JUST THE FACTS?

JONATHAN ALTER:

One of the most enduring visual images of the news business is the "zipper"--the electronic display belt (most famously in Times Square) that relays breaking news to passersby. "Pearl Harbor attacked," "FDR dead" "Space shuttle launched"--the zipper has always been concise, clear, and as "objective" as it is possible to be.

Until now. At the corner of 49th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, Fox News has a zipper that 1 like to watch when I have the chance. Many of the bulletins that move across the zipper include a cute little two- or three-word comment thrown in afterwards. The zipper has a little extra zip, usually from the conservative side where Fox and its owner Rupert Murdoch stand, and occasionally I get a chuckle out of it. Call it the respect of one wise guy for another. After all, for a decade I've been one of the authors of Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch, which each week makes snippy little comments about figures in the news. Before that, I laced my Washington Monthly articles with plenty of "attitude."

But I'm starting to have some second thoughts about my role in the "Attitude Revolution." It's one thing for magazines to try to be clever. Columnists and talking heads (I'm guilty of being both) can offer their opinions. But zippers are supposed to stay zipped up. The news sections of newspapers, like television anchors, are supposed to deliver the news straight. Textured reporting is welcome, but snide assessments of motive belong in feature pieces and magazines. Phrases like "In an effort to divert attention .. ."and "In an attempt to appear presidential ..." should not be in the news section.

How did we get here? How did the walls start breaking down? I've got a few pet theories:

The End of the Cold War. The seriousness of the bipolar struggle tended to inhibit attitudinizing in the news pages. Starting in World War II, the press tended to define news as what government officials said or did on a given day, because those words and actions were at least distantly tied to our survival. Today's media climate is a return to the prewar racy standard, which was called "ballyhoo" during the 1920s. With the end of the Cold War, the stakes are smaller, which means we're more free to indulge in silly partisanship and triviality.

At the same time, the duality of the global struggle-and the duality embedded in a legal system that came to dominate much of American life--made people think that offering two sides to a story somehow made it fair. The clash of competing forces defined news--and led the way to truth. Or so the theory goes. The inadequacy of that adversary structure has become clearer since the Cold War ended, even as it insinuates itself deeper in the media culture.

Technology: The Internet lends itself to attitude and opinion--to the idea that everyone has his or her view, and that they are of equal value. And the fragmentation of media because of cable technology means that there's a lot more time to fill. Straight, "objective" news can't fill it. Just reporting straight news doesn't get you ahead in the intensely competitive world of TV news. Sad to say, audiences prefer chewing over old, sexy news to hearing fresh news that doesn't make the blood race. Newspapers have a different problem. They no longer bring people the headlines, which readers have heard on TV or radio. So they include more packaging, analysis and attitude in order to stay alive. That's not all bad; good analysis is important in a confusing world. But spin is cheaper to produce.

Baby boomers: When they were young, baby boomers wrote for college and underground papers that were more like the foreign press--long on opinion and shorter on facts. Boomers were often intensely political when they were young, and many stayed political even when real ideological differences faded. Axe-grinding that began over weighty issues like Vietnam has now extended to trivia. Moreover, some of those who became journalists also grew up believing that "stenographic" reporting was a bit below their ambitions, especially if they wanted to go on TV to analyze the news (I plead guilty again). For the academically inclined (and a growing number of them ended up in journalism), the whole idea of "objectivity" was contrary to deconstructionism, the still current academic fashion in which texts all contain hidden messages of bias and privilege. The unspoken logic: If "objectivity" is impossible, why try?

The cult of attribution: The decline of "objectivity" is partly an understandable reaction to journalism that sometimes made a fetish of attribution. One reason I was never comfortable working on newspapers was that I disliked having to attribute perfectly obvious facts to someone else. At most papers, basic statements of fact ("The sky is blue") were required to have a ludicrous level of attribution ("according to the National Weather Service"). A looser standard of attribution has mostly been a positive development in American journalism. The New York Times, for instance, is a better written, more interesting newspaper than in the past in part because of new standards of what's permissible in the news sections.

