In the afternoon, four of the nation's most prominent political reporters agreed to have two prominent media critics deconstruct specific interpretative pieces they had done to explore the assumptions that go into framing stories, the limits of so-called impartiality and the degree to which traditional tenets of fairness, neutrality and accuracy apply to the new culture of interpretative reporting.

The moderator, Deborah Potter of the Poynter Institute, began by explaining that "the goal here is to examine the standards used by some of the top journalists in this profession when it comes to analyzing and interpreting the news." "Today we are on information overload, and many journalists believe their job now entails adding meaning to all that information with context and background and analysis and interpretation.

"An opinion is not always segregated from the news papers any more. Sometimes analysis is labeled. Sometimes it's just woven into a news story. And readers and viewers are sometimes puzzled -- how did you reach that conclusion, they ask? Why don't you just give us the facts?

"Rick Berke, when you write about politics, do you think it's part of your job, essentially, to interpret the significance of what politicians say and do? And is it ever not appropriate to do that?"

Rick Berke, the national political correspondent for the New York Times, answered that interpretation is an essential part of reporting but is must be based in facts:

"I think it would be a disservice if I just wrote straight what the candidate said and not tried to use my knowledge of what I think is really going on behind the scenes. It's always a struggle for me, and I think for a lot of journalists. There's a tension there between the analysis and the interpretation and wanting to get the facts out and wanting to be fair, and wondering how far do you go in analysis?

"I've had editors tell me on front page news stories to be sure to get this, this, and this in, get the motives in and the background and all that. It's very important, but sometimes I think wait a minute, we've got to say what happened before we get to all of this. Sometimes you feel crowded out with too much analysis. But I think it's the right instinct, as long as it's based in reporting and knowledge, and it's not just me writing off the top of my head what I think may be going on. If it's based in reality and it's fair minded, then I think it's my obligation to explain to the readers what I think is really going on."

Deb Potter: "Ron Brownstein, do you find that editors are pushing for more interpretation now? It used to be that editors would be the gatekeeper to tell you, watch it, you can't go that far. Are they actually pushing you to go even farther?"

Ron Brownstein, recently became national political correspondent for US News and World Report after spending several years at the Los Angeles Times. In moving from a newspaper to a magazine, he noticed a big difference in the style of writing expected of him:

"I did not feel that much at the LA Times. At a news weekly now where I am, it's a little different. The space is so tight, and you're operating in a world in which so much news has already come out during the week, that there's an enormous pressure and desire to see us make sense out of it. But I would say that newspapers are moving in that direction also, because the dominant trend of the '90s, obviously in the news business, is just the sheer explosion of sources of information.

"As a consumer of the news, not a participant in it, sometimes at the end of the week I feel seasick. You write the stories up and you write the stories down. Events seem to surge forward and then sort of dribble back. It's not only true in the scandal. ... Pre-Typhoon Lewinsky, you could read a sequence of stories in the Washington Post or the New York Times, and by the end of the week, as you follow each development in sort of the policy battle, I think you feel more confused than in the beginning. What's missing, and I think in a sense the newspapers are being forced to make some of the same calculations that news magazines had earlier been forced to make. What's missing is some sort of way of making sense of all of this, as Rick said.

"To me, what's important in that is not only looking for the motivation of the politicians who are making X proposal, because that is in some ways the easiest thing, the most common thing that we do as journalists, to say okay, here is how this plan fits into their political strategy, and that's an entirely legitimate thing. What's missing ... and what is even more valuable for readers, is giving a sense of how these events fit into some sort of longer term evolution of policy and policy debates and even political strategies.

"The biggest sort of gripe I have with Washington coverage of politics and policy is it often seems like these things appear out of nowhere. Startling new developments. When in fact, almost every debate that we're having is a debate that has evolved over time that has changed as the ideological parameters of politics have changed. ... What people really need is some sense of how each discrete event that flashes in front of them every day 15 times in headline news, fits into the other events that are going on at the same time or have come before it. It's very challenging, but I think it's a very worthwhile role, especially for the print press in an era where information is not only incredibly available, it is just pressed at people over and over again."

Deb Potter: "Eric [Engberg], I'd ask you about how opinion has made its way onto the air in a time when there aren't any commentaries any more. Since John Chancellor retired, nobody does commentaries, and yet there is more opinion."

Eric Engberg, a correspondent with CBS News since 1975, currently does the "Reality Check" segment on the CBS Evening News. He sees the importance of interpretation as explaining the power arrangements and workings that led to the story:

"That's probably right. ... It dawned on me that interpretive reporting is probably a lot like the job description for a White House intern -- it means different things to different people, depending on your point of view. "What I think of as interpretive reporting, and it's done by all good reporters in all the media, is it's when you stop covering bricks and start covering architecture. When you try to fit individual news developments into a larger historical pattern and you try to explain a little bit about the arrangements that are occurring that are causing that news development to happen.

"Some of the most important things in government and politics are arrangements between the players -- not what any one player says at any one given time. These are the kinds of things that I think a good political reporter should set about covering, whether he's working in television or in the print press. These arrangements are among the most under-covered things in our society, in part because they're largely occurring behind closed doors or in secret. The secrecy is critical, very often, to the arrangement, and I'm talking here about connections between lobbyists and elected officials, between public opinion manipulators and special interest groups, between congressional appropriators and their home state business interests, connections between people who benefit from a policy and the politicians who benefit on the whole from our disgraceful system of financing elections.

"Good interpretive journalism gets behind the facade of today's press release or today's press conference and starts relating let's say a government initiative or somebody's announcement that he's going to run for office to this whole set of power arrangements and power blocks that determine how the country's run.

