I'm delighted to be here. I have to tell you that I'm a little daunted by the assigned topic -- journalism at the millennium. It reminds me of the Groucho Marx line about not joining a club that would have me as a member. This is a very big issue, especially at a time when we're terribly concerned, as we are today, about what journalism means and what its future is, and we're asking ourselves really fundamental questions.

I was thinking about the millennium and journalism at the millennium and then I remembered from the dim, dusty reaches of my Northwestern experience what happened the last time there was a millennium. What happened, among other things, was that in Europe hordes of millennarian zealots stripped themselves naked and began running around the countryside proclaiming the apocalypse. Then I thought, well maybe it's not so far from the situation that journalism is in in 1997, because it feels like we're doing a lot of apocalyptic thinking and talking.

The name of this program is the purpose of journalism, and I thought I ought to just start by making a stab at a fairly unrigorous definition of that purpose, at least by my own lights.

To me, the central purpose of journalism is to tell the truth so that people will have the information that they need to be sovereign. That definition is terribly important in a self-governing political system in which there is maximum freedom of choice with respect to economic, social, and other decisions. The kind of society that we aspire to be and to a great extent are.

So what are the problems? Why are we concerned? Why do we have conferences like this? Why are we occasionally apocalyptic?

We're troubled because we're losing trust. The polls show it, and lately you can see it in the popular images of journalists on television and in the movies. We don't feel like heroes anymore.

Another reason that we tend to be a little bit apocalyptic as we approach the millennium is that we're losing audience.

Let me take those in turn.

We're losing trust significantly, I believe, not because of what we do, our purpose -- which most people would share that it's an important purpose -- but because of how we do what we say we're supposed to do. There are a number of dimensions to that.

One is, and I wasn't here to hear it, but I think Newt talked about the first amendment reflex in which we trot it out as a banner for everything we do, including the things that we do that are not very nice. We tend to be very arrogant about that at times. People don't like that. I think they're right not to like it. But even if they're not right to like it, the fact that they don't is a meaningful thing for us.

I think people believe, again to some extent correctly, that often we give insufficient attention and consideration to the personal hurt that we cause when we do what we do. We fail to value the damage that we do sufficiently, and maybe overvalue the good that is going to come out of what we do. People feel that we act that way sometimes. And sometimes they're right.

There's a closely related issue about privacy that people are nervous about. What we do is fundamentally not about protecting people's privacy. It's fundamentally about intruding on people's privacy in one way or another, and at a time when people are concerned about that, we can take the brunt of their concern.

I think there's a least common denominator factor to people's lack of trust in us or loss of trust in us. That is, we're the media. Anything anyone does is what we all pay for.

I think when you look at the data you typically find, as we do in our surveys, that the media are untrustworthy, but my paper has my trust. Yet we're the media.

Liberty always means that somebody, or almost always means that somebody's going to misbehave. That's what liberty means. It means that people have the freedom to do things that we perhaps even prefer they not do. So it's almost inevitable that in a situation of liberty, someone will behave differently and worse than we aspire to behave.

There's another factor in that one thing, and this is our problem, things shade into each other. Journalism, as everybody knows who's been involved in making news decisions, journalism's a game of inches and the decisions are not often what in the law are called bright line decisions, bright line distinctions. There's a balancing test that has to be applied to them. Then when somebody goes overboard in some way or another, does something that is troubling, we look back and we find it difficult to find the line between that and some other thing that we do that we would find acceptable. Then we all beat ourselves on the breast, strip ourselves naked, run around, talk about the apocalypse and say we're all the same. We fail to make the distinction, and then have the confidence to adhere to it. While if we operate on principle and we are trying to honestly make these distinctions for ourselves we ought to have the confidence to say, no, it's not all the same. We don't believe it's all the same. We don't believe we're acting like paparazzi. We would fire people who do what the paparazzi do.