The wrong lens: The problem is that the Times and other news organizations are losing sight of what news is. In September, for instance, President Clinton signed an executive order offering (not just proposing) important new protections to 120 million Americans in HMOs. The Times gave the story three paragraphs on page 21. What was once a clear definition of news--a decision that affects large numbers of people--is no longer big news because it's not "hot" It doesn't lend itself to conflict, spin, secrecy, scandal and personal attacks or quirks--the new standards of news.

The public is hypocritical about all of this. Viewers complain about the poor news diet, but routinely zap cable shows (the networks are a different story) every time they turn away from Monica Lewinsky. Even so, there is a growing unhappiness about the direction of news coverage. Readers and viewers want "objectivity" back. The first step toward doing that is to understand where "objective" journalism came from in the first place.

Just the Facts: How Objectivity Came to Define American Journalism, by David T. Z. Mindich,(*) is a good place to begin. Mindich opens with the common but important caveat that there is no such thing as "true objectivity" and that the word should always be used with quotation marks around it. He quotes Sydney Gruson of The New York Times. "Pure objectivity might not exist, but you have to strive for it anyway." Christiane Amanpour, a now-famous reporter for CNN and CBS, recently gave a speech updating the old standard. "Objectivity," said Amanpour, "means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally... So objectivity must go hand in hand with morality."

As Amanpour suggests, some of the changes in the old, unthinking standard of "objectivity" have resulted from hard thinking about the issue, not just a desire to get ratings and readers with a few clever remarks. There are not "two sides" to the atrocities she reports on. Sometimes there are six sides to a story--or only one. And the conventions of the news business have been easily manipulated by people in power to inhibit the reporting of the truth. The charges of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, for instance, were reported "objectively"

Mindich doesn't deal with McCarthyism or other 20th century cases; he's more interested in the 19th century origins of "objectivity," and those origins are illuminating. Because this is an academic (though clearly written) book, he breaks down "objectivity" into its journalism textbook components: detachment, nonpartisanship, inverted pyramid, facticity and balance. Each arose as a journalistic convention as a result of particular developments in American history.

Detachment and non-partisanship come from the Jacksonian and immediate pre-Civil War eras. James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the New York Herald, ran a splenetic and vicious penny paper, but he was the first major newspaper owner who was associated with no party. He went back and forth, endorsing the Democrat in one presidential election, the Whig in another. More important, in agitating against another newspaper editor who advocated duels and once beat up Bennett himself, he pioneered the idea of peaceful, if vitriolic, means of resolving disputes. This kind of nonviolent non-partisanship was tremendously popular. And by mid-century, detachment and independence were beginning to sell as party papers faltered.

Soon the old strictly chronological, narrative newspaper style, where the news was buried in the 25th paragraph, also began to fade. It was replaced by the inverted pyramid, the structural underpinning of a modern news story, in which the most important facts come first, in a "lead," with other facts presented in descending order of importance. According to Mindich, this approach grew out of coverage of the Lincoln assassination in 1865. Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, the greatest press censor in American history, also originated the inverted pyramid. While war correspondents still filed flowery narratives, Stanton, who had total control of all new information, telegraphed the first terse bulletins from the war department. Stanton was also the first to use the conventions of "objectivity" to bolster authority. By the 1880s, it was standard for newspapers. The telegraph, which placed a premium on speed and economy of style, became an important technological tool of "objectivity."

I've noticed that the inverted pyramid is distinctly out of fashion on the news programs watched by the most viewers--TV news magazines, The basic story structure on "Dateline" is right out of 19th century journalism: a strong narrative with the news--the payoff--buried far down in the story in order to maintain suspense and keep people watching after the commercial breaks.