"I think you are seeing less of that in local television than we need and even less of it than we had 20 years ago. You are seeing more of it in network television than we had before, because, as you pointed out Deborah, the loss of the outlets that we used to have that were commentary ... has left a hole which good news executives realize there is a demand for. People want to hear what the big picture is a little bit more. And in addition to that, the importance of the television networks, the big three at least, ... the people who are providing the audience with the first look of the day at what the hard news was, those days are over. They've been killed by CNN and by all news radio and by earlier newscasts being run on local stations.

"So what the three big television networks have to offer, at least from a standpoint of political coverage, is expertise and analysis. We are trying to do more of it because we think it serves our viewers and because we think that viewers will turn us on to watch that because it's one thing that they need...."

Tom Fiedler, senior political writer at the Miami Herald, believes that in response to market pressures, newspapers try to provide more context. This increases a reporter's risk of framing a story incorrectly or appearing to have all the answers:

"...My sense is that I am expected by my editors to provide something beyond just what the straight news is. ... I'm helped in that in that they give me the title "political editor" and that goes underneath my name, and I think in some ways that serves as a warning label perhaps to a reader to know that this person has a different expertise and maybe a slightly different charter than the person whose byline simply says staff writer....

"What's happened to me and to us in political journalism now is that we have been affected by market forces. ...We're now faced with the all news all the time stations -- not just CNN and CNBC, but locally in the local markets. Every local television station certainly in our market has the capability of breaking onto the air at any point and covering a story fully and exhaustively as it develops.

"...The value added piece that the newspaper at least tries to provide ... is that additional context that may be missing in just seeing the event the first time. It is trying to be the architect rather than the brick layer there. Which is an exciting kind of responsibility to have, but the danger of that is twofold. Number one, if you happen to be a lousy architect and what you construct has no resemblance whatsoever to what the reality should be, that's certainly serious. I'm sure I'm guilty of this....

"The other part of it is, the danger is that we can appear to be "know it alls", arrogant. That may be what the public dislikes most about us. It's no accident, I think, that Fox News has as its new motto, "We report and you decide," that whole idea. It's because I'm sure they found that television viewers in their case, but journalism consumers in general, are tired of being talked down to, so we have to be careful or at least sensitive to that, that when we are trying to construct a broader framework for people to understand events, that we do it in such a way that we either back everything up with demonstrable facts or credible people that we're quoting, or otherwise make a compelling case."

Deb Potter: "It's the making of the case, I think, that some consumers of journalism have trouble with. Stan Brand, ... if you accept that premise what the effect is on the other side of the coin, the political system and the legal system."

Stan Brand is a Washington attorney who served as General Counsel to the House of Representatives. As someone from the policy side, he understands the difficulty in explaining legal stories to the public:

"I think in this case, the problem is it's 90 percent interpretation and 10 percent facts.

"If there's one place where I think the press has fallen down a bit, and it's not their own fault, it's covering what's essentially a legal story and interpreting what all this maneuvering means to the public. The difficulty in explaining to people, for instance, how a Grand Jury works and what's actually going on in a secret proceeding, is difficult...

"I always thought that Oliver North performed a tremendous service when he got up in front of the Senate in his uniform and took the 5th Amendment, because all of my clients -- labor racketeers and others who had always taken it-- it had a bad name. He suddenly gave it a good name. ... It had to be explained to the public, sometimes innocent people take the 5th Amendment. It has a purpose in the system..."

Deb Potter: "When so much of what's published and broadcast is interpretation, what does that do to the public's perception of fact and the potential outcome."

Stan Brand: "It skews it terribly. The problem is, we were treated in the beginning of the story to all these salacious details about dresses, and then heard that there were no dresses, but ... the public isn't sitting at the end of the story trying to say okay, what have we learned and where are the facts? It just hears these things in a melange and never really is able to pull them apart. So at the end of the day they don't really know where we are, and it will be six months from now or a year from now if and when there's a trial that we'll find out. In the mean time, the parties will be walking away with the burden of what they've heard in the course of the story, and not really ever being vindicated, if they are."

Ron Brownstein: "In a strange way, I think the evidence from polling is pretty clear to me that the sheer proliferation of accusation against Clinton, and the fact that so many of these things -- not only in this scandal but in the earlier scandals -- never seemed to really come to a resolution, is actually, rather than hurting him by sort of casting all these unproven aspersions around his neck, is actually raising the bar that each new accusation has to pass with the public. ... People have grown increasingly skeptical of them in a strange way..."

Stan Brand: "What you just heard was a very interesting and very good piece of interpretive reporting by Mr. Brownstein. He just gave a great little example of what we're talking about here."

Deb Potter: "Jay Rosen, let me bring you into the conversation, because Rick Berke at the beginning said I do this interpreting of stories, and if I'm fair minded then that's okay. Is that okay? Is that enough for the journalist to believe that he's being fair minded?"

Jay Rosen, a professor at New York University, spoke about the point of view a journalists places on his or her story and how we might approach it from a different perspective:

"I don't think so, Deborah, for the following reason. I've been hearing for years from journalists, particularly in the print media, as Tom said, with increasing competition our value added is things like context, interpretation, analysis, and so forth. As an academic, that always raises an interesting question because there's no such thing as context with a capital C or interpretation with a capital I or perspective with a capital P. Once you move into realms beyond straight factual reporting, you are now engaged in some sort of intellectual act, and the kind of interpretation you end up with will depend not only, as people have said so far, on the reporting you've done, the facts that you've found, and the conclusions you've come to, but some more general understanding of the world that causes you to place events into a particular context.

