Charles Gibson, the co-host of Good Morning America and the moderator of the afternoon began by trying to push the conversation beyond platitude and theory.

"When you talk about diversity it is relatively easy to be for it. We're all against sin and we're all for mother love and we're all for diversity, but the practical applications of all of these questions are very difficult, and I would challenge the panel, I hope they can be very specific in their examples. I hope they can talk about real life examples because these things are not as easy as sometimes they appear in fora like this one."

Being Covered When You Don't "Fit"

Peter Bell, an Executive Vice President of TCF Financial Corporation which is a $10 billion holding company headquartered in Minneapolis, began the afternoon with an extended address. An African American who often notes how frequently reporters assume his position on an issue based on the color of his skin, he is especially critical of affirmative action.

"The rationale for diversity based on race and gender is often grounded in one of the following factors. First, to provide wider opportunity and career compensation for historically excluded groups. Second, to provide fresh ideas for journalism, non-profits, and government. Third, to provide representation in the councils of power for women and men who are currently disproportionately under-represented. The press often uses an additional rationale for diversity, which is to bring balance and fairness to a story.

"A question not asked, however, is when does that line cross and in effect become advocacy journalism? ..

"Few can dispute the fact that for a variety of reasons that include legal barriers and cultural biases, women and minorities historically have not been in key decisionmaking positions in our society. In addition, businesses, non-profits, government and the press need as many new and fresh ideas as they can secure.

"The argument for diversity based on representation or balance is more problematic. I believe at its core, it presupposes that persons of the same race and gender think alike because of their shared experiences of racism and sexism. The argument, I believe, ignores and/or minimizes the influence of class, education, region, family, personal psychology or religion in shaping our personal ideas and beliefs.

"Think about it. What would have a greater impact on my world view? My ethnic background, or if I weighed 300 pounds, or had a history of drug addiction, or was raised in a union household? One of those three, incidentally, is true for me.

"Diversity is often defined only by observable traits such as race and gender which are believed to serve as a proxy, and I would argue a crude proxy, for ideas ...

"It was not that long ago in this country that many people thought blacks and Asians all looked like. That idea has given way to the notion, now, that many of us must think alike. At the end of the day there is little difference between stereotyping an African American youth as a criminal, and stereotyping an African American as being able to represent a 'certain point of view'.

".. [W]hat is the black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is there isn't one. More specifically, I feel the press over-reacts to the criticism that it depicts communities of color negatively, and as a result reinforces stereotypes."

"The media never seem to ask the hard question which is what real world responsibilities, if any, do individuals subject to stereotypes have for conducting their lives in ways that run counter to the prevailing attitudes that the broader society may have of them? Or should society simply demand that all individuals simply disabuse themselves of all of their stereotypes and that we shame those holding them into silence?

"A friend once told me that stereotypes are simply and tragically applying statistics to a group or situation in a hurried world."

"Do I not only have a right to resent and confront a white shopkeeper who looks and treats me with suspicion, but also to confront the behavior of black youth who fuel the flames of that suspicion by virtue of disproportionately inappropriate behavior and the diminished opportunities for the African American community that result?

"In blunt language, on a number of different levels, are white racists or black criminals a greater threat to me? And why does one receive, deserve condemnation; and the other varying degrees of victim status?

"The press' response to these issues, I feel, is simply to do puff, feel-good pieces on cultural activities in communities of color including Kwansa -- a holiday I suspect that the majority of African Americans barely know exists, let alone celebrate.

"Few would argue that a major role the press has had in our society is to provide clarity on subjects of great public importance. Nowhere is this more true than the role the press could play in helping the public understand the subtle nuances of our racial dilemma.

"One example is to distinguish between issues like non-discrimination, affirmative action, and racial preferences. The first of these non-discrimination has its historic roots in our Constitution, and more recently, the Civil Rights Movement. The straight forward and legalistic approach into issues of race was quite controversial in the '50s and '60s, but now has gained deserved and unquestioned moral authority and public support.