We're in a time intellectually in which the intellectual climate of the time is to cast doubt on distinctions of this sort, particularly moral distinctions. And bright people can always make analogies. I think every one of us who have been in the business have had to face those analogies. Isn't what you do over here analogous to what they do over there? Of course in one sense it may be. In one sense, we do take pictures of people. In one sense sometimes we take pictures of people when they'd just as soon we didn't take pictures of them. But we don't do what the paparazzi do and we find a distinction there that's worth holding to. We operate on it. We act that way. We often hurt ourselves in the short run by not acting that way. We ought to be willing to stand up and say we think it matters. That difference matters.

All moral issues come in shades of gray, but that shouldn't lead us to say that everything is basically the same moral quality, or to doubt whether we can make the distinction between one kind of behavior and another.

Just to tell you a little story, we were offered by the National Inquirer the story that they eventually published about Dick Morris, the presidential advisor, frequenting a prostitute at the Jefferson Hotel where I spent the night last night, by the way. (Laughter) I hope I wasn't in the Dick Morris suite.

VOICE: Were there photographers?

JACK FULLER: There were no photographers.

We turned down the generous offer of the National Inquirer, which came to me, by the way from a classmate from Medill. (Laughter) We turned it down for a variety... I didn't turn it down, I passed it on to the right people who are the editors -- I was a publisher at the time. They turned it down for a variety of reasons. I don't think we even reached the difficult one, because we were utterly unable to verify that there was anything to the story, let alone to decide what we would do with it if it were true, or if we were confident that we knew it were true, let alone the details that might have made it a relevant thing rather than an irrelevant thing.

The next morning we did have a story about Dick Morris and the prostitute because over the course of the evening it was clear to the Administration and to Morris that he was in a crack and he was going to not get out of it so he resigned. We ran a story which reported everything including, painfully to Medill and slightly painfully to me, the conversation between my classmate and me, that he had offered the story to us and we turned it down. So we ran a story about this event.

This is one of those examples of a situation in which it's easy to say, well you let yourself be tabloided. Right? Yet I find it very easy to draw a distinction between the decision we made in the first place not to take the story; and the decision we made in the second place, to report that Dick Morris quit and why he did. I am totally comfortable speaking to any of you, to my mother, to my Maker or anyone else in drawing that distinction. Yet one hears constantly the argument that they're all the same because you would publish a thing like that. I didn't hear people say it about this, but I'm sure they did. They didn't say it to me. Because you do that, you're just the same as the National Inquirer, you're behaving by the same rules.

Let me turn to the question of losing of audience, which I think is related but different in some ways.

We're losing audience for two reasons, maybe three. Perhaps there's -- for the newspaper business of which I'm going to speak mostly because that's what I know anything about -- perhaps there's a declining taste for reading. That may be temporary, it may be permanent, but I'm not going to deal with literacy here, which is less our problem than the nation's problem, it seems to me. Certainly as literacy it's less our problem than the nation's problem.

But we're losing audience because of fragmentation. Choices are proliferating, and by and large everyone is losing audience. Despite the concern about mergers and so forth, we're losing audience as a result of a decline in control by powerful companies. And if you believe in the free market of ideas, this is ultimately a good thing. With more choices, the theory goes, people have more capacity to judge what's true and what's not, and act on what they believe is true.

The fact is, and I'm going to talk about newspapers a little bit here, specifically. The fact is, in many places, in most places, newspapers are holding audiences better than other individual media outlets.

We did a little research recently at the Tribune, and I mean no disrespect to anybody by this, this is the comparison that was instructive when we looked at it. We looked at the Tribune against the leading TV station in Chicago, WLS, over a ten year period. The Tribune's loss of audience over that decade was 14 percent daily and eight percent Sunday, measured by circulation. The leading TV station's loss was 24 percent.

Everyone is losing to fragmentation. Newspapers are losing less. So we're millennarians on this point. Every time you turn around there's a publisher or the president of a publishing company or somebody, an editor, who is beating his breast over the fact that we're losing audience, which is something of concern to all of us, and I'll get to the nature of that concern in just a moment. But at the same time, we have to recognize that this thing that we sell in newspapers, this knowledge that we sell that's holding audience better than anything else around, and we ought maybe to be balancing our concern about this with some optimism about it, maybe even some reason to boast.