"For example, if one were going to contextualize the President's current initiative on race, one can do it by using as context his desire to appeal to African American voters. The context could be the Democratic party's historical alliance with minorities. The context could be the Los Angeles riots and their aftermath. The context could be 200 years of national history. The context could be European colonialism and so forth. Your choice of context will depend on your overall view of the world....

"I can think of about five or six metaphors, if you will, for politics -- all of which are equally valid, equally useful, but would result in very different interpretations of the same event. The most common metaphor for politics in Washington journalism is politics as strategy, politics as game.

... That's one sort of view of the political world. Another would be politics as a sort of theater for ambition and personality and character. We see that quite a bit in reporting. Politics as what Hedrick Smith called a power game, the maneuvering behind closed doors that you were talking about, Eric. That's another view of sort of what politics is about. But politics is also perhaps about problem solving and how a political community comes to discuss and resolve its problems. And used as an interpretive frame, that would yield a different kind of interpretation.

"Politics is also supposed to be about deliberation, about choice making, and the kind of discussion that precedes choice making, and viewed that way, it would result in a different kind of interpretation.

"Finally, politics is supposed to be about participation, self government, democracy at the most basic level.

"So if journalists are increasingly adding interpretation, context, and analysis, then the intellectual roots of their ideas about politics, government, culture, society, become all the more critical. Unfortunately, things like intellectual roots and what Tom referred to as framing, are not topics of active dialogue in most newsrooms. What people talk about is the story, get the motives in there, make sure this is in the third graf, get it by deadline, get it accurately, so forth.

"I think the move towards interpretation has brought forward a kind of intellectual crisis in journalism that needs to be openly discussed and resolved within newsrooms, much more carefully than it's been so far."

Deb Potter: "Ron Brownstein, let's look at ... a little bit from the LA Times in a story that you did about President Clinton's comments on social promotion in schools. This is what you said about his remarks: 'They appear to aim less at conservative than liberal complaints about the push for more testing and standards.' "

"Is that about his motive? How would you come to that kind of interpretation?"

Ron Brownstein: "Actually that's not about his motive at all. He went to Chicago and gave a speech in support of Mayor Richard Daley. ...I often do talk about his motives, but I'm not doing it here. Here, he gave a speech in support of the idea of ending social promotion -- an idea that has come under fire from both the left and the right for different reasons.

"The House had recently voted a coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House and voted to stop the idea of voluntary national testing. The arguments on the right are the national government shouldn't be doing this, and so forth. The arguments on the left are, this is unfair to minorities, this is unfair to poor kids. In his speech, he did not deal with the arguments from the right, but he directly addressed a series of arguments from the left, and basically knocked them all down.

"So what I was saying was that in this speech he was responding more to the critique of this idea that came from his own party than he was responding to it from the other party. It really wasn't about how he was trying to position himself. ..."

Deb Potter: "And in truth, those are the quotes that you pulled out into the piece that supported that.

"Let's look at your little chunk from a US News story, quite recent, in which you're talking about the Republicans' reaction to the President's strength in the polls. Here you say, 'Just like the Democrats in the Reagan years, Republicans today are starting to blame the public for not seeing through the great communicator in the White House. That's a sure sign of a party in denial.'"

Ron Brownstein: "First, that's my column. Secondly, basically, the analysis here was looking at the growing frustration of Republicans over Clinton's continued popularity in the polls. I quoted in that story quotes from William Bennett saying basically, what's wrong with the country that they don't see through this? Pat Robertson said the same thing last week on his television show, "I am appalled that the American people aren't more outraged." Rush Limbaugh said, "His popularity went up to 70 percent and he had sex with an intern. Who can imagine how popular he'd be if he had sex with a sheep?" "As I went on in the column, I sort of looked at this as ... there's something wrong with the country if they can't see through this guy -- and how it eerily paralleled the analysis of many liberals in the '80s when there was a widespread sense of what's wrong with the country that they can't see through this aging actor in the White House who is simply bamboozling them with his stagecraft tricks.

"In each case there was an extreme reluctance to, I would argue, acknowledge that there were things on the other side of the ledger that caused the public to react in support for Reagan despite, as I pointed out in the story, polls showing that people did not consider him a rocket scientist, and the same thing in the '90s. There were reasons why people continue to support Clinton despite polls showing very clearly, since 1992, that people have questions about his personal honesty and integrity and whether he's always telling them the truth.

"This column is actually very much what I usually end up trying to do, which is take events that seem disparate, and suggest there may be more of a connection there than people think.

"I very much agree with many of Jay's comments. ... That is an inherently subjective process, because everybody makes their own connections. In effect, what I offer is simply my set of connections. That's what I offer to the reader and to the magazine.

"The only problem I have with Jay's analysis is the idea that, I think you said that once you move into areas beyond straight factual reporting that's when you get into sort of imposing intellectual constructs. Even in straight factual reporting, what you leave in and what you leave out reflects intellectual constructs.

"If you put in the second paragraph of a story about a proposal that a member of Congress makes, how much money they receive from the affected industry, you're making, you're creating a construct that encourages people to think about politics in one way or another. And it is very hard to avoid that, although I'm not saying here there are differences of degree. ..."

Jay Rosen: "I agree completely that even in straight factual reporting there's a great deal of selection in art. I was actually trying to make it easy on you by saying there was such a thing as straight factual reporting, but I would agree that actually there's not.