"The second response to race is affirmative action or equal opportunity. This concept, to the extent to which it is understood, also enjoys broad national support. It has historically been described as an outreach effort to ensure that qualified minority candidates for a job or placement in college were made aware of the opportunity at hand. This approach was quickly followed by many remedial efforts to increase the number of individuals in the pool of qualified applicants. Unfortunately, when these efforts did not produce results -- which is racial proportionality in virtually all fields of employment and education... Incidentally, something that has never come about in the history of the world."

"The third response our country has taken to race is racial preferences, which are often done under the name of non-discrimination or affirmative action. I know of no college, university or business that labels a program of racial preferences as such. It is always termed in a more benign manner to minimize public opposition. The public clearly does not support punishing innocent individuals with loss of opportunity for sins their fathers may not have committed, and in so doing, rewarding other individuals for practices that in many instances occurred before their ethnic group immigrated to this country.

"A related area of inter-racial conflict is distinguished between racial ignorance, insensitivity, and racism. While there are far too many examples of clear, unquestioned racist statements and actions in this country, must every incidence of someone scribbling KKK with chalk on the sidewalk or a bathroom wall lead the 6:00 o'clock news? It is doubtful that many in the black community would view these actions as anything more than crude, stupid, and insensitive pranks -- not necessarily a reflection of deep-seated racism."

"The hyper vigilance regarding racial slights has ushered in a wave of hate crime legislation and various speech codes on our nation's college campuses, with an eerie silence regarding First Amendment questions from the mainstream press. The press also, until quite recently, has been reluctant to address legitimate concerns raised by many who are critical of current Civil Rights leaders. As Shelby Steel has written, "The primary source of social, political, and moral power in black America is to keep white America on the hook." As a result, an incentive system has been established for black leaders to identify and articulate how victimized my community is. These leaders are inclined to interject race into virtually every issue affecting communities of color. There is a strong incentive to over-racialize virtually every issue affecting people of color, and in the process, minimize other causes."

"Unfortunately, this strategy causes white America to retreat to a color blind position to protect their own innocence with polarizing effects that are hard to overstate. As Steel points out, "Social victims may be collectively entitled, but they are all too often individually demoralized." Group victimization encourages individuals to be passive since society is the only possible agent of change."

"Many African Americans -- myself included -- feel enraged when we are told that any success we may have achieved has resulted primarily from affirmative action. This attitude tends to minimize our personal sacrifices and the tremendous efforts many of our parents undertook."

"I want to be clear. Any success I have had is due to the efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Bell -- not Lyndon Johnson.

"Finally, the press is often willing to accept the argument that when a behavior is labeled cultural, it should be immune from criticism. I am often asked by school teachers whether they should accept a different code of conduct for black students than white students. They fear that by criticizing so-called legitimate cultural behavior, they will appear insensitive or racist. This tendency to protect questionable behavior stifles the development of my community. The process we go through regarding this is now predictable.

"A significant number of individuals will engage in a commonly views inappropriate behavior. When this is criticized, civil rights advocates, often supported by academia, will attempt to explain the behavior in a cultural context which in turn immunizes it from open criticism because of our national fixation with being non-judgmental.

"This effort is coupled with attempts to destigmatize the behavior, to preserve the self esteem of the individuals and the autonomy of the culture in question. The behavior is then put on the fast track of legitimization which ultimately leads to normalization and a proliferation of the activity. We have seen this process at work with issues ranging from rap music to ebonics to out of wedlock births to divorce. The reality has done more to undermine the future of the African American community than the KK could ever hope to do."

Clarence Page, the Chicago Tribune columnist who is syndicated in 150 papers and who is also a commentator with ABC's This Week with Sam and Cokie, argued that journalists must continue to move toward diversity, imperfectly, because they have to. "We can never be all things to all people and we must never stop trying."

"While diversity has virtue, I do not believe hiring targets for interest groups are a good idea for a variety of reasons.

"There are few good yardsticks to measure our current status or to set our goals. For another, the best news people don't let you know what they really believe. Instead, they practice professional fairness, often called objectivity. We upset that covenant at our peril.

