TRANSITION TO GOVERNING PROJECT EVENT
Media Coverage from Scandal to Crisis:
A Discussion with Marvin Kalb

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

9:45 a.m.	Registration
10:00	Featured Speaker:	Marvin Kalb, Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government
	Panelists:	Norman J. Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute
		Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution
		Tom Rosenstiel, Project for Excellence in Journalism
Noon	Adjournment

MR. ORNSTEIN: [in progress] have fortunately turned to dedicating themselves to trying to improve the quality in their profession. Maybe the only two, I know there are one or two others.

A Sisyphean task, I guess we could say. But, in particular, today, we are going to showcase and focus on Marvin Kalb, the "guiding light" for many years, now, behind the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard, the executive director, now, of the Washington office, after heading it up in Cambridge for a number of years, and--

MR. KALB: Twelve.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Twelve years. That of course came after a remarkably distinguished career as chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS News, before that for NBC News, moderator of Meet The Press, author of a number of books, and most recently, just now, a terrifically done book called "One Scandal, A Story: Clinton, Lewinsky and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism."

It gives you some clue as to where he's going with it.

Next to him, Tom Rosenstiel, now the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which like our Transition To Governing Project, here, with AEI and Brookings, Tom Mann and me, is an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, an attempt to improve journalistic standards and focus on them.

He's also vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, coming to these positions after a distinguished career with the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek magazine, where he was both chief congressional correspondent, and then moving on to the LA Times, the media critic. His books, many of them, include, most recently--unfortunately, I don't have one to hold up but they're readily available just around the corner at various bookstores.

"The Elements Of Journalism: What News People Should Know and the Public Should Expect," with Bill Kovach.

We also have with us Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution, co-director with me, Norm Ornstein, of the Transition To Governing Project.

We're going to start with some remarks by Marvin, as we look both at the "low lights" and perhaps the "highlights" of the press in the last several years. Then we'll get some comments from Tom, and then we'll have a broader discussion, here, with the panel, and then with the audience.

Marvin.

MR. KALB: Thank you very much, Norm, and I want to thank the American Enterprise Institute and you, personally, for having organized today's event. I'm very grateful.

I want to start with the time, back in 1987, when I left NBC, and then went up to the Kennedy School to start up the Shorenstein Center, and when I arrived up there, I found that I already had the title well in place, and it was the Center On Press, Politics and Public Policy, and aside from the fact that that's beautifully alliterative, the dean was trying to tell me something, and at that time was Graham Allison, and the president of the university was Derek Bok, and they both had a feeling that it was really impossible for a School of Government not to address the issue of the press.

That, for so many years, the Department of Government had gone on in its own merry way dealing with the study of government but never acknowledging the existence of the press, and the impact that the press has upon the functioning of American democracy as practiced here in Washington.

And so Graham Allison and Derek Bok decided, with Walter Shorenstein's money, that they were going to set up this center, and then they threw the name at me, and just about nothing else in terms of guidance.

So it became a function of trying to make sense of what you do in a center of that sort, and one of the things that I came upon very quickly, and it grew out of my experience in Washington, was that how do you fashion a public policy? How do people come to understand what government policy is all about without the intimate, there all the time, inescapable presence of the press?

So at the Center, we just started as a research focus, the idea of finding case studies that could elaborate the theme of the central role of the press in fashioning the public policy of the country.

When I was about to come to the end of my 12 years as director of the Center, I wanted to do something, and in academic terms, as you all know, that means writing a book. So the question was then what kind of a book, what sort of book could I leave behind, that could be used in a classroom, but could also have some broader appeal to the public?

I had a number of ideas, but I did not have one that seemed workable, to me, anyway, until January 21, 1998, when the Washington Post, ABC, and the Los Angeles Times, together, but in slightly different ways, broke the story about the President's affair with a 22-year-old White House intern.

And as I read that piece in the Washington Post that morning, I said to myself, "Well, Marvin, you've got your subject." I mean, if there was ever an opportunity to study the impact of the press on public policy, this is it.

And so what I then proceeded to do was two things, basically. I did a great deal of what the academics call content analysis. I decided, rather than focus on all newspapers, I would focus on a limited number of newspapers, on all of the networks, on the two magazines, two major magazines, and then someone persuaded me to go along with U.S. News & World Report as well, which I did, and I had two assistants, and the three of us spent an enormous amount of time reading what was actually written or broadcast, not large summary generalizations but actually what it is that they said, what it is that they did. How many times they said and did what they said and did. And went through all of that. So that was the content analysis part.

And that's great for the scholars up at the school but it wasn't satisfactory to my journalistic instinct. So then it became a matter of interviewing the journalists. And I learned any number of things. I mean, I've been in the craft for 37 years, but I never realized before how difficult it is to interview journalists about what it is that they do. They never want to tell you anything, except if they have a, you know, a "great scoop," and then they will tell you what it is that they want to tell you about the scoop.

But I've spent so many years of my life trying to get information out of government officials, and I can tell you, flat out, it is much easier to get top-secret information out of the Secretary of State than it is to get it out of the State Department correspondent, or the White House correspondent covering a story.

John Osborne, the late John Osborne, once said that "journalists have glass jaws" and Tom Brokaw's always used to playing around with--and by the way, the anchors and the executive producers were also very helpful in--to me, at the beginning in limited ways, in grudging ways, but then, after a while, if you go back three, four, five times, and you review the same material, and they begin to think that you're not really going to rip them apart or destroy their opportunity of paying for their mortgage, they figure you're okay, and it took a while, but you were, after a while, able to get a significant amount of information out of the reporters and the executive producers. Not as much as I would like, by the way, but I did get a great deal.

But the glass jaw idea--I have a direct quote on it which I think is wonderful.

Brokaw said, "We throw punches all day long but as soon as someone winds up and looks as if they may throw a punch at us, we go down whining and screaming, in great pain."

[Laughter.]

MR. KALB: Unquote. And I think Tom is absolutely right. There is a great deal of that that goes on, a great deal of holding back information. I would like to, with that sort of opening, to talk about what it is that I learned about journalism doing the research for one scandalous story, and then take that and put it up against the framework of covering a war, and see whether, in fact, what journalists are telling themselves, and telling everybody is true.

Are we in, now, for example, into a new kind of journalism? Very serious, et cetera. Well, let me go through the things that I learned.

The first was the distinction that has to be drawn between "out there" journalism and "in here" journalism, and that relates to a story that goes back to 1992 at NPR, and Linda Wertheimer of All Things Considered was sitting around with her executive producer, Ellen Weiss, and they were talking about whether or not they should run the story about Gennifer Flowers, that had appeared that day in a supermarket tabloid.

All of the producers of the program wanted them to go with the story. When Linda asked why, they all said essentially the same thing. They said "because it's out there." And they began to explore, among themselves, this concept of news or information being "out there," and that the competitive pressures to bring it in here, meaning to make it part of your own broadcast, or newspaper.

The competitive pressures are such, that the impulse, the feeling, the tendency toward bringing something that is out there, in here, become overwhelming, and 9,999 out of 10,000 times, they're going to run with the story.

Sometimes, not in its pure rumor or fact form, but in something they feel comfortable with. But the idea of taking something out there that often could be unchecked, unsubstantiated, a rumor, and bringing it in here for those reasons of competition, ambition, whatever, become overwhelming and the story is quite often brought in here.

Let me tell you of the one illustration I came upon on January 25th, 1998, of two journalists working for one news organization, John Broder and Steven Labaton of the New York Times, the Washington Bureau, who refused to go along with the tide. January 25th. That morning began with a piece on ABC by Jackie Judd, who is a good reporter, an experienced reporter. Jackie Judd ran with the story, saying that "ABC News has learned--that's the wonderful thing in network--"CBS News has learned." Where? How? What? "CBS News has learned."

Anyway, on this morning, it was ABC News that had learned that a White House steward had seen the President and Lewinsky in a compromising position. The story was like a prairie fire. It just spread through all of journalism. An illustration was that Brokaw, that afternoon, an hour before the Superbowl began, broke into the Superbowl preparatory broadcast to tell them all about, not what NBC News had learned, but what ABC News had learned, without citing ABC News.

They didn't have anything, but they felt the need to say something, because it was "out there."

Broder and Labaton, at noon on that day, told their Washington bureau chief, Mike Oreskes, that they had four sources for their story about the sighting. The information was then passed on to Joe Lelyveld, then the editor of the New York Times in New York.

Joe thought, in that context--the story had broken the preceding Wednesday--this was now Sunday--that this was a story that was banner headline, and that he believed--what he told me was that if the New York Times ran that as a banner headline story on Monday morning, that would have toppled Clinton. He would have had to pull out at that time, so great was the pressure for him to pull out.

At 5:00 o'clock that afternoon, Broder and Labaton came into Oreskes' office and said the following: Their four sources were not really four sources, independent sources. Three of the four, they found out that afternoon, had learned what they had told Labaton from the fourth source. So there were not four independent. There was one who had passed it on to three.