"Secondly, the first story that we put up here that Clinton's remarks appeared aimed more at the liberal complaints than conservative complaints, I think that's a plausible interpretation. But as I was trying to say earlier, it comes out of a certain kind of view of politics. What politicians do is determined by their continuing fight to please certain constituencies and to curry favor with certain groups and position themselves well, and so forth, which is a great deal of what politics is. But it could be possible that Clinton's remarks could appear to somebody looking this way that they were aimed at say problems in the schools. That's possible, right?"

Ron Brownstein: "... I couldn't agree more. And to go back to that sentence, I am saying that he is substantively responding to the substantive complaints of liberals, not to the substantive complaints that conservatives have made. I'm not imputing ... that he's worried about his own base. I'm saying he's responding to the arguments that have been raised. Those are the arguments that he chose to respond to. "I agree with you that too much of political journalism..., looks for motive, that's the easiest thing to look for. ...There are a lot of other ways to sort of build a box around what a politician is doing, and the assumption that every proposal they make is simply based on a tactical assessment of their media political needs is fundamentally corrosive. ... But I do think that it's also wrong to be totally incognizant of the fact that politicians sometimes take positions..."

"Take a good example, Jay, in which this process isn't even necessarily always bad. In 1992 the entire new Democrat agenda of Bill Clinton was based not only on a policy analysis of things like welfare and crime and so forth, but a political analysis. The fact was that white middle working class voters had abandoned the party over the last 25 years, and he was looking for a way to both deal with substantive problems, but in a way that would allow him to speak to those voters and bring them back. Something like welfare reform, the original plan, two years with a guaranteed public job, was very much a fusion of political and policy analysis in which each sort of informed the other in a somewhat virtuous circle. So these things are real."

Deb Potter: "I think that's true, but the question really is whether the reporting reflects both sides of that equation."

Stan Brand: "I just want to testify as a fact witness. That statement is a true statement--that analysis. Because as a Democrat sitting in the House of Representatives under Tip O'Neill's aegis in 1980 through '84, those are the conversations we had. What is wrong with America that they don't see through this man. So to me, that's a perfect example of good interpretive journalism to the point where watching Bill Bennett get on TV on Sunday and say that, I said to myself, my God, he stole our losing play book and they are using it." (Laughter) ...

At this point in the program, the panelists watched a brief video presentation, a Reality Check segment from panelist Eric Engberg that had previously aired on the CBS Evening News. The report examined the Clinton Campaign's frenetic fundraising practices for the 1996 election, how those practices may have swung the election in Clinton's favor and the congressional investigation they spawned. It closed with this statement from Engberg:

"All that zeal did exactly what it was supposed to. It helped win the election. But it came at a steep price -- a money scandal that congressional investigators will lay out over the next few weeks, likely generating headlines that can only embarrass the President."

Deb Potter: "Talk, Eric, a little bit about the close. The end of a piece where there are certain expectations about what it will contain. Do you come into these stories knowing how it's going to end, knowing what kind of an "edge" you'll have at the end of the piece?"

Eric Engberg: "We don't have headlines the way a newspaper or news magazine has, so we have to resort to other trickery to try to leave the viewer with some knowledge of what it is we think is the most important thing in the story or the point that you want them to cling to once that story goes by ... . So what I try to do with the close is I try to either look ahead to what will happen next -- responding to the viewer's obvious question, so what? What happens now? Or, I try to summarize or encapsulate what the main point I was trying to get across in the whole story was, with maybe just a little one sentence zinger. ..."

Deb Potter: "In the reality checks -- that was not one, so we didn't see the opening montage, if you will, but there's a graphic at the beginning that says Reality Check, and it has your signature. You see your signature kind of scroll itself across the screen.

"Is it your sense that that sort of distinguishes it from the rest of the news cast?"

Eric Engberg: "Even though television is a visual medium, I've always envied the newspaper people because they have great visual techniques available to them .... They can put a box around a story on the front page and mark it analysis. They can do what Tom says they do on the Miami Herald, Tom Fiedler, Political Editor, which is kind of holding up a flag for people that this isn't just some schlubby, five paragraph story. This is the political editor talking. We don't have any way to do that on television.

"Dan Rather, I suppose, could introduce the piece by saying "This is an analysis," but he only says it once at the start, and while the piece is airing, people don't see what it is unless you are flashing up 'analysis, analysis' all the time.

"So what we decided to do was to give Reality Check a kind of a logo that says to the audience, this is not one of our standard, run of the mill stories. This is a little bit of investigative reporting, a little bit of interpretive reporting. But don't worry, it's not going to be boring like most investigative reporting is. It's not a white paper. It's got a little snap to it, it's got a little vigor to it. The best thing we could think of was number one, a graphic at the start which is a little bit different than the rest of our newscast, and then number two, we shoot it in the newsroom against the monitors at the back of the newsroom to try to give the impression that this is a reporting intensive kind of a story, you know, that the reporter has been working on this and now he's going to get up and stand in front of his own newsroom and tell you his close.

"These are all gimmicks. I'll admit it. In fact we refer to them openly in the office as what's the gimmick on this one. But they're gimmicks designed to help lead the viewer along with the understanding that this is something a little bit different than a two minute story from the White House on the President's latest initiative in race relations or something."

Jay Rosen: "... Eric, at the close of your piece you say that all this fundraising came at a steep price, and the price is going to be paid in damaging headlines about... legal fees and damaging headlines about the campaign finance scandal to come, right? This helps make the point I was trying to get across earlier.

"First of all, the idea of a price paid in headlines is strangely circular. In other words, the price is going to be extracted by the very people who are saying there's going to be a price, namely, what we're going to be covering in the next week is the campaign finance scandal. You see that a lot in the news media."