What's more, "religious and political attitudes are as a practical matter, very difficult to measure." Not only are the studies contradictory, but they probably aren't accurate. As "communication professor Judith Budenbaum of Colorado State University points out .. some people lie to pollsters, bless their hearts, even when it's a poll about religion....For most people that means presenting themselves as religious. For journalists it means just the opposite. .. [T]he traditional newsroom culture values objectivity to the point of non-involvement in the spiritual life of our communities, or at least not a public kind of involvement, a private relationship with their faith."

"Now does this make a difference in how we view the news? Maybe. But we're not sure. That's the way it's supposed to be when you're a journalist....."

"Even so, I've noticed a tendency too often among my colleagues to accept a limited stereotype view of American life. Black conservatives, for example, too often are regarded as some kind of political aberration when in fact every major survey shows ... Hispanics being mostly social conservatives, so are black folks. Instead of encouraging a vigorous debate on such innovative conservative agenda items, whether you agree with them offhand, but encouraging debate -- school vouchers, resident managed public housing, neighborhood anti-crime efforts, etc. My colleagues, black and white, tend to relegate such efforts to the back pages, unable to understand them or unwilling to try. Immediately suspicious of any black folks who came out of Reagan's White House basement.

"On the flip side, I detect much of the working class pro-union, pro-city presence that used to prevail on our newsrooms is slowly disappearing."

"....Those of us who come from minority communities have an obligation to bring our experiences to the table in news meetings; and editors and news directors worthy of their titles are obligated to reach out and listen to as broad a diversity of views as possible. None of us wants to be pigeon-holed. But we in the newsrooms, (also) can't duck it. .. We in the media cannot be all things to all people, but we must never stop trying."

David Ashenfelder, a reporter at the Free Press, and a Pulitzer Prize winner, said the current environment in many news organizations, even those with supposedly good records on diversity, was one in which conservatives and the devout feel they must be silent.

"I'm somewhat of an oddity in my newsroom... On Monday nights I meet with 500 men in a Bible study program in a northern suburb of Detroit. The men that are in that Bible study are from all walks of life. They are there for one reason, and that's to find out how God wants them to live their lives. And they frequently ask me, as a journalist, why we're so hard on Christians?

"Early on I used to defend what it is that we do and try to explain why it is that we do the things that we do, but there are some things that I've discovered in journalism, in our newsrooms, that really causes me sometimes to wonder if maybe some of us don't really like Christians."

"Every once in awhile (for instance) a sports figure wins a big event and he praises Jesus Christ for seeing him through. That happened with Evander Holyfield when he retained his boxing title after Mike Tyson bit off part of his ear. In the interviews, the live interviews that people saw, and some of the Christians saw, they saw him praising Jesus Christ repeatedly for helping him keep his cool, but a lot of that stuff got edited out in the later programs. The stuff that he thought was important enough to talk about his faith and what an important thing it was in his life."

"Four years ago or three years ago the Free Press published a story about a killer earthquake out on the West Coast. We sent a reporter out there to find out how it had affected the Michigan residents that had moved out there ... Toward the bottom of that story we quoted a gay man who .. was planning to stay there and rebuild, and we asked him why ... Here's what he said.

"'The weather is the best weather in the world. The people are good. In Topanga you can walk naked down the street smoking dope and nobody will bother you.' He went on to say, 'They're not like those born-again sons of bitches back in Michigan I had to put up with.'"

"I can guarantee you, that quote would have never gotten into the newspaper had it referred to Jew, Arabs or gays, it just wouldn't have happened. We learned a lot from that one."

"I've attended several Promise Keepers conferences, about seven or eight in all, and I can assure that the men that go to these events come back quite a bit different than they go. For many of these men it's a really fundamental religious experience. .. The news media over the last several years has really typecast these guys as being anti-gay and anti-women, and I can assure you that their motives are completely different than that.

"Finally, I talk to the guys in my Bible study group and I say we don't really have this agenda but they think we do, and they've tuned us out. A lot of them don't read the newspapers anymore and they don't want to watch TV and they just don't think that we really care about what they're into. Worse yet, they think we have an agenda.

"We have an obligation to do better than this. We're turning off a large segment of our audience."