The one was a Washington lawyer named Joseph diGenova, who has a wonderful voice, and is absolutely marvelous at the Gridiron and loves to participate in the game of politics, and one of the ways in which you can do that is to be a great source to the press.

So he was for a lot of the Washington press the source for the story about the witnessing of this compromising position. Now how did he know that? What he told me, a couple years later, was that he learned that from his wife, another Washington lawyer, Victoria Townsend. He overheard his wife in the midst of a telephone conversation with a possible client, talking about what the client had heard, possibly starting at ABC that morning, and passing it on to Victoria, overheard by Joe, passed on to reporters who went with it, because that was that kind of incredible competition.

Labaton and Broder told this to Oreskes, and they killed their story in the New York Times. So it isn't as if it's undoable. It is doable. If you don't have it, there is a way of saying I don't have it, and they kill the story.

Another lesson that I learned is that journalists--it shouldn't have been a lesson that I picked up only in January, post-January '98, but that journalists rushed to judgment. There was a presumption among the Washington press corps of Clinton's guilt as a womanizer, because of the--not guilt--the reputation as a womanizer. So with that reputation, when you pick up something, and it seemed right, you go with it.

Later on, reporters were quick to point out in the face of any criticism, we got the story right. They got the story right. My criticism is not that they got the story right. I expect that of good journalism. The way in which they got the story, in the early part, in the period that I was studying, as I said, tarnished the quality of American journalism. Another lesson, what Broder many years ago called blurring the lines.

In Washington, as so many of you know, everybody wants to get on television, and so a lot of people who are in the Government leave the Government and also overnight are transformed, in the present climate, into pundits, and they appear on television programs, and they do their op-ed pieces, and they're there. Is there anything wrong with this? No; don't jump me. Everything is fine. It's all perfectly copasetic. Except that in the world of 24-7, post-1996, journalism, of cable television, and an awful lot more talk-radio, there's a lot of time that has to be filled, and it is filled, not just by people who know what they're talking about, but by many, many people who don't know what they're talking about, and there was a great example of that, I think, over the last month, in the discussion of what it is that was happening.

I happened to look, last night, before going to bed at the New York Review of Books, which had a special column, bannered on the front of the magazine, by William "Poff"--is that the way it's pronounced--William Pfaff, P-f-a-f-f.

MR. MANN: "Paff."

MR. KALB: "Paff." It was a beautifully written, very elegant piece, pointing out how totally wrong American policy is in Afghanistan, how the bombing cannot work, how the Taliban will resist, how they will get to a certain point where they cannot even get Mazar-e-Sharif. They will not be able to do anything, and, one day, the Bush administration will acknowledge how bad they are and how faulty their analysis was.

So there you are in a magazine that arrives. Everybody is great at putting forth their ideas. This guy I've read for many, many years, I've never met him, and he seems like a very, very bright guy, and he surely commands the English language well, but he was dead wrong, absolutely dead wrong up to this point anyway.

Everybody and his uncle is getting in there, and Ben Bradley at one point said that Watergate, in his experience, marked the final passage of journalism to the best seats in the establishment.

My own sense was that once in the best seats in the establishment, it was required to give your opinion, not just tell us what you knew, but what it is that you believed. I have a feeling, every now and then, when I turn on my set, that an old-fashioned journalist is now pretty much an extinct species. You don't have them anymore.

Broder wrote, in '88, "We damn well better make it clear we are not part of the Government, are not part of a Washington insider's clique where politicians, publicists, and journalists are easily interchangeable parts. Once we lose our distinctive identity, it will not be long before we lose our freedom."

It's a large statement but I happen to share Broder's view. I think that journalism is losing its distinctive identity and I think that that, in and of itself, is very bad.

Let me close with two points, and then listen to Tom. The first point has to do with Michael Isikoff, a reporter, once for the Washington Post, and more recently for Newsweek magazine, and Michael, in his book, a very good book, a journalist's inside account, talked about his style of journalism, and he ascribed his style to all of journalism.

He said that when he was negotiating with the Office of the Independent Counsel--it's an interesting concept, journalists negotiating with the OIC. I hadn't come upon that in my own experience, at all. But he felt it was all right to reach a deal with the OIC, for Newsweek, in effect, to hold up on publication. It was not a "big deal" because this was a Thursday night and they don't publish until; make the final decision, anyway, till Saturday, and possibly even Sunday.

But he did reach this deal that will hold up for 24 hours, to give you an additional 24 hours, to try to break Lewinsky, and then the following day, he gave them an additional 24 hours to try to break Lewinsky, while he was trying to get additional information for his story.

He explained it by saying, "I cajoled, I threatened, I warned," and I sort of read these verbs, and it truly sent a chill through me, and Isikoff is one of the people I talked to a dozen times in preparation for this book.

He was, in an interesting way, both helpful and extremely unhelpful. But I wanted to understand from him why he felt that journalists routinely warn, threaten sources, cajole and frighten sources, and I told him in one conversation the truth, which is that I had never done that.

He said, "Oh, Marvin, that's absolute--of course you've done it." "Really?" I said, "No, I have not." He said, "Absolutely. I cannot believe, for one instant, that while you were covering Kissinger, you didn't go into his office and really lay it down on the line, and tell him that if he didn't do this, you were gonna report that."

I said, "Mike, you can believe it or not, but I never did it, and it would never occur to me to do it."

He said, "Well, that's the way we do it now." I said, "Well, God bless you. I just don't think it's right." So we parted. We're, I think, cordial to each other. Polite. Very nice. I don't think he liked everything that I wrote about him in the book, but that's life. That's the "glass jaw" phenomenon.

I just have a feeling that this kind of journalism is one of the reasons why journalism today is sort of way down there with root canal specialists, among the least-admired people in American society. My final point has to do with the war today.

Everyone has said, or almost everyone has said that we are now in a new time, and it's a new time for journalism, and it is a new time for the country. I think it's a new time for the country. I'm not sure it's a new time for journalism.

I find that most of the same bad habits that were on exhibition to an embarrassing degree, during the early days of the breaking of the Lewinsky story, were very much in view since September 11th. Very much in view. Let us bear in mind, that it is, for the most part, the same anchors, the same executive producers, the same editors, with one major change at the times, but it's a continuation of the same mentality and with the Times, by the way, they've done, I think, exceptional stuff.

But the idea of running after stories, of doing stories without solid backup information, because a story is out there, you put it in here, has been going on since September 10th. The anchors, in the first couple of days, I thought were truly terrific and very much playing the role that Cronkite played for four days after President Kennedy was killed--sort of a bonding process for the entire country, and once the first week was over, a lot of the same tendencies came into play.

The difference is patriotism, which, like a large multi-colored coat, is worn by the country, and worn by journalism because journalism is part of the country, and the journalists feel the same sense of outrage about September 11 that everybody else does, and they don't want to seem to be out of step. So there's a lot of flags flying, not as many as used to be, and it'll be less as time goes on. But the idea that for journalism, this is a new time, I don't think is right by performance, and I don't think should be right by what it is that journalists get paid to do.

Thanks, Norm.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you very much.

Tom.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: Thanks. If anything, I'm probably even a little harder or condemnatory of the press in Lewinsky than even Marvin, in a couple of ways, and basically one is to question not just Isikoff's techniques, but sort of the basic approach of what is news and what is not news.

I think what we saw in the Lewinsky scandal was what Bill Kovach and I called in an earlier book called "Warp Speed," the arrival of some sort of long-term structural changes in the way the press operates, that we're creating a new journalism of assertion, that was replacing the old journalism of verification, and there were several factors that build into that.

One is that with the proliferation of outlets, you have essentially a seller's market for information, you have a static number of sources being chased by a growing number of news outlets, and sources have growing influence over the news media that's trying to cover them, and we see that in the kind of conditions that sources set for reporters, the kind of cajoling and abuse that sources use in trying to control the news agenda. It's part of a growing sophistication of sources.

Another factor is that you have more sources of varying agendas, of varying, sort of news values, and in the age of 24-7, what we get from the media is less journalism as an end product and, to some extent, more, the raw grist, the raw elements of journalism given to us piecemeal.

So you tune in, and you see on CNN, or one of the cables, a press conference live. You don't know what's right, which allegation is important or significant or true, and then the anchorman vamps for 25 minutes, or 40 minutes, or two hours, until the responding press conference is held, and depending on when you tune in, you either hear, you know, the allegation, the response, or neither. With more time to fill, there's actually less time for reporters to sort of verify, synthesize, and figure out what here is important, and it's not an uncommon experience to tune in something at 10:00 o'clock in the morning on cable, and by 10:00 o'clock at night, whatever it was has vanished because it was ephemeral, it's trivial, it was unimportant, although not at the moment.

How many airplanes have been diverted, you know, that turned out to be hoaxes, but let the local news, since 9-11?