Eric Engberg: "You can't get away from that in a profession which is judged by public opinion. ... It's what voters are going to decide about what they think about the President and the medium of exchange here is public opinion. I realize that it is sometimes circuitous that we're reporting often on what the press is going to say about this, but you can't get away from that in a business where the President operates under polls and the results of elections."

Jay Rosen: "A different view of politics, another kind of price could have been said to be the price of Clinton's campaign in '96. ... By running a campaign based on money and ads and tiny little programs that he could sell to constituencies as your piece reported, that he didn't arrive in the White House with any sort of political mandate or agreement from the country or compact with voters that would enable him to do a hell of a lot in the second term.

"Now if you view politics that way, as being about problem solving and policy, that could have been a price paid for the very same things that you report on. I'm not saying that yours is wrong and this is right, it's just different."

Eric Engberg: "Here's the fundamental error in your thinking. This was not the only story that CBS News did on the election. We did stories on other aspects. This just happens to be the one story that focused on this one narrow issue of campaign finance. ...

"You can take any one story apart and say it fails to take into account this and this and this. You have to deal with the whole context of what the press is reporting in very large..."

Jay Rosen: "I'm not saying it fails. I'm simply saying that it arrives out of a certain view of politics..."

Rick Berke: "I just don't understand what the alternative is. ... I don't know how he could have done that piece without having some kind of explanation of the political toll that it would take. And as Eric said, whether print or television, there were lots of stories on Clinton not having a mandate, and there were lots of stories on the fundraising scandal and so forth. But I'm not sure what you think we should be doing. Should we stop short of any interpretation because it may be one of three ways you can interpret something? What should we do?"

Jay Rosen: "I think all those forms may be legitimate. I think what needs to happen is for journalists to ask themselves, ... are we continuously communicating through the forms of interpretation that we choose? ... That kind of inquiry would tell you something about the messages that you send to people about politics in the full run of your coverage.

"It doesn't matter whether this individual story could have been done one way or another way. I don't think there's anything wrong with the way it was done here. But there are habitual patterns of interpretation that over time tell people what politics is supposedly about. Those kinds of messages which run very deeply in Washington coverage, I think take their toll on public confidence in the press."

Eric Engberg: "One of the habitual patterns of Washington coverage, or of campaign coverage over the last 50 years is that we ignored the impact of money on the outcome of these elections. We are just now waking up to this."

Tom Fiedler: "With all that said, though, there is something to what Jay is saying, and I think that if I understand him correctly... The question is not whether or not you interpret. The question is what is the frame you build around why people are in politics and why we are having these contests. I think anyone would honestly admit that the dominant way we look at it in Washington is that the politicians are here to advance their own interests to win power, to get themselves reelected. And secondarily, if at all, to advance ideas that they care about.

"I think there is something to this point. The message that we communicate over and over and over again is that politicians are making whatever move they make primarily out of some tactical assessment of their immediate political advantage. ... That is not the only reason that drives politics..."

Deb Potter: "Tom Fiedler, let's put up some of your work [on the overhead]. This, I believe, is from a piece that you wrote in January about Willie Logan, an African American member of the Florida House who was in line to become the Democratic leader until a majority of his fellow Democrats dumped him and voted to replace him with a white legislator. Your story says this controversy 'threatens to remake the state's political landscape" and then you write that "the Democrats have failed to back up their charges in a way that would rebut allegations that Logan's race was a factor. The charges seem to fall apart on close examination.'

"Can you talk a little bit about what you based that kind of interpretation on, and whether you think it's visible in your writing? In other words, are the wires that hold this up, are the constructs actually visible to the reader?"

Tom Fiedler: "That first quote I believe was very high up in the story, and that was essentially, this is the meaning here, folks. We have an action that occurred. The coup against the person who would have been the first black Speaker of the Florida House, had he stayed there, and supplanted by a white. So there was this lingering atmosphere, was this racially motivated and so forth. And after stating that fact, and then the aftermath of it was a tremendous reordering of the power structure in Florida that is continuing to be underway. So that paragraph is what, I guess, editors would call the universal graph or the graph that sort of gives overall meaning.

"That, obviously, is designed to kind of hook a reader, to say this is what this action is all about. And then my job is to then back that up, to put forth the arguments that would leave a reader at the end of it saying well, yes, I can see now what's going on."

Deb Potter: "But when I read that to you [on the phone], you said 'Boy, that seems a little subjective, doesn't it?'"

Tom Fiedler: "I guess my thought was ... that's interesting that that slipped through an editor as it did without somebody challenging me a little bit more on it because it's a rather sweeping statement.

"But for something like that to stand--I like that metaphor of the architect-it needs to have the super structure put into place so that it carries credibility or it would sort of collapse of its own weight. My credibility would collapse along with it. ..."

Deb Potter: "Do you think that we do this on a regular basis, that we make the case with as much factual evidence as the reader might want? Or do you think that we sometimes, based on our lengthy experience and our solid reporting, essentially say to the reader, 'just trust me on this'"?

Tom Fiedler: "That's the danger. I noticed in Don's ... straight news story, ... it had "appeared". I think probably with any one of us if you did a search next to our names with the verbs "appeared" or "seemed" or "suggests", you'd hit a lot of stories. It's our little weasel way of saying to the reader very subtlety so it doesn't necessarily jump out at them, that we really don't know this to be true, but it's a good bet that it is true. I think that's our little safety valve, and I think it's absolutely appropriate for us to be doing that sort of thing -- the warning, as well as connecting the dots, so to speak."

Deb Potter: "Rick, you did a fundraising piece about Vice President Gore. The lead was the Senate report that concluded Gore was involved in efforts in 1996 to violate the letter and spirit of federal campaign laws. You wrote, 'If Republicans are intending to discourage Mr. Gore from his quest for contributions in this mid-term election year, they have failed miserably.'