The purchase of The New York Times by Adolph Ochs in 1896 is often seen as a landmark in the development of "objectivity" While William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer pioneered yellow journalism, the Times was developing a sense of "balance" that would heavily influence journalism in the 20th century. But Mindich examines the case of Ida B. Wells, a former slave turned crusading journalist who showed how flawed the Times' "balanced" coverage of lynchings turned out to be. It's Wells' critique of phony balance--two sides to every story--that has informed the better critiques of objectivity today.

So how to balance the need for "objectivity" with good writing, good analysis, and good humor? Not easily. We should want reporters to analyze, reach conclusions, and write with style. The only answer I can envision is to erect a stronger firewall between anchors and commentators, between news shows and entertainment shows and between the news sections of a newspaper and the rest of the paper. The risk is boredom, lost ratings, and lost circulation. The reward would be greater confidence in what people watch and read. The good news is that truly partisan, biased news organizations don't make big money in the media game. In the last quarter century, the big profits have generally gone to reliable papers and networks with a reputation for some objectivity in their news sections. The Wall Street Journal and ABC News are more profitable than The New York Post and Fox TV. Smart news executives know this, and are watching the balance carefully

ART LEVINE:

THE PRESIDENT UNDER SIEGE: LUCY AND THE JAPAN CRISIS

Washington, December 7, 1941--Ever since last week's disclosure of wheelchair-bound President Roosevelt's dalliance with social secretary Lucy Mercer, the President has been seeking to keep the country's attention on the mounting threat to America's overseas allies. Today was no exception to this public relations strategy, advisers say. Even though it was a Sunday, the crippled President, wearing his customary smoking jacket and sporting his jaunty cigarette holder, was wheeled into the Oval Office for a series of photo ops and meetings that sent a clear message: The President of the United States is hard at work protecting our interests.

Even so, the exposure of the Mercer affair, added to the recent spate of articles on the President's polio-induced handicap by New York Daily News gossip columnist Ed Sullivan, has severely damaged the President's political standing, analysts say. As Father James Coughlin, a Senior Fellow at the America-First Enterprise Institute, pointed out, "The President has to keep the public distracted, and a war may be the only way to do so"

The day's first meeting only added to the mood of impending crisis in the nation's capitol. Seated behind a desk, the President greeted War Secretary Henry Stimson with a hearty "Hello, Hank!" before turning to a discussion of the progress of the Lend-Lease Act, the shrewd legislative PR gambit that has increased war supplies to Britain, although some White House political advisers worry that it could draw America into an unpopular war--and drive down the President's approval ratings. Before lunch, to show he still retains the famed Roosevelt charm, he posed with his dog Fala, who barked playfully while seated on a red checkered blanket on his master's lap. "Don't worry, fellas," he joked to reporters, "his bark is worse than his bite. Kind of like [Prime Minister] Tojo."

The Japanese threat to Asia, though, is taken seriously at the White House--now more than ever. For months, the Administration has been engaged in diplomatic sparring with Japan over its aggressive moves against Indochina and China, even imposing a controversial oil embargo against a country that State Department insiders say is only seeking vital natural resources. The mounting strain between Japan and the US. seems to have reached the boiling point today, just as the President was enjoying a lunch of salmon and asparagus served by two uniformed White House stewards on the First Lady's favorite china, a wedding gift from that brisk March day in 1905 when the then-hopeful couple were married in a lovely outdoor ceremony at Hyde Park.

About 1 p.m., the President was interrupted by an urgent visit from his top aide, Harry Hopkins. "Yes, Harry?" the President inquired. "What's so important?" Hopkins, sources say, blurted out: "The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, sir!" The President appeared genuinely surprised by the news, White House sources insist, although Republican critics, such as Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin, contend that the Pacific Fleet was moved to Hawaii to lure just such an attack. Whatever the truth of the allegation in a city abuzz with rumors, there's no question that President Roosevelt acted swiftly to summon Secretary Stimson and his other top advisers to learn the grim facts of the "surprise" attack, as the White House called it--and to shape an effective political response.