Tom Bray, the editorial page editor of the Detroit News, argued that hiring targets are a mistake because he doubts the wisdom of trying to create an objective news product by balancing philosophies in the newsroom. Anything that pulls us back from a disinterested journalism is dangerous, and the whatever progress has been made in gender and racial diversity is obviously too superficial since it has been more than overmatched by the size of the audience that has drifted away to media with other cultural identity, whether it be for young people or conservatives. There has to be a better way.

Is there a liberal bias in the newsroom? "I don't think there's too much question about it....On the core issues, from abortion to taxes to healthcare, you will really find very few reporters in the newsroom who see much merit in the conservative argument.

"....If you do a nexus search using the term right wing or extreme right wing, [it] appears far more frequently than left wing. There is no left wing, as far as much of the media is concerned."

"Can this problem be solved through hiring practices? I doubt it. .. The nature of the news business tends to attract people who are more at home, I think, with a liberal point of view. I would say even a status point of view even more than a liberal point of view. They tend to believe in the efficacy of government, that problems can be solved through the application of rational principles."

"Besides, trying to solve this problem through hiring practices I think is wrong in principle. It's dubious enough to be making hiring decisions based on rather superficial criteria such as skin color or gender. Trying to sell an objective news product, objective in quotes, by balancing philosophies, would be even worse. Nobody would ever be able to believe anything they read.

"We might be able to remove some of the barriers to a more balanced approach to hiring. One of the biggest barriers, very broadly speaking, .. it is now very difficult, frankly, to fire anybody. It's very difficult under the law. .. that makes us reluctant to hire anybody. If you had more flexibility in these decisions you would probably get editors and managers more willing to take chances. It's the people at the bottom of the hiring ladder who need us to take those chances -- not the people in the vast middle or at the top of that ladder."

"While we have been busying ourselves with dubious schemes to produce more skin-deep diversity in the newsrooms, our customers have been diversifying their reading, their viewing, and their listening habits in more substantive ways. The popularity of Rush Limbaugh may have been only the first wakeup call. An audience of five million people who, according to the surveys, are better educated than the average.

"I think we're going to see a much more ideologically based press in the future, more perhaps like exists in Europe. I am not persuaded that this is a good thing."

Donna Britt, who has been writing a twice-weekly column for the Washington Post since 1992, agreed with many of the conservatives about the limits of the journalistic culture, and the limits of traditional definitions of diversity. What other option is there, however, to beginning with gender and race?

"I know that when we talk about what's wrong with hiring targets, you have to ask what's the alternative? I was an award winning writer at the Detroit Free Press for years and never got a bite, and there were white people that worked with me who had nary an award .. who got plenty of bites. .. And I'm sure my being a black female didn't hurt me at getting whatever job I got at the Post. .. None of this stuff is simple, and we would like things to be simple because our hearts are tight and it's hard to open them up, and because we don't have that much time to do it.

"I've been walking around this campus where I went to graduate school, and .. I'm seeing it differently, because I've been walking with my 16 year old son and his 17 year old friend. They're young black men, and they wear baggy clothes, and hoods over their heads, and they are so sweet and vulnerable, and you might think that they would hurt you because of what the popular image is."

"A lot of times the voice that gets heard is the loudest voice. And a lot of times that voice is not the one that represents me or my neighbors or my children. Then you have to question who my neighbors and my children are."

Linda Foley: President of the Newspaper Guild, argued that the progress made in diversifying newsrooms has led to only limited opening of the definitions of news not because race and gender are poor proxies for ideas as much as because journalism has lost sight in many cases of its real responsibilities as a public mission under the profound weight of a major shift toward corporatization.

"Should we hire for beliefs that people have? I'll tell you right now, to do that, to screen for that, would be crazy," and impossible.

Instead, "What is important is for us to think about .. [is] Why do we have journalism?....The founders of this country put a First Amendment in the Constitution because they said if people have information .. they can be good citizens. That's why the efficacy of government is important in this debate, and it is important for us to keep that in mind.