"Was that their intent? Is the reader meant to believe that that's what the Republicans were after? What do you think?"

Rick Berke: "That's a good question. That was one quote from a really large story that sort of analyzed his fundraising in a lot of ways, and when you pull it out like this it looks like maybe the whole story was around that point, that that was their intent. Maybe that was the danger. I don't think that was the sole intent. It was almost said in sort of an aside, if their intent was this, well look, they've failed miserably. ..."

Deb Potter: "It felt like a transition from a lead that was pegged onto a story that was really all about his fundraising efforts, but we had this lead so we had to get from here to there. ... The whole piece was about how Gore was raising his funds."

Rick Berke: "The honest truth about that whole piece was, it was the out-takes from a magazine piece that I did. (Laughter) I had to make a lot of cuts, so I took the whole fundraising section and I put a new top on it. When I saw that this Senate report had come out on Gore, that's the angle, I'll get it in this weekend. That's what I did. ...

"But I would argue that it was perfectly legitimate and the timing was right. Sometimes you have to wait for the right moment to introduce a subject when there's certain interests there. I think making that connection was fair. I wish you had the lead there so I could sort of... I don't even remember exactly how I wrote the lead, but I don't think in the context of it was unfair. I really don't."

Deb Potter: "There is another bit up there from the same piece, in which you write, "The Vice President has little room to maneuver. He wants to amass as much as possible in 1999 to scare off potential rivals, while also not being too overt and thus reigniting attacks that he is just another hat in hand politician."

"Those are basically conclusions."

Rick Berke: "Those are total conclusions. ... It's a little more interpretive than a normal newspaper article that I would write. That is because it was a magazine story and I just put it right in there in the news pages. ... But I feel and felt fully confident when I wrote it, more confident than I would in maybe a normal daily news story, because I had spent months talking to his people about what their motives were, talking to his fundraising people, talking to his top aides, talking to Democrats, talking to dozens of people. So I felt totally comfortable and confident that I didn't need to attribute that to anyone because I have no doubt of that statement."

Deb Potter:"But you could resolve any controversy by following up a statement like that with a quote from somebody that jumps in."

Rick Berke: "I used to do that more, five, ten years ago. I was afraid to be too interpretive. Everything would be attributed, and I'd have more quotes in my stories and so forth. I thought that was a crutch. I thought I was doing it too much. I thought, I need to be more confident in what I'm saying to the reader. ... If I feel like I know what I'm talking about, why look for someone to quote. ..."

Deb Potter: "I'm curious about how you got there. Was that a sense that you ... now knew this better and had the confidence? Or was it a sense that the paper expected you to?"

Rick Berke: "I think it's both. I think it's the evolution of the paper wanting more, encouraging more interpretation, and my own confidence level, my own understanding of some of the issues I was writing about.

"One thing we all have to be careful about, we've all seen reporters who go into stories with preconceived notions and who spend more time talking than letting the interviewee answer questions. I've seen that again and again with various journalists, thinking they know the story. Or I've had editors reject stories because they think they know the answer beforehand.

"...One other thing, I think we also have to be comfortable about raising issues in stories and saying we don't have the answer. I've written many times, it was not clear what the motive was or why he was doing that."

Ron Brownstein: "If you're looking for how newspapers have changed, though, what Rick said is very important. I've really found that, too. The quote that Tom talked about, editors will cut out now for space. The assertion is protected. They value the assertion. Sometimes as a reporter I feel I really want to support it with X number of examples, facts, quote, whatever. That will go as things squeeze. That does suggest a certain editorial level, they put a certain value on this, they see this as part of what they're trying to do. Often they'll say the quote just repeats what you said and they'll get rid of it."

Jay Rosen: "As somebody who's been on the other end of the telephone expected to supply such quotes, I welcome this trend. It's not a particularly noble role to feed reporters lines that they can use to firm up conclusions they already drew anyway. But to go back to Rick's story, which I did read in full twice, so I'm not taking it out of context.

"I think it's an extremely thoroughly reported story, and it is obviously based on talking to a lot of people in Gore's camp and Clinton's camp. It's based on a lot of factual reporting, and I can see how you'd say that you drew that conclusion from what you knew based on your reporting. But I would still argue that the whole piece, and not just the section that we saw an excerpt from, is also based on a certain view of politics. The view of politics is, in this case, that preparing to run for President or having presidential ambitions is about maneuvering, it's about lining up allies, it's about raising money, it's about positioning yourself vis-a-vis others. And although this was not ignored, it was certainly downplayed. It's not fundamentally about thinking through your ideas, deciding why you want to run, what your vision of the nation is going to be, what you're going to offer people. The preparing to run is not about that. It's about these mechanics, about these maneuverings. I'm saying that's just a view of politics. I'm not saying that's the wrong view of politics, because it's a large bulk of what happens. But interpretation of this kind, conclusions of this kind, cannot be based solely on the facts you've dug up, no matter how thoroughly you've done your reporting on the people you've talked to. They have to also have an element of imagination in them. You're imagining the political landscape for us when you write about Gore preparing for the President through his maneuvering. He could be preparing to be President through, for example, some kind of inner resolve that he needs to reach, some kind of vision that he needs to come to. That could be part of it, too, if that were part of politics."

Rick Berke: "... All that it advertised as being was a story on fundraising and his fundraising apparatus and why it's important and so forth. I don't see any other context I could have put that in in terms of Al Gore's fundraising. Where I will agree with your point is in the piece that ran a week later...