The White House has been torn by dissension over how to respond to the carnage in Hawaii and the subsequent Japanese declaration of war. The military damage is severe: The first wave of attacking planes arrived at 7:53 a.m., Hawaii time, and by the time it was all over, 2,400 servicemen were killed, nearly 200 planes were destroyed and the Pacific Fleet was crippled. But the question in Washington now is whether a President who is crippled both physically and politically has the capital needed to wage war against Japan. "When the President is speaking to the public about war, won't everyone have a thought bubble in their minds about the President in bed with Lucy Mercer? How can he be credible?" one Republican strategist wondered.

Today, there's furious debate among the President's advisers about the tone of the speech the President is scheduled to deliver Monday before Congress. One version, drafted by Hopkins, reportedly refers to December 7 as "a date which will live in infamy," and asks for a declaration of war. But another team of advisers, led by Vice President Henry Wallace, has been urging instead a tamer version that refers to December 7 as a "date which will live forever in our saddened hearts" and urges in no uncertain terms an immediate resumption of the stalled negotiations with Japan over the US. oil embargo. The President, weighing the various options and concerned about potentially negative media coverage, hasn't yet decided which course to take. Only time will tell.

TIMOTHY NOAH:

Two imperatives in contemporary journalism are at war with one another. One imperative says: Be smart! Be analytic! Be like The Washington Monthly or The New Republic or The Weekly Standard! The other imperative says: Don't say anything that will make your readers--or, more important, your sources--mad! Don't lose significant leaks from government sources, which still matter a lot, to the competition! The first imperative boils down to being subjective; being so intelligently and fair-mindedly will benefit a reporter's career over the long run.

The second imperative boils down to being rigorously neutral. This is no longer the path to glory in a journalistic career, but analysis-free reporting remains a useful skill--sometimes you just want to know, Did the bill pass? Did the Red Sox win? What is the disagreement between party A and party B all about?--and solid careers can be built on it.

The trouble arises when a reporter, torn between the imperative to be smart and the imperative to not rock the boat, tries to have it both ways. One common corruption arising from this dilemma is to be snide. Nobody can prove you think that the Clinton healthcare bill is a nightmare of red tape, but you can still communicate the general idea. "There are ways of saying it, without actually saying it," a seasoned New York Times reporter once told me. Another corruption is to sculpt your analysis to resemble prevailing biases so perfectly that no one is likely to complain. (When readers or sources bitch about "biased" reporting, what they almost always mean is reporting whose biases they disagree with.) Thus you can portray a Ralph Nader or a Jesse Helms as a hopeless boob simply because he isn't working within the mainstream.

Ultimately, it's best for reporting to strive to be neither "analytic" nor "neutral," but simply to be fair-minded and truthful based on a detailed examination of the matter at hand. A good reporter who is well-steeped in his subject matter and who isn't out to prove his cleverness, but rather is sweating out a detailed understanding of a topic worth exploring, will probably develop intelligent opinions that will inform and perhaps be expressed in his journalism. It is very difficult to be a blowhard on a one has studied extensively and from many angles. The extent to which the reporter spells out his assumptions and follows them to their logical conclusions may vary, but whether the result is a work of "opinion" journalism or "objective" journalism matters less than that the writer's objective is to inform, not to impress.

DAVID IGNATIUS:

It is endearing of Charlie Peters to sponsor a symposium calling for more objective, less opinion-laden journalism. Can this be the same beloved, raccoon-eyed editor who used to hector his editors when they offered up an overly fact-laden piece: "Where's the gospel?" The same man who infuriated dozens of America's leading journalists by writing his own opinions into their pieces? The same man who coined the term "rain dance" to describe his efforts to put more of a writer's heart and soul into a piece?

You have to wonder: Can our own mischievous, opinion-drenched Huck Finn really have turned into Tom Sawyer? Or Robert Pear?