The thing that is concerning to us as journalists in the loss of audience is that it is related not only to fragmentation, but it's related to a distancing between the public's taste and our tastes. I heard some of the previous conversation on this subject, and everyone who has been involved in this business has had to recognize that what we think people need to know in order to exercise sovereign decisions in their lives, our definition of that as journalists, which derives in substantial measure from a theory of government, from a theory of how a good society behaves, learns, decides, our concept of what people need and their tastes are divergent.

With powerful regularity this gets expressed by us, by us journalists -- I was just reading the American Journalism Review. It was all over the most recent issue. This gets expressed as a conflict between new corporate values and journalistic values.

Now I'm not here to try to define for you let alone debate the conflict between journalistic values and corporate values. That can happen. That can happen. It happens. But it's not the essence of this issue, in my view.

The real conflict here is the conflict between our tastes, our idea of what information people should have, and what people's idea of the information they should have. And if we want to attribute this to the new form of ownership or the growing form of corporate ownership in the media, all I ask you is in your nostalgia if you hold that view. In your nostalgia, remember how the great sole proprietors of newspapers built audience. I've got to tell you this, it wasn't by turning up their nose at the Marv Albert trial kind of story. They built it by appealing to the tastes of the public that we find most uncomfortable. It has nothing to do with corporate form or whatever, it has to do with what people do to get large numbers of people to pay attention to them.

I've got to confess, personally, I share the journalists' taste -- not surprisingly. I've spent most of life doing just that, writing this work, and I still do. I like my books, the ones I write, a lot better than I like the books that sell a lot. (Laughter) And I wonder at the fascination that people have with celebrity rather than achievement -- I frankly wonder at it. I'm appalled at the novels that I see highly educated people reading. They should be ashamed of themselves.

I wish people cared more about politics. I deeply wish they cared more about politics for both high minded reasons and venal ones. The high minded ones are obvious. The venal one is we cover politics really well in the newspaper. That's something a newspaper does extremely well. Unfortunately, the taste for it is declining.

I think figuring out what to do with what I'll call journalism's crisis of public taste, is one of the fundamental professional challenges that we as journalists have to deal with as we lurch into the millennium, stumble into it.

My views aren't going to change people's tastes, and neither will turning up collective noses and giving condescending lectures to people change their taste. There may have been a terrible failure in education that's at the root of it. We may have something to do with it, but probably we don't have all to do with it; probably don't have very much to do with it.

There are several alternatives. I'm going to put them real starkly, and there are lots of nuances among these alternatives to deal with the shift in public taste, or the difference between the public's taste and what we think people should want.

We can move journalism and redefine it and make it to aim at an elite audience. The elite audience will, it actually does share our tastes. By and large, it agrees with us, what people need to know in order to make sovereign choices. So you could move journalism, what we define as good journalism, to an elite audience. That has some pretty unpleasant civic consequences. if you really believe that the reason these things are important is because it's important to the country, leaving most of the country in the lurch is not a terribly good civic solution. And it has rather unpleasant economic consequences. You can build business models in which great journalism is directed at small, elite audiences, but they're not very easy to build. There certainly aren't going to be as many publications of that sort as there are publications today.

There's another alternative. We can continue to behave like Ted Bernstein's wonderful creation, Ms. Thistlebottom. If you remember Ms. Thistlebottom's hobgoblins. This was a book about things that English teachers teach about good usage that are wrong. We can behave like Ms. Thistlebottom and lecture forever to people that they should want what we want to give them, and then to give them failing grades for not agreeing.

Or we can try to find some new methods, new rhetoric, that gets crucial messages through to people and uses some kind of judo on their appetites. I like the last, but I don't have any slick ideas of how to achieve it. I think it takes all the collective intelligence and creativity that we can muster in our profession to answer, to create a new rhetoric for journalism, and I think it will never happen until we open our minds to the idea that this is our responsibility -- finding the way to reach people with these messages is our responsibility. Even if it means challenging many of the things that we've come to take for granted as part of the credo of our business.

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