Jay Rosen: "I was talking about the magazine piece."

Rick Berke: "You have a valid point. I had a magazine piece a week later, and the entire piece was about Gore's preparations, laying the groundwork for running for President in 2000. In the same 8,000 words, I could have written an entire piece on Al Gore and his views on issues and why he's a Democrat and his other motivations. I could have written an entire piece on trying to get inside his head like a million people have done or written about my take on why he connects or doesn't connect to the public the way he does and how that relates to his father and his mother. I know all that stuff. There's about ten ways, in fact, that I could have written that piece. "If you read the piece that I wrote, it was a single minded piece on the apparatus and how he is laying the groundwork, in a very fact based piece. I don't disagree that there are many other ways I could have done that, but I wasn't trying to present it as the only way to look at Al Gore. All I was trying to present is here's one slice of Al Gore and really, a lot of people didn't know about things he'd been doing to prepare for 2000. I will come back and write a million other stories in the next couple of years about lots of other things about Al Gore as a lot of other people will. ... "

Tom Fiedler:"...This morning we discussed the committee's reports of studies looking into trends in journalism such as an increase in opinion/analysis. ... Isn't there still an important distinction between opinion and analysis or opinion and interpretive reporting? I'd like to see where the panel would draw the line."

Ron Brownstein: Yeah, I think there is. ...Although there are occasional exceptions. Even my column, going back and forth between being a reporter and a columnist, kind of an unusual role, I try to keep it very analytical. I guess the difference is, I think of opinion as this is what should happen, this is what we should do on X. Analysis tries to explain why we are doing X. To me, that's sort of a rough and ready line in my mind."

Rick Berke: "One thing we haven't really talked about is the different outlets of interpretation and opinion. When we saw your column ... marked in that kind of commentary way and set out, you have a lot more license than you would in the normal news pages. ... Sometimes it is a fine line there, but when you talk about opinion, that's really what you want to happen, as you said. I think we have to be careful to shy away from that in the news pages, obviously."

Eric Engberg: "I think they've both done it very well. Opinion are things that you see on the McLaughlin Group, and analysis are things you see on the front page by someone you respect.

"... The most disquieting, corrosive development in the history of political reporting is that newspaper people whose views were respected because of the kind of reporting they did, don't think anything of going on a Sunday talk show and shooting their mouths off about matters they don't know anything about. People in the audience have a very difficult time discerning when he's being the studied, intelligent, honest reporter, and when he's being the TV performer."

Tom Fiedler: 'I write a column that runs on Thursdays on the OpEd page and on Sundays in the Viewpoint Section, so I do two columns a week as well as cover news stories. I think the danger in doing that is when I show up with my notebook in front of somebody to talk with them is how they are viewing me. Are they wondering is this something that he is going to digest and then put into the OpEd page, or is this going to be a straight recitation of he said/she said, and follow all the norms that we learned in Journalism 101.

"So the restraint on me is that I have to make sure that my column steers as clear of opinion as I can, but it's a thin disguise, Eric, I think between what is opinion and what is analysis. And sometimes it's almost invisible.

"I think the difference is in my column, like Ron's columns that I've seen here, my column is an argument about something that I perceived happening or something that is going on where I see all the dots are out here. If I was reporting, I would report on where the dots are, but in my column I'll connect the dots, and I'll tell you that this is the case I'm going to make for you. I'll tell you that all these dots are out here, and then this is my case for where they're leading. That stops short of me saying I think it's good that all these dots being connected will point to A, B, or C, but still, I've moved slightly beyond where the facts might necessarily take me there. So it's a progression, moving down a slope that gets a little bit steeper and slipperier each time."

Tom Fiedler:"I would like to suggest that we all make a mistake of believing or assuming that if we label articles commentary, opinion, analysis, editorial, that that is readily understood by the average newspaper reader or the television viewer.

"... To the average television viewer, they certainly cannot distinguish between the McLaughlin Report and Ed Murrow. So far as they're concerned, it's all media. I would suggest that what we need is education in the public schools about how to read, how to understand the press, the television. Because as this whole effort demonstrates, there's very weak understanding in the public and also among ourselves about the fundamentals of the press. We need to understand that when we put a label on the story -- analysis, commentary, we need to do a hell of a lot more than that to clarify to the reader."

Rick Berke: "I think that's a good point. I don't think a label should be cover for excusing a reporter from veering into opinion.

"... One thing we've done in the last couple of campaigns at the New York Times, and this came from the top echelon of editors. There were orders that ... in the final days we should stop interpreting so much and the reporter should just write what the candidate is saying. It sounds like a novel idea, but when you go on the stump with a candidate -- day after day we had front page stories full of quotes from the candidates. With no interpretation.

"On the one hand I thought it was a good idea because sometimes we so over-analyze or we risk over-analyzing that the candidates can't breathe in our stories. The people don't know really what's going on, what's the candidate trying to say. But on the other hand, sometimes I thought those stories were so naive, when they just had quote after quote without any kind of context. That's sort of an example of the struggle that we go through in covering politics."

Tom Fiedler: "I think that's a really interesting problem. If you just recapitulate what the politicians says, what help are you really giving the readers? On the other hand, the kind of analysis that gets behind what they say can go overboard, so you need to provide some proper kind of context.

"One way of doing that is to do a thorough inquiry into issues that are ... of most concern to citizens, and thereby compare what the candidates are saying to an in-depth treatment of those issues...."

Audience Question: "... I go back to Ron Brownstein's [piece], the very first paragraph had what would seem to me the key word, which was "appear". Clinton "appeared" to be doing something.