"What has happened, I think, is not so much that we have done a bad job of having different beliefs throughout our newsrooms. What has happened is we have a corporate culture that is pervading every newsroom in this country because of what's happening to the corporatization of our industry. (Applause) That is what is keeping us from covering real issues and covering things that really matter to people.

"We have a duty under that First Amendment as journalists to empower people, to give them credible information. Not to make them think that they're powerless to do anything about their situation. .. And in this corporate culture, we as journalists are not being allowed to do that.

"The ability of journalists to exercise conscience is much more important than anything they believe or any beliefs they bring to their job. It's credibility more than objectivity that's important for us in our industry. That's what makes journalism credible.

"Journalists have to have the ability to fight for stories to get in the paper; there has to be a culture in the newsrooms that allows a journalist to have open and free discussion. There has to be job security so that they don't fear that they're going to lose their jobs if they make a mistake. And there has to be an economic commitment on the part of these owners who own the media through which journalism is practiced, that they will back us up, and that they will invest -- yes, invest -- in good journalism. That's what's missing. That's why we have to have these kinds of discussions."

"When it comes to their own business, in order to have any credibility with the people that we cover, our own business practices in journalism, and on the part of media owners, and their own practices and policies with respect to workers and trade unions, have to be above reproach ...

"You have to practice what you preach. That's why, despite the tension that's in this room today with respect to the Detroit newspaper strike, now lockout, is important. Because if you are the metropolitan newspapers in Detroit, and you turn around after getting a legalized monopoly here to produce a monopolistic product and share the profits between the two largest newspaper corporations in this country, and then you turn around and cause a strike among your workers and the journalists in those newsrooms, and then you buy police forces and pepper gas people and try to run them down and all the other horrible things that have happened, that's real. That says a lot to this community and to the workers in this community about how their issues are going to be covered."

John Hockenberry, the NBC news correspondent, argued that traditional approaches to diversity simplistically risks atomizing audiences into mutually exclusive groups and ideas that do not correspond to how people live. Far from hiring being an indicator of where diversity comes from, he said, it comes from knowing your audience and being truly interested in your audience.

"I want to pick on two of the issues that came out in this panel here, and not particularly talk about myself, because quite frankly, I am in a complete quandary as to what is the relevance or need for more disabled people in the newsroom, and it raises for me the issue of what is the connection editorially between a notion of equity in the newsroom where you hire the people in your community because you think that is an equitable thing to do as a community; versus the editorial component of having all kinds of people show up in the paper and being able to identify themselves and be able to point to columns and places in the paper that represent their experience.

".. I don't think there's a natural relationship between the two, and I think it's for one reason.....It is absolutely the case that the media is market driven because in the United States all entities are market driven in this era. Market driven means you evaluate your success on the basis of your individual achievements and your individual wealth, as Mr. Bell has suggested earlier. That in fact Mr. Bell's success is because of Mr. and Mrs. Bell and anything he might have done to collaborate with them. In fact, it is due not only to them, but also to Lyndon Johnson and also to the other people in the community that one has to rely on."

"A person's individual faith, what a person tells a pollster about his faith, in fact, I submit has no meaning whatsoever. What an individual does with his or her faith has a lot of meaning. (Applause) What an individual does and how an individual acts politically does have meaning.

"In this society where we evaluate things on the basis of polls, where we determine our revenue in the media on the basis of demographics and mass audiences, we atomize the United States down to a collection of random, almost irrelevant, almost mutually exclusive sets of opinions and motives and agendas. To do so is to basically adopt a strategy that means you will end up doing what Ray Suarez pointed out earlier this morning, that we cover things that are irrelevant to most people because we are adding them up on the basis of a lot of characteristics that don't relate to how they live and how they depend on each other in their individual communities.

".. [F]ar from hiring in the newsroom being an indicator of where diversity comes from, it's knowing your audience, and to be truly interested in your audience from the top to the bottom, from the left to the right, and from all economic levels. That's how you ensure diversity in the stories that you actually produce or publish. To simply say that as a matter of, and I'll quote someone earlier this morning, as a matter of corporate logo evolution that you're going to have an Asian and a black and a person in a wheel chair in your newsroom, and that somehow is going to give you some license to say that you're diverse, is to fall into the same category of simply determining your content on the basis of demographics.