There are other factors that, you know, don't bear going into necessarily now, but this idea that the press was moving away from what you called sort of the old journalism of trying to find out what's true and what's not, and what's important, and what's not is overrun by various structural factors.

Underneath that was another phenomenon, that scholars have sort of seen coming for years, and I think is somewhat relevant in trying to understand where we are now with the war. That is what Neal Postman memorably called, back, 15 years ago, are we are "amusing ourselves to death," a phrase that seems somewhat more prophetic today.

In studies that we've done at the Project, we have seen a changing definition of what the news agenda should be or is, starting 25 years ago, getting lighter and lighter and lighter.

I was looking at the numbers last night. What we would consider traditional hard news, that is, government, domestic affairs, international affairs, foreign policy, the military--in 1977, made up roughly 70 percent of the stories on the evening news, and by 1997, it was 40 percent. We did a study in June of this year. It was about 45 percent, hovering in that same area.

In a study that we have coming out, what's supplanted that is lifestyle and celebrity coverage, which, by June of this year, made up 25 percent of the evening newscast, was celebrity news and fashion, and health, and consumer, and lifestyle issues.

The other part of this, of sort of "amusing ourselves to death," is something that people often think of, that's an issue in Lewinsky, is nothing private anymore? and I think that's actually a complete misunderstanding of the issue.

The real issue is not that nothing is private anymore but that nothing is public anymore, because what we once considered the public agenda, the public square, is increasingly squeezed out, not completely, obviously, but it has shrunk in the news to a point that we know a great deal less about the public square because there's less of it in the news, and so matters that should get healthy debate get a very limited or cursory debate, and that has a policy impact.

What's changed now, and how permanent is the change? We have a study coming out next week, that shows some of the shift, particularly on television, and I'll throw out a couple of numbers but be careful with these 'cause we haven't number-checked them yet.

But, basically, if 45 percent of the network newscasts were this traditional hard news arena, in June, today, it is close to 80 percent. Lifestyle and celebrity news, which made up 25 percent of the news agenda on the nightly newscasts is now zero. Gone. One story in the time frame that we studied in late October.

Science and technology news is up. Business news is down slightly, and crime, which oddly had become a large percentage of the nightly newscast, which is a curious thing because, nationally, crime is down, and most crime coverage is local. Crime had become a fairly sizeable component of the nightly news. That has also essentially vanished from the newscasts.

To some extent, for the moment, at least, we have been in the news business, at least on television, "scared straight." We are seeing a more traditional, the most traditional news agenda that we've seen in 25 years.

The question is: is this simply a temporary phenomenon, you know, caused by the fact that we are at war, a war on terrorism? I think the answer is: it's hard to say. We know that for the first time in 15 years, viewership is actually up for news.

We also know, from polls that Andy Kohut has done that, people are more approving of the coverage of this story than they have been of any story in recent memory. However, that approval rating, as Marvin has suggested, has been declining. They were more approving the first week, and that approval rating, while high, is slipping.

There is historical precedent to think that journalism can change. Journalism was very frivolous in the 1880's when "yellow journalism" was invented, a period of certain economic boom, but, more importantly, a high degree of immigration, and newspapers were aimed at these new immigrants who found America a very scary and sensational place.

By the turn of the century, yellow journalism was dead; basically, because these new immigrants had become more middle class Americans and they had more middle class concerns, and actually could read English and didn't need to look at the comic strips to get their news.

The 1920's was a period of enormous trivialization in the news. We had the invention of a new technology, radio. We had an economic boom. We had the invention of the term, tabloid. Walter Winchell, rumor and gossip as news. A period that really parallels the period that we were in before 9-11.

The good people at Harvard were so fretting over what to do about the sensationalism in the media, that they invented the Neiman Fellowship, thinking that if they could get twelve journalists up to Harvard for one year, that they could, you know--

MR. KALB: Accomplish miracles. Miracles.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: They could transform American journalism by the exposure to the enlightenment of Harvard University. I'm sure it did wonders.

MR. KALB: It's true; it's true.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: American journalism changed on a dime. The era of sort of the Lindbergh kidnapping coverage, and all of that, was transformed in the 1930's by the Great Depression. The news agenda changed, dramatically. That continued, you know, with World War II, and then the Cold War, so that with the invention of a new technology, television, that journalism was fairly serious because the socioeconomic situation was fairly serious.

To some extent, what we have seen in the press is caused by technological change, proliferation of outlets, which is causing everybody to lose audience and lose revenue, coupled with sociopolitical change, the end of the Cold War which took the great threat away.

Has journalism been changed, permanently? I think the answer to that will be whether or not the world has been changed permanently. To what extent do we go back to normalcy?

As I was working on this study last night, and going through the numbers about what's on the news, I also saw a promo for 20/20 this Friday night, which was Nikki Taylor, the supermodel, how does she cope with her recovery from her car accident. To some extent, I think we're in a period where Good Morning America's very serious right now, but there is some return to normalcy.

MR. MANN: That's big news, Tom!

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I actually have to say, and this shows how unqualified I am to be a press critic, until she got hit by a car I didn't know who Nikki Taylor was--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Tom.

MR. MANN: Thanks, Norm. I actually read every word of Marvin's book. I finished it last night. It's beautifully crafted. It's riveting. It ends very powerfully, and I would say, emotionally, as Marvin asked whether a few good men and women might transform journalism as it has become. So I recommend this book to all of you.

If you'll indulge me for just a second. Finishing the book, I thought back to a, quote, considered opinion I wrote at the end of 1998 for the Brookings Review. I was one of those insider Washington types who was filled with opinion and not much fact, and the end of this story is that I want to thank Marvin for basically providing the real research that substantiates my impressions at the time.

At the time all I could do was observe what was going on. But it was an argument that basically James Madison had been turned on his head. That the idea was that we needed political elites to refine and enlarge the public view, to come together and use their good judgment to basically dampen the political passions of the unwashed, and what I said is just the opposite had occurred during this extraordinary year of Monica Lewinsky.

It was the public that provided the ballast, the maturity, the good sense, and that not a single adult was to be found in Washington during that year, and I ran through those who failed to demonstrate adult behavior, beginning with President Clinton himself, who I argued was responsible, more than anyone else, for what had happened, as Marvin does. But I then included the Supreme Court, the President's personal attorneys, the Office of Independent Counsel under Kenneth Starr, politicians in Congress. But I saved a special section for the press, and if you'll just indulge me for a moment.

"Then there is the behavior of the press. One hardly knows where to begin. From the breathless forecasts by celebrity journalists of the President's imminent departure from office, to months of weekly-sourced, breaking news stories by Woodward and Bernstein wannabees, whose idea of investigative reporting is to be an unfiltered conveyor belt for strategic leaks by the Office of Independent Counsel and White House, to the 24-hour, all Monica all-the-time cable news entertainment shows featuring partisan food fights among pseudo experts, to the scores of editorials and columns, dripping with contempt for the President and the public, media coverage of this presidential scandal and it's appropriate place in national politics and policy making has been a wasteland."

Well, Marvin has demonstrated that I wasn't too far off, and it is enlightening to see him sort of run through, recreate the narrative and then generalize in a very, I think, sophisticated, conceptual way, what the nature of the problematics are that have developed.

But I indulge myself, in reading this piece, for another reason, which is to raise some questions and to make an argument or two.

What this piece argued was that everyone failed us, not just the media. That the media operates within a broad context, and the substance of what is up, and the behavior of the other participants in many respects are the raw material out of which journalists do their jobs, and oftentimes they follow what Senator Moynihan called the "iron law of emulation," that is, they become their subject matter. It's like the Congress trying to staff up to match the executive branch. They adopt techniques and that are very much like the people they are trying to cover, and therefore, a scandal inherently brings out the worst in journalists, especially when other political elites are not engaging in responsible behavior at all. It pulls journalists into a downward spiral, where all of the worrisome tendencies that existed already are exacerbated, and they sink to the bottom, they become "bottom feeders" as do the other political elites caught in this.

On the other hand, when there's something serious to be covered, this extraordinary and horrific attack of September 11, and the aftermath of that, sometimes we see our political elites acting responsibly, and the combination of the seriousness of the subject matter and the behavior of other players pulls out some of the best in journalism.

So I've seen them sort of rise to the occasion, all of which is to argue that the press is less a sort of independent force in this whole world, in that the subject matter, the "stuff," the reality of which the public life and political community is dealing with shapes the behavior of all of the political elites and actors.

I mean, our politics has been mean-spirited, trivial, sort of nasty for a long while, partly because the stakes have been so low to the country, not to competing parties. But, you know, the "old saw" about academic politics being so bitter because the stakes are so low, applies, I think, to an era we've gone through, and now we're in a different era.

Thomas has raised this point and the sort of question becomes, Will journalism change? Will some of these tendencies be altered because politicians are changing, in some respects, and other actors in the system are? That's the encouragement, to me, at least, the possibility.