A chary editor might have suggested to Charlie that, instead of a symposium, this topic might make a good "Tilting" item (long the preferred way to deal with the boss's momentary obsessions). Or perhaps another volume in Charlie's autobiography. But as it happens, Charlie has something going for him in this new crusade for "Just the Facts" He's right.

Let me begin (inevitably) by defending my own newspaper, The Washington Post. The danger of too much opinion and spin on the front page isn't something we've just discovered. The Post's top editors during the '90s, Leonard Downie and Robert Kaiser, tried hard to suppress tendentious writing and gratuitous analysis in news stories. Kaiser, in particular, became exasperated at those introductory clauses that begin so many newspaper stories: "In a move intended to deflect the House impeachment inquiry, President Clinton yesterday announced ..." Or: "Despite growing criticism of his divisive record as House Speaker, Newt Gingrich yesterday proposed..." Such leads had become all too common at the Post. They were a product of emphasis over the last two decades on interpretive, analytical journalism (encouraged by, let's be frank, a certain humble West Virginia lawyer and his band of anti-elitist Harvard grads).

Kaiser decided to do something about this trend toward manipulative, opinion-saturated "news" leads. He banned them. Specifically, he enunciated something that came to be known at the Post as the "Kaiser Rule" Reporters were forbidden to begin a story with any kind of explanatory clause, whatsoever. I'm sure people can find examples of this rule being violated, but on major front-page stories, it stuck. To reporters who complained that their analytical stories had been neutered ("Jeez, Bob, Clinton was deflecting attention ...," etc., etc.), Kaiser would answer with a memorable dictum first postulated by the Post's editor in the '50s, J. Russell Wiggins: "The reader deserves one clean shot at the facts"

That may be a good motto for the new, new journalism. Don't tell people what to think. Present readers with information, as cleanly and clearly stated as possible, along with context that gives them a chance to make up their own minds what it means.

To be sure (as we used to say when I worked at The Wall Street Journal, where every front-page story was supposed to have a "to-be-sure graph" that allowed the possibility that the thesis of the surrounding story was false), there's a place for analysis. The front page of any great newspaper needs good analytical writing that helps people make sense of the world. And it needs vivid, colorful writing that brings home the intensity and visceral reality of events to readers.

That's the business that newspapers are in now--at a time when people usually know the basic facts about a big story before they pick up the paper, from television, radio or the Internet. Our job is explaining the world--providing meaning and context and a way of ordering the world. That's what a newspaper front page is, essentially--a daily ordering of the world that establishes the seven or eight topics the editors think are most worthy of a reader's attention. That's a subjective and interpretive mission, inescapably. But it's not an excuse for violating the Kaiser Rule. Readers do deserve one clean shot at the facts.

The Post has taken some grief in the profession for Downie's and Kaiser's emphasis on traditionalism. The buzz on the street has been that the Post was less experimental, less daring, less open to "personal" writing, less "fun" Some of this criticism was misplaced; some of it was probably valid. But it's worth noting that the changes in the Post resulted from Downie's and Kaiser's deliberate efforts to steer the ship away from the rocks that Charlie Peters is now sighting. Indeed, I have to ask where Charlie was during all those years the Post was getting drubbed by media gossips for being a little dull.

The biggest danger I encountered in my years as an editor was a reflexive cynicism among some reporters that led them to assume they knew what a story was about, before they had actually done the reporting. They would begin with an assumption of who the good guys and bad guys were, and then organize the facts around that hypothesis. Sometimes, reporters were so confident about their a priori hypotheses that they would make only the most perfunctory, last-minute efforts to contact the "bad guys" ("Mr. Jones couldn't be reached for comment." "Mr. Jones failed to respond to a reporter's inquiry.")