"You can determine revenue on the basis of demographics, but you can never determine content on that basis.

"If you want total diversity, where everyone's voice sort of exists in a kind of a meaningless cacophony, you can look at the Internet. That is total diversity. But it is content free in the sense that it's just random shots of people walking down the street. [Only when] you're engaged in an interaction on the Internet does that content begin to have meaning.

"Therefore, when we think of our newspapers and our institutions and our television networks, we have to understand that they are corporate, market driven entities, and to expect from them exclusively the kind of diversity and democratization that we expect from other levels of society is to be naive. The diversity in the American media will come from the bottom up, not from the top down. That's the way it's always worked in America. It may be a sad statement, and it may mean we're going to see a lot more frightening pictures like what happened at Howard University and what happened at Santa Monica Community College on the day of the OJ verdict. But we have to understand that those pictures are stories, and they're part of the struggle to achieve diversity in the United States. The media is part of the agent for that change, but it can't be the whole thing.

Charles Gibson: "If we are talking about whether or not it is wise to have various groups represented within the newsroom, if someone came to me as a potential person to hire me and asked me if I were devout, asked me if I were conservative, asked me if I believed in the union movement -- those are the three things mentioned, but there are other examples I could use, I would not tell them. And I would resent the questions, and I would be highly offended.

"Is there anybody who defends that those questions could be asked? David, would you want those questions asked if you were hiring somebody in your newsroom?

David Ashenfelder: No.

Charles Gibson: Donna?

Donna Britt: I don't think so

Charles Gibson: Would you?

Linda Foley: "No, and I wouldn't want to be asked if I was anti-union either."

Donna Britt: "I would want to be asked if I could write about those subjects with interest and objectivity. Even asking that shows an interest that I think editorial pages and pages throughout newspapers often don't show."

Charles Gibson: "But probably all of us pride ourselves on the antithesis of that. For instance, I consider myself personally devout. If I had been asked by Clarence's pollster if I went to church on Sunday, well, I went to the Disney store, but I don't know if that counts. At ABC it does. That's the problem, which proves other people's points.

"But as somebody who is personally devout, my argument to anybody if they asked me that question, David, would be to say I can put that aside. I can not consider that."

Peter Bell: "I'm struck by that because the arguments that I heard for diversity based on race this morning really were based on the same rationale. That persons of color have unique access and sensitivity to areas of society that need to be covered by the press; and by virtue of the fact that I am African American, I somehow have a unique understanding of the African American community, affiliation, access, sensitivity to it.

"Now if in fact that's true and people buy that argument, why would not the same be true of someone who is devout or..."

Charles Gibson: "That's exactly the point. That's why this thing breaks down because when you walk in I know right away if you're a female; I know right away if you are Latino; I know right away various things about you that I don't have to ask questions about. There are things that I cannot get at by simply visual..."

David Ashenfelder: "I think what people resent is not so much being asked whether they have these particular affiliations, but learning after they're hired that that's the last they're ever going to engage in a discussion about any of those issues."

Peter Bell: "And that is a distinction without a meaningful difference, too, I would argue. One of the concerns that I hear many individuals of color raising, and I think it's a doubled-edged sword, is individuals not wanting to be pigeonholed....On the one hand I hear people arguing we need increased amounts of diversity. On the other I hear individuals saying yes, but I don't want to be just assigned to this community or seen as representing this community or having an affiliation with this community or having access to this community. I would argue it's difficult to have it both ways."

Clarence Page: "I would say a lot of things in life are difficult, but we've got to have this both ways. There are reasons why your experience means something in the newsroom. Everybody has this affinity impulse. We all want to surround ourselves with people just like us. If I had a choice I'd love to have a newsroom full of Clarence Pages, but I would be a pretty stupid manager ...

"Does that mean that you grill people during the interview process? No. But what it means is... And Tom and I would agree on this. As I mentioned earlier, I think a lot of conservative views get shunted out not because they're conservative but because they're unorthodox. A lot of liberal views.