But I've raised sort of two questions. One of the things that Marvin talks about in the book but it doesn't really emerge as one of those sort of four central problematics of journalism has to do with news budgets.

I mean, what I am struck by is the herd instinct, not just in getting to a story and covering it, but the amount of coverage. The figures in Marvin’s book about the news budget devoted to the Lewinsky scandal are breathtaking. It's just overwhelming, and, you know, we had the same thing happen after September 11.

The New York Times, you know, provided marvelous coverage, but we had "The Nation Challenged," that second section. I don't know about you. I loved it for a while and then I started looking for, is there anything else happening in the political world? You know, one senses this misappropriation of resources, driven by the same forces. It's the competitive forces, and my fear is that there are a whole lot of really important stories, now, that are getting very, very little attention, some important matters deferred, delayed, and the like.

So the question is even if the seriousness of the matter improves the quality of journalism because it's improved the quality of the President and the Congress and others, will that somehow be--

[Start side B.]

MR. MANN [continuing]: --to all war, all the time as opposed to all [inaudible].

The final point, which goes to my original point, is what's the best way to change journalism? Is it sort of inside/out, or outside/in? Is it bottom/up or top/down?

Marvin believes that you begin small, maybe like a broken window kind of approach to crime, that you get serious people in the business to think about what they're doing to change their behavior, and eventually that'll ripple out. I'm a little less optimistic about that approach.

That micro improvements in the profession will transform the profession, because I think the profession exists in this broader context and what it's going to take, really, is the combination of a new seriousness in our public life, because of the nature of the challenges we face, and changes in the behavior of other political actors, which will then exert the pressure and create the opportunities for those few good men and women to have their way.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Tom. If you are one of those who's all opinions and no facts, I think we can get you a show on MSNBC.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: I would suggest that the key indicator of a return to normalcy will not be a 20/20 story on Nikki Taylor. It will be the first story on Rudy Giuliani that's about Donna Hanover and--

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: When we return to that, it will be a return to normalcy.

A few observations, and questions myself, and it seems to me we have really hit on some core areas here, and the larger question, Will we restore those elements, which at least for some times in our history have been present, of classically good journalism? gets to one broad question, which is how much of the change that we've seen is a change that's the result of market pressures? Technology-driven, to a degree, as Tom suggested, but also in other ways, including that we shouldn't let the public off the hook here.

They may have been more mature in some ways during this era of scandal, but the bottom line now is that we're getting 80 percent hard news because people are watching it, and as soon as people stop watching it, even if the external world would suggest that there's more than enough room for 80 percent hard news, it'll move back to 50 percent hard news, and we know that those market pressures extend to the 24/7 news cycle, the different kinds of markets that drive cable television and the kinds of audiences you need there.

The dwindling audiences for nightly news shows and network broadcasts. The decline in readership, overall, especially among young people, and so on.

How much of this, on the other hand, is due to culture? But there are two elements of culture to consider here. One is the external nonjournalist element which Tom Rosenstiel alluded to--the end of the Cold War, change, our culture, it changed what we covered. For the moment, at least, the war, the terrorist attacks have changed the culture, but there is also the internal element of journalistic culture, which I would argue changed itself with Watergate, with Woodward and Bernstein, with a new era in which the rewards in journalism went to those uncovering scandal. The way to reach the top of your profession was if you could bring somebody down, not if you could uncover problems in the appropriations process.

I think another element of that culture, which is the blurring between news and opinion, that Marvin referred to so eloquently, and which I would say started, ironically enough, with David Broder, who believed that he was above this enough, that he could simultaneously be a reporter and an opinion columnist, separate those two elements, and people would see that when he was reporting he was keeping his views out of it, and when he was writing his opinion columns, he was putting his views into it, leavened by and educated by his reporting. But those things could be separate.

But even as he was doing that, and as he was writing that, if this blurring took place and continued, it would be the end of journalism. It was happening because others, lesser in their quality, perhaps, than Broder, moved into that.

Then of course it got exacerbated in a major way by The McLaughlin Group, when it became clear that there were other rewards for journalism, not just recognition by peers, but recognition on the street and lecture fees, that would come if you became a part of a popular television show offering opinions, and it then became clear would come even more if you could ensconce yourself on those shows, which came not just by offering opinions but by offering hysterical opinions, or extreme opinions, or being pigeonholed as on one side or the other, even as you were writing news as well.

Now we know that there are other journalistic norms that have perhaps always existed, but that have been expanded by this process as well. One of course is get it first, not get it right. I go back a long ways to being struck, in particular--I think it may have been in 1976, when NBC put on a series of full-page ads in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other places, right after the Republican convention, because they had broken the story of the running mate to the presidential candidate by six seconds.

They'd gotten it six seconds before anybody else, and that meant, obviously, that they had to be so much better than anybody else. This is a norm that goes way back, but obviously, now, under the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle, getting it first adds crushing pressures, and I can tell you, just from my own experience of sitting in the CBS studio on election eve, this last time, as first Fox, and then others reported their third quarter results, that even though there were significant doubts, the pressure to come out with that story, not stand back and away from everybody else, was just immense, and I sat there thinking, and even saying, wait a minute here, if they're wrong and you hold back, you'll be lionized everywhere. Isn't that better? If you hold back and you were just being a little bit more careful, what's wrong with that?

But there's something about that norm that has just taken off. There is a norm that I think is now even more important, that follows from the blurring between news and opinion, and that is give your opinion and if you get it wrong, there is absolutely no penalty. In fact, if anything, if you are spectacularly wrong, you will get your own show on MSNBC, and while Marvin talked about Bill Pfaff, even as cities were falling like dominoes in Afghanistan, was out there with that story, I can go back just a couple of years to the number of columns and other things written even as Milosevic was falling, saying flatly, the bombing in Yugoslavia cannot work, this is an insane policy.

Where are all of those people now? They're now writing columns about Yugoslavia, or on television, reporting about Yugoslavia. So there's no penalty.

MR. MANN: Afghanistan.

MR. ORNSTEIN: About Afghanistan.

We also, I think, continue to be in a scandal culture, even during this particular time, and we have a return to normalcy there, which I saw just a couple of weeks ago, when Katie Couric, on the Today show, was interviewing a drone, a poor guy, a poor doctor from the Center For Disease Control who thought he was coming on to talk about anthrax and what we knew about anthrax, and instead every question was, Well, didn't the FBI mislead you? Isn't it the case that these other authorities were fighting among themselves and that's why we got it all wrong?

He was pretty taken aback because it wasn't what he expected, but we're back to the kind of news that says there's a scandal here somewhere, and, by God, we're going to uncover it, and we will have, I think, a lot more of that.

Then of course the whole notion of news and opinion. Now what we are back to is the phenomenon of talk shows in which the hosts interview other talk-show hosts as the experts.

Matt Lauer, the other day, interviewed Bill O'Reilly, about all of the money that had come into the charities for the victims of the September 11th attacks. Larry King interviewed Chris Matthews, and then Chris Matthews interviewed Larry King.

So I don't see any of this changing, and I do not see, at this point, anything other than a very brief moment, when the nation, for the first time since Pearl Harbor, was under direct attack, and the entire country refocused, and journalists refocused, and as soon as we got beyond imminent additional attack, we returned to all of those corrosive norms that will no doubt come back again if there is yet another scandal, whether it's a sex scandal, or a bureaucratic scandal.

Is there any sign, in your mind, that something fundamental may shift here, or that there will be any level of shame among those making decisions in journalism, that will begin to change the internal culture?

Let me throw those questions out along with those of Tom, get some responses, or anything you want to say, and then we'll open it up to the audience.

MR. KALB: I think that, I mean, my "gut feeling" is that my sympathies lie a lot with what it is that you have just concluded, but in my judgment, you've overstated it. I think that there is certainly a determination on the part of many journalists to try to do this right. They are very much aware of the impact that September 11 had. True, they operate in this competitive environment, they haven't removed themselves into a bubble of unreality, and therefore they're going to be wonderful and, quote, by my lights, old-fashioned.

No. I think that some of the things that Tom said in the opening of his comments, the impact that technology is having, the new economic underpinning for the industry, have in effect changed the industry. The function of journalism remains the same, but it operates in a very new climate of economic and technological, revolutionary change, that has to have an impact on the industry, and I think the impact so far has been negative.

However, given September 11, given the fact that journalists, in my judgment, really do want to get this right, they're aware of the seriousness of the moment, they don't want to return to the days of Monica. They really don't. They were very embarrassed by what happened then, and when you went to them, as I did, really, dozens and dozens of times, and said look, you said on the air, on X date, these are your exact words, would you say that again. How did you know that that was right at the time? Nine out of ten of them would say off the record, that they didn't know. They didn't know at the time.

Well, then why did you say it? Well, because sort of, you had to, it was out there, and you were being pressed to do it. It's extremely easy, years later, to say tsk, tsk, you guys were wrong, and you really shouldn't have done it. But at that moment, under the gun, you find you have no option, really, but to go along with it.

