for more journalists to be held accountable. It is legitimate if a journalist takes a very strong position on an issue to ask what his interests might be, either in terms of his personal background or his financial interests. Journalists have rights to not provide information, I suppose, if they choose to, and people can then make their own judgments about that in terms of honoraria or anything else. But I do agree that, especially with journalists being important players in the public policy debate, they should not hold themselves above everyone else and pretend that they have a divine right to investigate everyone else's lives and cast doubt on their motives and then be unbelievably thin skinned when someone questions them. ..."

Murrey Marder, for many years, chief diplomatic reporter of the Washington Post: "On the question of sources ... go back to some of the original discussions of sources in Washington in the Watergate years. Let's take, for example, Henry Kissinger kneeling with President Nixon. Henry Kissinger is a source, let's say, and he repeats what has happened to Larry Eagleburger. Do you then have two sources? You only have one source. Much of this business of counting sources is illusion. If one person tells five people, do you have five sources? You still have only one source. I argued this at great length inside the Washington Post during the Woodward/Bernstein years when Ben Bradley insisted to the younger reporters that there should be two sources or more.
"Having operated for years, first as a Washington Post foreign correspondent and establishing a foreign service, we dealt, as every diplomatic reporter does, constantly with anonymous sources... Now the reporter can, in many ways which are not being used now in the press in all these stories ... indicate the direction the source comes from. That's all the reader needs to know. ... I don't know what kind of deals you people make with sources, but when I dealt with sources all my life I don't allow them to say what I can't identify them with. All I'm giving them is anonymity for themselves..."

Walter Mears: "Isn't one of the tests whether the source is imparting information, fact, or whether that source is imparting his or her opinion?"

David Shribman: "I don't want to speak for anybody else here... I think the identification of a source now is one of the opening parts of the negotiation in a journalistic conversation. From what you're saying, that's a new development. ... In this context, the first thing you say is we have to agree on how you are to be described. That's a negotiating point. And not really different from the kind of negotiations, in a way, that Ken Starr goes through when he's deciding whether to offer immunity."

Ann McDaniel: "And it's often the source that starts the conversation that way as opposed to the journalist."

Murrey Marder: "Does the source say you can't identify me personally, you can't identify me as a member of the Administration. You can't identify me as an American? How far do they pin you down?"

David Shribman: "Pretty far."

Marlin Fitzwater: "It is a problem, and I think more so as people become more sophisticated about the negotiation process. As a 27-year source for millions of quotes, I would say that I opened every discussion with some kind of talk about what the sourcing is going to be. And generally speaking, the sourcing changes according to your fear of being exposed. So that if I'm giving you something that I don't really worry too much about, I'll say, you could say it's a White House source or somebody close to the President. But if it's something that I want out for nefarious reasons and are really more dangerous, I will say a source in Washington or something like that. ... I have also had cases where a reporter says I won't grant you that source and I say fine, I won't grant you that information. We shake hands and walk away and do business another day.

"...It is more delicate and more detailed today than it probably was 20 years ago because reporters and sources don't trust each other as much today as we did 20 years ago. The negotiation has to be more careful."

Jackie Judd: "You also just put you finger on a really important problem in this story in particular: Is being inside what my investigative producer and I have begun to call the echo chamber. If there are three people you could go to to confirm a story, and you got it from the first one, and then you call the second one to say have you heard, well, he may have heard from the first one already, then you call the third and he may have talked to the second one. So you really have to be careful that you're getting original information and not something that's just been tossed around from one potential source to another."

Jay Rosen: "...I'd like to just toss out this suggestion to the panel, that in the future, if serious journalism wants to distinguish itself from the tabloid media and regain some of its lost trust, then perhaps the meaning of competition will have to change. There may be many more grounds on which journalists ought to be competing with one another than simply to be first or to be on the air with something that is the sexiest or the most sizzling story.

"You could compete on grounds of openness, as Marlin just suggested, meaning your newsgathering operations are more open to scrutiny than others. You can compete on grounds of transparency in decisionmaking. Ann, you're having vigorous debates at Newsweek about standards and practices, maybe those debates should be online. Maybe we should be knowing about them and that would help us trust Newsweek more. You can compete on grounds of dialogue, being in a richer and more rewarding dialogue with citizens about your practices which is not something all that common outside of forums like this.

"Maybe there should be competition on grounds of fairness. I was very interested, and I'm sure Bill you were, by the appearance of Fox News' slogan, "We report, you decide." Which is an attempt to brand a particular news organization as somehow less inclined to inject opinion and analysis. I don't think actually Fox News does what it's slogan says, but it was an interesting slogan anyway, because it was an attempt to say hey, we're different than the competition because we do news in a different way. So competing on grounds of fairness may be important. Competing on grounds of proportion. We don't allow ourselves to get carried away with what everybody else is doing. We are more proportional than other news organizations. Competing on grounds of respect for privacy, so that the Richard Jewel case, for example, might not have happened with certain organizations. Competing in tone. There's generally one tone in Washington journalism, and Tom Patterson has written about this. It's the tone of the savvy, inside strategy minded decoder of political signals, and maybe there ought to be competition on that. Maybe there's another tone for political reporting, or competing on grounds of accountability...

"So in the future perhaps political reporting will improve itself not just by competing with the tabloid media, but broadening the very meaning of competition to include a lot of different forms of journalism that we don't see now."

Walter Mears: "Doesn't the bottom line have to remain the story, and that the story is accurate and readable and useful and important? I don't disagree with many of those things, but the one you left out is competing for the story."

Tom Patterson: "I'd like to comment on Jay's point. I don't know how you get away from this issue of time, Jay. I think this is fundamentally what competition in the American press is about. It's somewhat different in the European press where values play themselves out so you get competition essentially over different perspectives on society and the like, but this is where the attention goes. The Post broke that story and Newsweek, to its regret, didn't break that story. This is where the prizes go when you break stories. I think that's why what we've been talking about this morning is so important.

"There's enormous pressure to be first. Then the question becomes how do you be first and also be accurate, be right in the story? That's why I think these issues of looking at sources, the rules, sort of the informal rules that you use in applying, trusting a source, not trusting a source, why those are so fundamentally important in this whole question. And I think it includes a willingness on the part of news organizations, and they've done more of this in Lewinsky than in some other stories, to turn their glare on each other when in fact someone pushes too fast with a story that's incomplete and quite damaging either to the society or to an institution or to a particular individual."

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