"I wonder, I just raise the question, is that what for all of us forces us to ask the question about how the reporting was presented. As you describe it to us right now you say actually that was the case, but by using that word "appear", I wonder, does that make is sound like it was then your opinion and you didn't tell us it appeared because I talked to so and so?

"Now we all know that you talked to many people, but I wonder if the audience may not know that as much as we all know. ...

"In Mr. Engberg's piece, ... the question it raises in my mind, that end, that last line, is the question of resolution. Pieces that we all notice in television, and in any story, we want to end the piece. We want to resolve a piece. That last line is often the hardest thing. Sometimes it's time will tell, is what the answer is, but we want to say something that sounds like the story is resolved.

"I hear this from my wife and everybody I know who says to me, dammit, why did they have to resolve it in a way that makes it sound like the story is wrapped up? We all know that ambiguity is probably the actual end point of a lot of stories, but it's a hard point to end on, and I wonder if that raises some difficult questions when you're talking about interpreting."

Eric Engberg: "There's a term of art we use in the newsroom at our network that is a direct reference to what you're talking about. When a producer is criticizing the close to a piece he'll say, damnit, give me a close that sounds like a close. ... I often think to myself, what is it? Is it 14 lines of iambic pentameter, is it like a sonnet? We sometimes do fall prey to this stereotypical phrasing of things to make it sound like it's resolved.

"You will notice in that story I didn't make it sound like it's resolved because it was on the first day of the hearings. The piece was put together specifically to sort of preview what kinds of problems were going to be pointed to when the Congress started looking at the campaign finance problems that the Clinton campaign had.

"So what I did there was I took an ambiguous situation and I sort of just talked about well, what was the worst thing that's happened to him so far? After all, he is President. All right, he's going to get a beating over this. The Republicans are going to beat up on him and the public's probably going to beat up on him a little, too. So I tried to make the ambiguous situation have at least a sound of drama to it, even though I myself made it ambiguous, just because a close has got to sound like a close. You can't just say Congress will start looking at this tomorrow and who the hell knows what they're going to find out."

Ron Brownstein: "Let me respond to the first part of the question real quick, which is actually interesting. I'm struck at the interest in the sentence. ... The reason why I used the word appear was precisely the opposite. It was because I was not able to talk to anybody on the trip.

"... Clinton goes to Chicago and he makes a speech. Because I have been covering this issue, I'm familiar with the arguments being made by both left and right against it and that have just come up in the congressional debate in which left and right joined against center to defeat his idea. "In this speech he makes a series of arguments, all of which respond to the complaints made by the left. And he doesn't really deal with the complaints made by the right. So I can just simply report the points he made, or my view was, I was adding value by pointing out to people that the series of arguments that he made address the substantive complaints of the left without really getting into the substantive complaints of the right. That was really what he was doing. ...There's utterly no value judgment attached to that, just a statement of fact or at least interpretation, that the substantive arguments he's ...responding to are substantive arguments to the left, and the reason why I say appeared is because I didn't get to ask him on that trip if that was his intent."

Rick Berke: "...I've found pressure in the way you do in your closings on television, where I find that pressure is in writing magazine pieces, where an editor has a line for the cover in mind before I even go out to report the piece. I'm expected to come down one way black and white, and much more interpretive than ever I would for the newspaper. I've had this many times... When I spent a year when Senator Wellstone was in his first year in office, I followed him around for a year and wrote a magazine piece. They wanted to know did he fall prey to this sort of insideritis going on or is he still an outsider, yes or no? I said it's kind of a little of both. Yes or no? Is he going to succeed or fail? Then I had the same thing, I did one on Trent Lott last year and they said success or failure? Is he going to be a raging conservative or not? I said I can make points in different ways, but I'm not going to do it the way you want. I've had some real battles. I can say I've never written something in that way that I'm uncomfortable with, but ... I've been pushed in ways that I don't like to be pushed."

Tom Rosenstiel then closed the day with a brief summary of what we heard: "I think what we heard in the morning and throughout the day was a series of extraordinary and intensifying pressures on journalists. In the morning in particular we heard about how our sources increasingly have greater sophistication than they once did about not only how we operate, but the effect we have on the political process.

"As the spectrum of media expands and there are more points on that spectrum, each of those points, each of those outlets -- CBS News and the New York Times -- has less power relatively and less leverage, and our sources are gaining sophistication. We have more competition and there is less differentiation by the public. I think it even raises the question as to whether the definition of journalism that Lipman laid out, that we are the sifters of rumor and innuendo and presenters of fact, can even hold, if the people who we're covering have a greater ability to use the technology to dissemble and deceive. The questions of anonymous sourcing and source characterization become only one element in this question.

"At lunch I think we saw how our own peer pressure and sensibilities come to bear on this. Particularly this problem that we have in all our coverage. The chicken and egg question of are we creating the events and the cultural phenomenon that we observe? Are we reinforcing them, are we observing them? Are we the cause of cynicism or are we the reflection of it is a question that we probably can't answer but I think Phil and the rest of the people there offered some, at least at the beginning, a way to think about how can you spot yourself, or spot cynicism in your work when you see it?

"On the last panel I think we saw that the demands by the public, by a changing culture, and by our own editors to differentiate our work and to provide the meaning to our reporting that gives it context could almost be interpreted as, to use a verb, as just another form of pressure that makes what we do much more complicated and difficult than it once was.

"All of the work that we saw up here could probably irritate the hell out of some reader who'd say how does he know that? And yet I think we saw in each of the cases here reporters who are sort of unusually, had an unusual amount of time and skill and experience in putting together what they do. ...

"It suggests, I think, some other areas for us to look at down the road at the other forums.

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