The point that you were making before, I agree with, completely. The journalist doesn't operate as an independent force. The journalist very much works within an environment, and that environment that we've talked about this press/politics side, that where everything gets mushed together, and you're not absolutely certain who the journalist is, the opinion news, all of that stuff.

At this time, I would love to believe that this is a wonderful opportunity for journalism to turn a corner, and to begin to go back, not to the old days, but to some of the true standards of the craft, so they can recapture some of the respect of the American people.

I think, at this time, they've done that, but I think it's artificial. I think it is really artificial, and here I come down on your side very much, Norm. I think that as time goes by--it would be a wonderful idea, Tom, if you could do that study of yours month by month now, to be able to see, in fact, how the numbers change.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: You get the grant; we'll do the study.

[Laughter.]

MR. KALB: All right. We'll try and do that in fact.

But my "gut feeling" is that under it all, the technology and the economic changes are going to pull them back--Norm's point--to where they were, because where they were conforms to the requirements of these new forces, in my judgment. I hope I'm wrong.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I largely agree. You know, what we've identified, obviously, is that there are many factors that are shaping the kind of politics we get, the kind of media we get, the kind of policy we get. I think, Norm, to answer your question--I don't consider you one of the corrosive norms, by the way.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSENSTIEL: That journalism is sicker at the top than in the middle, and that what we see in this town is worse than what I see as I go around the country talking to people, in even large, and small, and midsize newspapers, and even television stations, and even at some of the Web sites that are developing in a very serious way.

There is a movement that began before, long before Lewinsky. We created a group called the Committee of Concerned Journalists in 1997, because people around the craft were appalled by what they were seeing, and so these corrosive norms are--and there are other--even the civic journalism movement throughout the '90s was an attempt, and sometimes misguided and sometimes well-guided, to respond to sort of the corrosive norms.

These corrosive norms are often old techniques that no longer have much utility, that don't serve the principles of journalism, but journalists, because of the way they're trained, confuse technique and principle, purpose and practice.

The only exception I would take, Norm, with what you were suggesting, is that I don't believe that the evidence really supports, very strongly, although episodically yes, but generally no, the idea that the public wants this stuff.

The long-term trends for viewership and readership have accelerated their downward spiral as the media moved more toward the sort of scandalous, personal scandal in particular.

Much of what we're seeing, and particularly the sort of monomania in the press, that you described, Tom, is driven by the cost structure rather than the audience structure of the media. The fact is that the networks have gutted their hard news-gathering capability, their beat-gathering capability. They have put the remaining resources into features, into the magazines.

Even in the middle of this, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer was ousted last week because he had to oversee a 23 percent reduction in his news-gathering staff, and the company, Knight Ridder, decided to condemn him because circulation was declining.

Knight Ridder has not yet made the connection, that by gutting their news staff they've cheapened their product, and that may have something to do with why circulation is declining.

But they believe that in the current economic environment, they cannot sustain a news-gathering staff because the revenue won't--not that the circulation won't sustain it, but that the advertising won't sustain it, which is where the revenues comes, 70 percent of the revenues in newspapers comes from, and in television, of course, a 100 percent of your revenue comes from advertising because you give the product away.

So the cost structure is creating a situation where even if the journalists, from within, want to fight against the corrosive norms, we become even more subject to the iron law of emulation, because we don't have enough people to go outside the rope line.

We go cover a story, they set up the white--you know--they set up the yellow tape. I remember, and I'll close with this, I remember in about 1989, when one of the best reporters in the country, Barry Bearak, called me up, and he said we've crossed a threshold, and I said what? He said it's an important threshold in journalism. I said what is it? He said now, when I go--he was the Florida correspondent for the LA Times at the time, but he was a roving national correspondent.

They would use him for things like plane crashes, and stuff like that, any big national story. He said when I go to one of these stories now, I cannot have access to any officials, except at press conferences.

We've reached a point where we have become so massive, in the press, and that they rope us off, and we only know what they want us to know, and we only get to talk to them at press conferences. In the Lewinsky case, we were only talking to their lawyers; we're not talking to the principals.

The gutting of the newsroom operations, or the cost-cutting, reinforces that in a very pernicious and subtle way, so that we are more victim to sort of being able to change the culture than we would have been before.

MR. KALB: May I just add one point.

When you started up the operation about the concerned journalists in '97, and you said that there was this feeling among journalists that something was going wrong, no question about that. You could sense it even among journalists in the '80s, that something was going wrong, and it did in fact go wrong.

One of the things that was so depressing to me, in the research for the scandalous story book, was that by '98, conscious for at least a decade that things were going wrong, and there was an opportunity when the next big story came along, to do it right, the best journalists in the craft ended up participating in what I think was a tarnishing of the whole industry.

So that has to say something. I mean, it isn't just ordinary folks who were tremendously pressured, and they've got to do something or they'll lose their job. It was the very top of the industry that also felt the same way.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I agree, in part. I think, and you said it yourself, the New York Times is a better newspaper today than it was ten years ago. The Washington Post is a better newspaper than it was a couple years ago.

MR. KALB: And thank God for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I think that, and I say this as a print guy, perhaps, with some prejudice, that when you say it's happening at the top of the craft, that's truer of television.

MR. KALB: Yeah. I agree.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, yes and no.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: The New York Times is a better newspaper than it was ten years ago, but it wasn't much more than ten years ago, that we had a front-page story in the New York Times about Kitty Kelly's book about Ronald Reagan, that was portrayed as a hard news story, and it was gossip-mongering of the worst sort. Printing names of rape victims. I mean, there were all kinds of things that the New York Times did, and I can tell you, just a little more than ten years ago, when the House bank story was the scandal of the day, I had journalists calling me, asking about the bank, and I would explain to them that this wasn't a bank in the traditional sense, and go through it, and then I wrote a piece in the Washington Post, in the outlook section, about the bad coverage, and it got back to me very quickly that the investigative reporter of the Post who was doing this dismissed what I had said and basically said this is a great story.

"If he thinks we're going to confuse this with all these facts, he's crazy."

So this is the Washington Post, and I believe that while they have improved, enormously, I think what they've done is a paragon now, especially in the last couple of months, and really a model for everybody.

I come down with Marvin on this one, that when, and with the Times, when you had a change at the top, and a desire to reach out to younger readers, putting Maureen Dowd on the front page, in that sense, and then moving her to the op-ed page, a lot of things that were done under competitive pressures sent a signal to the rest of journalism that the gates are open, do anything you want.

MR. KALB: Strong point.

MR. ORNSTEIN: With that, we will open things up to questions. We have a mike, if you will wait, right up at the front here, Paula, and Arnaud, if you would set the tone by identifying yourself before asking a question.

MR. de BORCHGRAVE: Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times, UPI, and CSIS. My question is addressed to Marvin. Do you see a correlation between the constant melodrama of constant trivia, which you address so eloquently here, this morning, and the post 9-11 discovery that Osama bin Laden, to take one example, had become immensely popular among the impoverished masses of Muslim capitals, that Pakistan was the only supply line to Taliban for years, that the Pakistani Intelligence Service had a direct link to Osama bin Laden--all these things which we've discovered since 9-11. Shouldn't we have known before?

MR. KALB: Arnaud, there are very few reporters like you. It's not a compliment I'm tossing out easily. I remember the great reporting that you have done in this area, and in many others, over the years.

What happened, as you well know, and as Tom was suggesting before, the budgets began to be cut on news concerning the rest of the world, in the late '80s. It was not in the '90s, with the end of the Cold War. You could actually begin to see it even earlier, in fact in the mid '80s, and that was at the major networks, that was at the major newspapers. There are hard and depressing statistics about the number of bureaus that were closed down.

So, sure, when September 11 came along, were the American people up to speed on what it was that was happening in different parts of the world? No, they were not, and they were not because there was very little opportunity to read this material.

In fairness, there were stories about bin Laden and Pakistan, and the flow of arms to Taliban, before, but there's something about the relationship of journalism to the public, which I've never quite understood, but there's a moment when the public "gets it," and short of that moment, there were stories about it, but they don't quite "get it." It isn't there in sufficient bulk, perhaps.

But there were those stories. I remember, in USA Today, breaking a number of stories about bin Laden and terrorism, this year, in the spring and in the summer of this year. They did do it. A number of other news outfits did.

But it wasn't there. It wasn't on the front page of the Times and the Post. The networks weren't devoting themselves to it. Their minds weren't there and there wasn't enough money to send reporters out. I'm being too generous here. They didn't even give a damn about the rest of the world, in fact. They thought the numbers were only in America, only with sensationalism, only with perhaps the Monica type, OJ, Versace, Diana, type stories. That defined the news of the '90s. Now, theoretically--and Tom may well be right on this--maybe we are entering a new period now in American history, in American journalism. I'm less optimistic of that but there's no question that journalism today is focusing on the story. If it didn't, it should go out of business entirely.