"Let me say, though, that I think Tom and I would agree that there are certain mindsets in the newsroom. Yeah, there is a culture that tends to stereotype certain views as being wacky or off the charts or not worthy of page one consideration. It's up to managers. Nobody promises managers a rose garden. It's up to managers to deal with diversity, whether it's racial or idea diversity, etc., and to be aware of biases that do pop up in the newsroom culture."

Charles Gibson: "Tell me, Peter, what your newsroom looks like."

Peter Bell: "The thing I would hire on the basis of more than anything is the ability to write or cover a story, technical skills. And if any kind of diversity, I would look for it as philosophical diversity. I think a clash of ideas, as people have talked about, is how we arrive at truth, but I think a clash of ideas cannot be embodied in things such as race or gender or sexual orientation or even a class."

Charles Gibson: "Todd Humphrey, a fellow from WDCA has submitted a question -- Why has no one discussed hiring on the basis of merit."

Tom Bray: "How do you define merit?"

Charles Gibson: "You sit down people, you hire the smartest, the best experienced, the whatever, hang anything else."

Clarence Page: "Smart according to what?"

Charles Gibson: "According to you the person that's hiring."

Tom Bray: "That's merit, yeah. According to whoever hires. We're back to where we started from.

"The debate of affirmative action, etc., today is a debate of how you define merit. .. So it only begs the question."

David Ashenfelder: "I fundamentally disagree with this. .. I think there's been a debasing of standards in our country because of this very argument. I think this is an issue of significant concern to the American public, and I think you can quantify. I think this panel could get together and spend an hour afterwards, and we could define what qualifications are, for merit is."

John Hockenberry: "But it is the great tragedy that America in attempting to solve its diversity problems attempts to extract from people objective measures of things like merit and experience and quality so that we may therefore reorder the world in some way. What we always end up with is Stalinism. We end up with some sort of enforced social engineering that actually pleases no one.

"To say that merit is independent of experience is absurd. It's to say that you're going to judge Finnegan's Wake on the basis of its grammar."

Tom Bray: "I come down on the side of some kind of standards, and obviously part of that standard is experience, and are qualities that are sometimes hard to put into quantitative measure. But it seems to me that you have to have, at least in your own mind if you're the hiring manager, some sort of standard by which to hire people. Otherwise just the first 20 names in the Cambridge phone book..."

Donna Britt: "I have never worked anywhere where I have not been astonished at the level of mediocrity among white people where I've worked because I've been given this vaunted idea of their excellence and of their merit and that they really have it together, and I work next to these people and it's like my God... They are as average as we are."

Charles Gibson: "The terribly tricky thing is when you begin to try to quantify the numbers that you have in your newsroom, you then begin to try to quantify the qualifications on which they are hired, and then you're so deeply in the mire that you have trouble getting out.

"Let me ask you a question .. Do any of you work in newsrooms where there is actually a chance where people sit down, challenge each other's beliefs, say I'm not sure what you brought to that story, why you wrote that story that way? Is there any kind of interchange once you get into the newsroom where this diversity supposedly pays off?"

John Hockenberry: "I hate to blab on here, but there is actually one story that relates to exactly what you're talking about that is personal to me, and also something that Peter was talking about earlier, this idea of being pigeonholed.

"I went to NPR years ago, and then to ABC and NBC with the absolute idea that I did not want to do stories on disability. .. [F]or me existentially, and it was a problem in figuring out the stories that I would choose, and when I arrived at Dateline, a producer came to me and said, we want to do a story, a hidden camera story about discrimination against the disabled in employment and in hiring. I said to myself, I certainly don't want to do this story and here's why I don't want to do this story. I talked with him. Even though my motives had something to do with this issue of not wanting to be pigeonholed as the disability reporter, what I said was in my experience in encountering discrimination, it's inconclusive. I see people who sort of look at me wrong or maybe they make some sort of decision and I never really quite understand .. how it effected me.

"So I'm given two choices. I can either say well, I guess I just suck; or number two, I guess they're all against me. But I never really know the answer.