MR. de BORCHGRAVE: Could I have a follow-up?

Then how does one explain that Tonya Harding--I mean, that's what began the constant melodrama of constant trivia--that she got more airtime in a comparable news period--I forget whose survey it was, than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whose fault was that?

MR. KALB: I haven't the faintest idea.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I think it was yours, Arnaud.

[Laughter.]

MR. KALB: You know that the fall of the Berlin Wall, I mean, an astounding bit of a little fact, the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Brokaw, anticipating that something was going to happen, to his credit, went to Berlin, and was there a couple of days in advance, and then the Wall came down. He was on live, NBC News at its best, it had its anchor there. Its ratings were the lowest of the three. The American people have very little interest in the fall of the Wall, presented to you live by the number-one anchor in the country.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: Well, he wasn't number one at the time.

[Laughter.]

MR. ROSENSTIEL: But there was a sort of anecdotal conventional wisdom that was developed at the networks because it was researched very quickly, I think basically overnight ratings, that showed that the fall of the Wall did not interest the American public, and very shortly after, you began to see this sort of rush for the kind of infotainment stories.

You know, the Tonya story, you know, there is an arc from Tonya to Bobbitt, to OJ, to--and these, as we talk about in warp speed--what happened was that the old mass media audience for news fractured, fragmented, and there's--Andy Kohut has done research that shows that today, there are probably five audiences for news, none of them is larger than about 20 percent. That's not big enough to sustain, you know, NBC News.

So there's a kind of constant--one approach to responding to this is to do this monomaniacal kind of journalism where you look for the blockbuster breakout story, that's the country-and-western song that makes it on the R&B charts, and the blues charts, and all of these, and crosses over these categories and attracts all five of these, or six or seven of these fragmented audience groups.

Tonya was one of those, and OJ was one of those, however briefly, and when, in the valleys between those, the press, these days, looks to manufacture a blockbuster, so Jon Benet Ramsey is a classic example of a blockbuster story that wasn't.

The reason for this is not actually really audience. The survey work suggests that at its peak, except for the one week of the white Bronco, the OJ story never fascinated more than about 30 percent of the American public. Why do it? Well, two reasons. 30 percent of the American public is a big number. It's a lot of eyeballs.

But the other is that it's an enormously cheap story to cover. Two camera crews give you 24 hours at the courthouse in LA, and you can fill up the Today show, the nightly news, and cable, in particular. Why do we see this orgy of talk? Because it's incredibly cheap. There's no reporting involved at all.

MR. KALB: Very interesting.

MR. CLARK: I'm Tim Clark from Government Executive magazine and National Journal. It strikes me that despite all the cutbacks in budgets and staffs covering foreign affairs, that you've talked about, the New York Times, among others, is doing a pretty good job of explaining what is going on abroad. We're gaining understanding of a part of the world that we haven't paid much attention to, and I'm going to ask this question in the print context, not really in TV, because this is a hopeless story for TV.

But what has not been covered, in my view, as well, are the deficiencies in capacity of the U.S. Government. Now this is a story that we're all sitting right on top of, here, in Washington, and we are just now learning, by episodic and not very systematic reporting, as with the federal page today, you know, that we have major problems in the organization, structure, staffing, budget, technology of American Government, that significantly impede our ability to cope with this crisis.

These are stories that the American press--this is the biggest press corps in the world, that we are a part of, here, in Washington, and yet we have not been covering this, and I would argue, even now--even now, that it has become something of an episodic story. You'll see a front-page lead story in the Post or the Times, or the Wall Street Journal, about the deficiencies of the FBI.

It's episodic and it's not systematic, and it seems to me that we are still missing what is a major story, that should have been exposed, not only by the press, but by the other elites in this town, for quite a while now.

MR. MANN: I think you're absolutely right. What's fascinating to me is how low on the totem pole, for both journalists and scholars, the study of public organizations, and the implementation of public programs. You know, public administration is the "lowest of the low" among academics, and yet it's so incredibly important, and I think much the same is true. It's only Al Kamen who interjects, you know, a little "juice" into it, that gets attention. Otherwise, it tends to be a really sort of low prestige beat.

There are not many people who understand how our public health system works, what the nature of the federal system is, the particular strengths and weaknesses at each level, the nature of that intergovernmental relation, and yet, can you imagine anything more important, in a sense, on the domestic front?

What we instead get are sort of "mini scandal" stories. Someone has failed; someone hasn't detected this. But it doesn't, in any way, wrestle with the real roots of the problem, the inadequacies that exist, where what the cost of certain aspects of contracting out have been, why, you know, why the Federal Government and Congress has put such a high priority on, quote, shrinking the federal workforce instead of getting the federal workforce up to speed to deal with some of the important problems.

I mean, that reflects a long-term problem in the press and academia, and government, more generally, that we now see manifest at a time of extraordinary national need.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me add to that. You know, part of this is the reward structure in journalism. If you can find a scandal in the FBI, or a scandal in the way in which we've handled the anthrax problem, that is a root to a Pulitzer Prize.

If you look at the structure of the public health system, as Tom suggested, where we know we've got the Center For Disease Control, Fort Detrick, some other public entities that often are at odds with one another, or that start with different cultures in terms of how you deal with problems like epidemics, and it's actually a very interesting story, but there's nobody who is assigned that beat, or who would cover it, and now what we will get will be the scandal stories.

We've had this problem with the culture of the FBI. We know for a very long time. God knows, we've had warning signals over the last 15 years, over and over again, in the crime labs, in the way we responded to Ruby Ridge, and all of these other things. But the focus was always on the immediate scandal and not on that culture.

I remember reading, as soon as it came out, the Hart-Rudman Commission Report, which first recommended an Office of Homeland Security, and the reason for the Office of Homeland Security, basically, the grounding of it was that we've got a number of federal agencies that have missions, that are not appropriate to the task ahead, and that have built internal cultures around those missions. Changing the mission without changing the culture will not work.

So what you've got to do is to reorganize to change their culture first. Got no coverage, at all, and when the office was created, no focus on the organizational structure, and we're going to miss a huge beat here.

Now the interesting question is going to be--and even getting back to what Arnaud suggested--right now, we are getting stories--the Washington Post today had a story, with great detail, about the different Pashtun factions and the tribes, those that are pro Taliban and anti Taliban. We are learning about all of the different elements within Afghanistan. I contrast that with the television coverage.

This morning, again the Today show had a couple of experts. We have probably four experts on Afghanistan in the country, where now we've taken 150 people who have some broad credentials in international affairs and made them experts in Afghanistan, and the focus here was the Pashtun is one entity against everybody else, which is not the case. But we're following those stories. The moment that Afghanistan becomes a nondirect threat to the United States, we will see a total collapse of that coverage. There will not be anything.

Where do those reporters go? And they will not go to--

[Simultaneous conversation.]

MR. KALB: Where do the experts go? Think about that.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: They retool, and the next war in Somalia, today's Afghanistan experts will become Somalia experts.

MR. KLINGER: Bill Klinger, former chairman of the Government Reform Committee, and I just wanted to follow on the last question, because it was my experience that when I was willing to talk about the FBI file thing, or about the Travel Office thing, I mean, I could get on any television program and was "hotly pursued" by the media, generally. If I wanted to talk about procurement reform or the failure of the Senior Executive Service, or whatever other issues, much more important issues to be working on, there was just absolutely no interest at all in covering any of those things.

But my question to Marvin is you talked about, you know, how Isikoff and others, you know, cajoled, and browbeat, and threatened people to get information, and I had some experience with Mr. Isikoff in my--you didn't mention the one thing that I found really disturbing, which was an effort to really manipulate the story.

In other words, working with members of my staff who were eager to be part of the game, he was able to corroborate other sources through my staff.

In other words, it was kind of a Faustian bargain, in effect, where he was able to sort of manipulate and move the story through the use of my staff. It seems to me that really does step over the line, where you have journalism, you know, directly involved in not only reporting the news but shaping the news.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: Don't you think that's fundamentally what Isikoff did in the Lewinsky scandal?

MR. KALB: Well, Isikoff, certainly, he did, and there's no question about that. There's just a small part of me, in the back of my brain, that doesn't want to come down too hard on him, because sometimes it is extremely difficult to get information out of the Government.

I don't want to lay all of the fault on the press. I don't think that's fair. Because the Government is so tied up in knots about information and leaks, and one thing or another like that, that sometimes a reporter feels that he's got to play one source off against another in order to get closer to the truth.

I do not approve of what Mike's techniques were. I have a small bit of sympathy out there for what he was attempting, however, to do. But the idea, right now, of the press in Washington, and just about anywhere, but here, it comes to a boiling point. It's as if it's in a pressure cooker, and it all comes together, so that the Isikoffs operate with your staff to produce a certain kind of story.

My concern is that they not have in mind the end result of the story before they have the evidence to get them there. I am very worried about reporters who have agendas, who are out there to prove certain things. It's very easy in this city--I don't think you have to be a terrific reporter--to come up with evidence to support your point of view, and once you've got the evidence, you sort of run with it.

That is, you know, a very disturbing phenomenon for me. The idea that journalists have this agenda of their own and they're trying to sort of, with the power of their own craft, to impose it on others.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I would agree with the question more, I think, than Marvin. I think that the fundamental mistake, seminal mistake in Mike's work, in Isikoff's work in the Lewinsky story, was precisely that. This story might not have actually become a story, that there might not have been perjury by, you know, or the threat of perjury by the President of the United States, had Mike not had, worked in--blurred the line between sort of newsmaker and news coverer in his relationship with Lucianne Goldberg, and others in the story, in ways that I find profoundly disturbing, creating a corrosive norm that is even deeper because Mike became a celebrity because of the story, and as much as I admire the book, Marvin, I think you're too easy on him in it.

MR. KALB: I'm just a sweetheart.

[Laughter.]

MS. BOWMAN: Karlyn Bowman from AEI. I haven’t done a content analysis, but I've been following, sort of casualty, the emergence of a certain kind of journalistic story since September 11, and this is just one example. Most of the major papers have written stories about the fact there are not enough women represented in the ranks of coverage of the war story or in the top ranks of journalism. Now it seems to me it's one thing if 55 women sue Morgan Stanley for a pervasive culture of discrimination, but I guess perhaps this is my ignorance of what journalism is today, but is this in fact a legitimate news story or is it journalistic agenda setting, telling me exactly what I should be thinking about in the context of the war.

MR. KALB: Do you mean the story itself, what's happening in Afghanistan, or--

MS. BOWMAN: No, no, no. The story about--

MR. KALB: The story about not enough women covering--

MS. BOWMAN: There are not enough women covering this story, or they aren't represented in significant-enough numbers, in the top ranks of journalism, or in the top ranks of international diplomacy.

MR. KALB: Yeah. Well, put the diplomacy aside for a sec because I don't know what the numbers are, now, at the State Department.

But in terms of journalism, I know for a fact that the people who runt he networks--I'm not talking about newspapers--not maybe Tom knows more about that than I. But at the networks, they have been trying, now, for about 15-20 years, to have many, many, many more women in positions of authority, and as anchors. Where women have not broken through as yet at the networks is quite literally at the very top.

There have been women working as Washington bureau chiefs, a lot of them, and there have been women as producers, a lot more as anchors. As a matter of fact a local program can't go on the air without a woman, an African American sitting there. It just doesn't work any other way.

So there's been obvious progress, if that's the way you want to read it, in terms of getting more women involved.

Where it gets difficult is the same business that the Pentagon has now. Women in the military, doing the same kind of work. What about the women who are in Special Operations? Are they actually breaking through walls with the men? No; they're not. There's a different thing, and I know for a fact that a number of people who send reporters out to Afghanistan are a little concerned about sending women, and have talked to women reporters about whether they want to go.

A number of them have said yes, and they're there, and a number of them have pulled back. But I don't think there's an discrimination. As a matter of fact, I think it's quite the other way. They just want to get--

MR. MANN: I think Karlyn is really raising a different point, which is--

MR. KALB: Then I missed it.

MR. MANN: --really presumption on the part of some people writing stories, that the gender of reporters and the gender of people in positions of public authority shapes coverage and shapes decisions, and policy making, in some ways, and I think what you're saying is that there have really been a remarkable number of those stories. That it's not really reporting on real political reality out there but it's a news agenda with an agenda, which is a political agenda.

I'm not surprised to see it. We see that surfacing in other kind of coverage but it is--I think you're right to observe it and notice it. I've seen it. What is lacking, if you really wanted to do this seriously, is there be some serious work, research, trying to indicate whether or not one's gender shapes the nature of one's work. In this case reporting on the war and making decisions relevant to the war.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I would just add this. That I think this is sort of one of the really important new frontiers of trying to understand the press, is we've moved into an area where we expect the press to contextualize the news for us a great deal more, provide a lot of analysis and interpretation. In fact I think, to some extent, there was this sort of idiotic oversimplification in the early '90s, that since television people knew stuff, you know, TV was on the time, that the job of the print press was to add context and interpretation, which I think was foolish because most of what's on TV is not in the--I mean, most of what's in the newspaper is not on TV, and what people want from the press is synthesis and verification.

They want to know where, here, can I believe? What's true and what's important? Not don't tell me what to think about it. So there is--

[Start tape 2A.]

MR. ROSENSTIEL: --when we say we want the press to provide context for us, analysis for us. As Jack Fuller, a very bright news executive from Chicago put it: We have a pretty good way of teaching people in the news business how to check the spelling of people's names, but we really don't have any--we've not even begun to think about how do we check the assumptions behind somebody's analysis.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Although it has been sort of interesting to see how the television outlets have been eager to put women forward in the "war zone," as it were. So, you know, Christiane Amanpour is now muscled aside by women in flak jackets reporting from Pakistan, and if we end up having an ongoing battle inside Afghanistan, where, suddenly, reporters get in and travel with troops, then it'll be interesting to see if we have some of these women who are reporting from the rooftops of nice hotels in Lahore, actually go in to the war zone in a way that they haven't before.

MR. BRANEGAN: My name's Jay Branegan and I was covering the White House for Time magazine during Monica, so I fully agree with what Marvin said about the--

MR. KALB: I quote you. I quote you.

MR. BRANEGAN: I'm not in the book.

MR. KALB: Yes, you are.

MR. BRANEGAN: --talking about the degradation of standards and the problem with sourcing. I was also a foreign correspondent, by the way, in Europe, in the '90s, and I would point out that we had a terrible time any time we put Boris Yeltsin on the cover. Boris Yeltsin was "death" on the newsstands. I mean, he was this colorful guy, you know, doing all these crazy things, stuff like that, and they would bend over backwards to avoid putting Boris on the cover because newsstand sales would just plummet, and that was a big problem.

But I wanted to ask you, Marvin, I think one of the interesting things in your book, you pointed out--and I agree with what you and Tom said about the structure of the new media and the new outlets, basically putting all this raw material out there, putting the stuff that we reporters always got, but would never print before we had checked it out. Now it's just "out there" for everyone to see. I think that is really a factor.

But you also mentioned the changing corporate structure of the media as being a factor in this degradation, and I wonder, the Post, Newsweek, and the New York Times are central players in your book. They all have the same corporate structure as they always have. GE has always owned NBC. I think they're concomitant; they happen together, this "conglomertization" of the media.

But I'm not sure whether I accept that there's really a direct connection between the big "corporatization" of the media and the change in the standards.

MR. KALB: I think, in my judgment, anyway, sort of quite the contrary. That that is one of the major motive forces here. Let me tell you a story, and I'm going to be like a senior State Department official. I won't give you my source; trust me.

An anchorman for a major television news program was telling me, just the other day, that Disney has cut $25 million a year--they haven't done it in a single swipe--but $25 million a year from the ABC News Bureau budget, and that every single news program at ABC must now make a 10 percent cut in cost. Now this is going to hook up with the coverage of the war in a sec.

For four days after September 11, ABC, among a number of other networks, ran no ads. They lost, roughly, at the end of the first week, in money not made close to a billion dollars.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: All three together.

MR. KALB: Five. Actually all five together. It's close to a billion dollars. That's an enormous amount of money. Then there are the costs of covering the war right now. One of the things, I am told, that Disney refuses to get enticed into saying is that you guys are spending too much money, because there's so much patriotism around. But there is a feeling through the whole newsroom, in every news program, there is an awareness--it's in your mind, nobody is telling you what to do--there's an awareness. You're not getting as much money. You must cut 10 percent on your program. Your costs, however, because of the war, are skyrocketing. How are you going to do both?

The other day, at a program we did at the National Press Club, we had a number of people, including the president and publisher of USA Today, Tom Curley, who's a very good guy and a very smart guy, and he came up with the whole USA Today idea, and did it. It's very successful. 2,300,000 copies a day are sold. That's a lot of money. He raised the point that he doesn't know how long you can continue the same kind of coverage of the war, because he doesn't know at what point people like him will decide, either that they have to cut their profit estimates for the year, or they're going to have to cut costs to reach their profit estimates for the year.

An outfit like Knight Ridder fires Robert Rosenthal, who was also on our program on Monday evening. Robert Rosenthal said it is a conflict of cultures. There's a culture of journalism, as he described it, and the culture of money and profit. He couldn't do both, couldn't pull it off. Jay Harris of the San Jose Mercury News, in April of this year, felt he had to quit, for the same reason. That large corporations do influence the direction that the newsroom takes.

MR. MANN: Marvin, does that apply to the Washington Post and the New York Times as well?