"I said to this producer, I don't want to be standing up there and saying on camera, you know, it didn't look quite like discrimination, but take it from me, it was. There was quiet for a moment. This young man, a Korean American named Joe Ri who is a dear friend of mine said, "John, discrimination doesn't happen while you're there. It happens the moment you leave. That's why we have the hidden cameras, and we're going to nail it." I looked at him, and he looked back at me, and we went after it."

"I had no particular view to bring to the story of disability, although it was important. Joe had no particular view. It was the combination of our collaboration in that newsroom that brought together a story that actually did something that mattered. I think it's those kinds of collaborations in a newsroom that are much more important than the individual head count of races and minority."

Linda Foley: "I think that's a really valid point....It's the idea that we can have this discussion, that we can have these viewpoints aired, and then we can go together as professionals and go and cover the story. That's really important. I think that's not what's happening in newsrooms today. Not like it was. And even though, John, you're right, that newsrooms, the media in this country has always been a corporate entity, the corporate culture and sort of the vanillaness of the newsroom debate is much more pervasive now than it has been.."

Charles Gibson: "Is there newsroom debate? .. Since journalists are supposed to ideally be objective, shouldn't the need for diversity be better addressed by the culture of the newsroom than by individual perspectives? Is there a culture of the newsroom? .. Is there interchange between people. Are you challenging each other, are you talking each other, are you pushing each other?"

David Ashenfelder: "I'll tell you how it plays out for Christians in my newsroom. They don't talk. They're afraid of being ridiculed. ..we talk to each other and we talk among ourselves. ..[W]e've been asking ourselves lately is why are we just talking among ourselves?"

Charles Gibson: "Tom, does it happen in your newsroom? Donna?"

Donna Britt: "[If] e-mail and messages could be read publicly it would be incredible what people would learn. .. Flurries and flurries of messages complaining, arguing, discussing what's in the paper that day."

Charles Gibson: "[Are] reporters, generally those who are the people writing and the people that are on the air, are they so out of touch with the people they are covering that we lose perspective? Is there a class question in newsrooms where we are, in effect because of our pay scales, elevated too far above our readers and our viewers?"

Donna Britt: "It's not just pay scales, it's education. People who, very few newspapers are looking for people who aren't college educated or even have master's degrees and beyond, and the people who tend to have those degrees tend to have more money."

Peter Bell: "I would argue that the way we discriminate most in this country is not on the basis of race or on the basis of religion or even on the basis of class. It is probably on the basis of intelligence. .. I would argue, you find fewer marriages across IQ lines than any single other division in this country. There is rigid segregation on the basis of IQ."

Charles Gibson: "But you are not advocating, I don't suspect, the dumbing down of newspapers are you?"

Peter Bell: "No."

John Hockenberry: "That's TV's game, and we've got it locked up....People who work in journalism, on balance, have more education, higher income, and particularly on television, are physically more attractive. That is a select subgroup. .. Then I think you have all kinds of questions of access to the public and understanding a whole range of issues."

Donna Britt: "If you go just into schools and speak like I do, you meet people who have no kids, who have no money, who are so smart, and who can ask you incredibly challenging questions, who are not going to go to college. .. What about those people?

"... If you don't have a certain level of income or you don't catch the eye of the right foundation or mentor, it doesn't matter how smart you are..."

Judith Cummings: "Is there an assumption here that diversity and quality are mutually exclusive?"

Tom Bray: "I don't think so."

Linda Foley: "Absolutely not."

Peter Bell: "I don't make that assumption."

Charles Gibson: "According to Ben Bagdikian, almost all of our mass media, book publishing, newspapers, TV, radio, etc., controlled by roughly 20 major corporations. How can their be diversity in views on economics in business when that is the situation?"

Dave Ashenfelder: "First of all, we have a proliferation of outlets now. We have talk radio, we have a great deal of news magazines. .. I think there is more diversity of opinion that exists in this country than perhaps ever before."

Linda Foley: "I don't buy that at all. From an appearance standpoint there may look like there's more diversity of opinion, but I disagree with that. .. The average person gets their information from television and maybe newspapers and maybe a magazine or two [but most] from television, and I don't think that there are enough outlets for information in journalism and news. Not with 20 corporations controlling all of that."