MR. KALB: It applies to all news organizations, large and small, but the Post can do it for a longer period of time, the Times can do it for a longer period of time, because so much more is expected of them. The point that Norm made before, in a slightly different context. When the Times does something, it says a great deal to the rest of the industry, and if the Times were now to cut back, the day that the Times decides to drop that extra section that you have, you know, become disenchanted with, when they decide to drop it, when there's a physical action, that is going to send a message through all of journalism, "the crisis is over as far as we're concerned."

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I would add one other thing, and this is something that other news executives in print are acutely aware of, more so than they have been before, which also has diminished the influence of the Post and the Times, in the rest of the profession, and that is that the New York Times and the Washington Post have a different economic model. Because the Washington Post is in Washington, it has 43 percent penetration in the market, 43 percent of the households buy the newspaper. There isn't a--43 percent of the households, last time I looked, in the Washington metro area, buy the Washington Post. In Los Angeles and in most other cities, large newspapers have about 24 percent penetration.

MR. KALB: What about the Times?

MR. ROSENSTIEL: The New York Times has yet a totally different model. Only 10 percent of the households in the New York metropolitan area buy the New York Times. Half of their circulation, half of its circulation is national, so that it's getting, you know, one-half percent of every other community.

That is an economic model that is not viable for any other newspaper in the country. I mean, the Chicago Tribune would be out of business tomorrow, if it had only 10 percent penetration; but these are reaching unique markets, and so their economic model does not apply. The New York Times does not operate the Boston Globe the way it operates the New York Times, and it certainly doesn't operate its small Southern papers, where it looks a lot like the Gannett Company, the way it operates--

MR. ORNSTEIN: But we should also note here that we are having a war with these skyrocketing costs during an economic slowdown. So the advertising revenues for these papers--and the Post relies on classified advertising much more, the New York Times obviously does not. Those ad bases are shrinking some. They're getting less for their ads. They're having fewer ads. It's fairly clear. I mean, the Post is just not as thick a paper, even, as it was before.

So those cost pressures, as their costs of newsgathering go up, their revenues are declining, they can withstand it for a while, but the pinch hits them, too.

MR. KALB: Oh, yeah; absolutely.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We'll take three more.

MR. CHETVERIKOV: Okay. Thank you. I am Sergey Chetverikov of Hogan and Hartson. To follow up Boris on the cover story, I would like to hear your comments on the rather limited coverage of President Putin's visit to the United States, and, actually, this subject didn't even come up in the discussion today. So what--Marvin, especially your comment--what is the reason for that? Is that lack of interest, or are they waiting for the breaking news from barbecue and singing cowboys?

[Laughter.]

MR. KALB: I guess that I don't share your judgment, that there hasn't been a proper amount of coverage to the Putin visit. His visit comes at a time of such dramatic and fast-moving events in Afghanistan, that the person who puts that front page together, who puts the news together at night, I think, understandably, is going to go as much, or even more with the Afghan story than the Putin story.

But I think there's been some terrific coverage of Russia in the last couple of months. There has been an extraordinary opportunity presented to the world right now, in what Putin is doing in Russia, and the way he and Bush are trying to manufacture a new kind of Russian-American relationship, and if they can pull it off.

I take my hat off to both of them because it gives, again, an opportunity to Russia, more meaningfully, to move in the direction of the West, and we both know about the chronic tension in Russian society and politics, one way or the other.

Putin made a command decision, about six weeks ago, to go with the West, and I think the West is responding to that, and I think some of this has been reported. I would love to see more of it, but I think, broadly speaking, there has been a proper amount of coverage given to the Putin visit.

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I would add one thing, I think, and that is, you talk about the corrosive norms, Norm, and I think one of the corrosive norms--and here, journalists are to blame for the falloff in diplomatic coverage--is that we did foreign affairs coverage in a Cold War model, which was basically who's got their guns aimed at us and who do we have our guns aimed at, and when the Cold War ended, we didn't know how to do international reporting a different way, and we didn't know how to report globalization, for instance.

So these stories seem alien because we don't know how to make them relevant. It's like we cover politics very poorly in this country, because we cover it the wrong way, and make it irrelevant to our readers. We've done the same thing, to some extent, with the way we've covered foreign affairs, and that's why, then, when we're presented with Putin's visit, I'm not sure--I may agree with Marvin about the amount, but I believe that what's the relevance of this to a reader, to a viewer, to the average citizen. We do a pretty lousy job, I think, of doing that, because we are accustomed to the old model, where you didn't have to explain the relevance because the Cold War made it all obvious.

MR. ORNSTEIN: You know, the last two days have been some of the most remarkable news days in the history of this country, and to watch editors, watch CNN, for example, try and figure out how to juggle a plane crash that lands in Queens with the prospect or possibility that it's a terrorist attack. Mazar-e-Sharif falling, followed by Kabul, and Putin striking a dramatic arms deal with Bush has been quite striking.

It suggests, by the way, relating to Tim's question, one other important news story that I haven't seen anybody cover yet. You have an administration and a foreign policy team that now has to juggle seven or eight delicate crystal balls in the air that have repercussions for decades to come.

Normally, if we did not have a war going on right now, Condoleezza Rice, the resident Russia expert, would be spending all of her time focused on this new era of relations with Russia.

I have not a clue as to how much time Condi is spending on that compared to trying to figure out how we're going to build a government in Afghanistan, dealing with our relations with our allies, which include delicate questions of how much military involvement they're going to have, an agreement on the global warming treaty that's taking place outside of our ken and control, trade negotiations with enormous implications for the future, relations with China which will now come even more into play, the India-Pakistan situation and the Middle East.

They've got a deep team. I have yet to see a story explaining how they're managing all of these balls, who's taking charge of critical areas, which has to be at a Level Three below the top, now, that they've had to delegate to. It's one of the most fascinating, and interesting, and important--

MR. ROSENSTIEL: Maybe we made so much progress with Russia because it had to be delegated to Bush.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Brad Patterson

MR. PATTERSON: You really answered my question. I was going to ask about, since this is the Transition To Governing Project, what were you comments on today, the new administration's handling of the press and its relations with the press. You have newsmakers, you have Cheney, you have Rice, you have Ridge, and you have others there. Karen Hughes. How has this relationship changed, as you've seen it?

MR. ROSENSTIEL: I'll take a first whack. I'm sure others will improve on this. I think that the administration had an easy task in the sense that rallying public support around this event was a no-brainer. I think they initially did a really crummy job of addressing multiple audiences. In other words, I don't think they did a very good job of addressing the audiences overseas in the Muslim world, and the moderate--all the factions, and, you know, and they sort of came late to deciding that they should put people on al-Jazeera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I think that they were also heading toward a mistake by trying to--these guys are "control freaks," to some extent, and Bush and Rumsfeld and Rove, I think, in particular, and I think they were making a mistake in trying to exert too much control. There's a great risk, had the war not gone well, that people would begin to distrust the administration because they were withholding so much.

I think that success breeds success in these situations and if it turns out that the Taliban are in retreat, rather than a strategic, you know, retreat, that that potential mistake will not be a problem.

But if it turns out that the plan, that things are in chaos over there, and we don't know who's going to rule the country, and what we leave behind is a mess, that, again, trying to control that story too much will not serve them. There's a revisionist theory that we lost Vietnam because people saw body bags on television. I have gone through the tapes of the 1960's, television. There were no body bags. What there was was a manifest derision on the face of TV reporters and anchors about the numbers that the administration was giving us on the 5:00 o'clock follies. The nub of the relationship between the press and the government in Vietnam was the credibility gap, and that's the danger in this situation.

MR. MANN: Let me just say a word, Brad. I think the transition from the first eight months to the post-September 11 period in this regard is what's absolutely critical, because I think the approach of the administration in the first eight months was wildly inappropriate to the new environment in which we exist, and I've seen changes but their old habits die hard. This administration, the first eight months, was consumed with spin, with a permanent campaign, sort of selling an image of something that didn't comport with the underlying reality, sort of clever "we'll talk a bipartisan game but engage a partisan strategy in trying to get something done," and, you know, when the stakes don't seem as high, you can get away with that for a while, although I thought the low point was when Karen Hughes held a press conference after the President's announcement on stem cell, and in the most unintentionally condescending manner, told us about the book he read and the article he perused, and the probing questions he asked of experts. It was so transparently spin, that it did no service to the President.

Karl Rove, in that first 24 hours, was at risk of doing something similar, but the seriousness of what was at stake I think catapulted Bush to the floor and he started being the central player, and, frankly, it was his sort of natural reactions in New York, and his initial speech to Congress that lent credibility and weight and seriousness to the administration, that made expendable all of their spinmeisters.

But, over time, what's essential is the credibility of what they say, because if there's any question that they're "spinning" the war on either front, international or domestic, then the base of public support will collapse.

MR. ORNSTEIN: I promised everybody we would end on time, and we're a couple minutes over, so I think we're going to have to end it here, and I want to thank Marvin, Tom, and Tom. It is, "One Scandal, A Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism." Thanks for a great discussion.

- - -