This sort of cynicism is so common that it has become a journalistic stereotype. But it's actually the opposite of the fundamental journalistic values of curiosity and skepticism. The reason you call people for comment (and keep calling them until you get them) is because you want to get it right. A good reporter lives in terror of the possibility that his elaborately constructed hypothesis is wrong--that the last phone call he makes will reveal that the real story is something different from what he had assumed. Interestingly, in my experience, the very best reporters rarely exhibit the stereotypical cynicism and arrogance that people have come to associate with the profession. Bob Woodward isn't that way. David Broder isn't; David Remnick isn't; Kate Boo isn't; David Maraniss isn't. These people couldn't gather the stories they do without being genuinely curious about the world and open to new information.

The reflexive cynics in our business tend to be the burn-outs: the has-beens or never-weres. Most of all, they're the television people, who affect a world-weary know-it-all-ism that the public has, quite rightly, come to loathe. If ever there was an unearned cynicism, it's the kind found among these TV celebrities and pundits. Many of them haven't chased a fire truck, let alone covered a war.

A final impediment to giving readers one clear shot at the facts is the journalistic tendency to keep score--especially in covering the White House. There seems to be an unquenchable need to record, on a daily basis, whether the president is up or down, whether he had a good week or a bad week, whether he continues to be "dogged by scandal" or has "triumphed over his critics" This running box score is often nonsensical; there is no real event whatsoever being described, only an imaginary battle for influence. And often the scorekeeping obscures what actually is going on--the particular legislative debate or foreign-policy crisis that reporters see as a backdrop for the real issue: Is he up? Is he down?

What reporters really mean when they write this daily form sheet on the presidency is: What do my colleagues in the press corps think? What's the consensus opinion of the handful of people I talked to today? To call that sort of work "bad journalism" is charitable. It isn't journalism at ail. There isn't a fact in sight.

JOSEPH NOCERA:

To my mind, the big problem with American journalism is not so much that it is snarky, or that opinions have crept into news stories, or that it is more often about attitude and showing off than about facts--though all of that strikes me as plainly true. Rather, it is that journalism--especially the journalism practiced by political print reporters, which is the concern of this magazine--has lost its way. Once, these were the people through whom politicians made their cases to the nation; now, thanks to Larry King et al., they have been stripped of that role, and they simply don't know what to do anymore.

So they practice "gotcha" journalism. The cover process rather than policy. They get caught up in spin, and who's-doing-what-to-whom and all the rest of it. It's a kind of journalism of nihilism--or it doesn't really believe in anything except itself. Journalism has become, to an astonishing degree, self-referential, like a tribe cut off from the rest of the world. When Mauteen Dowd, the current queen of the tribe, and others of her ilk sneer at those who would like to see a journalism that actually cares about things the country cares about, that's when their cards are most on the table. The notion has become practically incomprehensible. Note, also, by the way, how the only people she ever quotes in her Ain't-I-One-Smart-Cookie op-ed columns are her fellow journalists.

The late Theodore White gets blamed a lot for starting us down this path. He, of course, was the first political writer to add detail and color to political reporting--to make process come alive. And it is certainly true that other reporters picked up his techniques--and then drove them into the ground through sheer overkill. But what has long been forgotten is that White had a tremendous--and completely unembarrassed--passion for the country, for its people and its problems, its strengths and weaknesses. And he was never afraid to display that passion in his books. He would, for instance, regularly include lengthy chapters interpreting the latest census data in his Making of the President series, as well as chapters that had nothing to do with process and everything to do with the problems facing the country. The craft it took in writing those chapters was astonishing, for this was material that was difficult to bring to life. But it was important, and he cared, so he made the effort. When the day comes that Maureen Dowd can bring herself to leave Monica and Bill behind and writes a column about the census, you'll know that political journalism has begun to find its way again. Me, I'm not holding my breath.

JAMES FALLOWS:

The problem the Monthly's getting at is not confined to news stories with loaded lead-ins. ("Dogged by criticism of his role in the Lewinsky case, President Clinton today raised a man from the dead with the slightest touch of his hand") It's just as common, and has an even longer history, in the portentous-sounding but vapid zingers that end the typical TV or radio news report. ("The president may have conquered death today. Whether he can beat Kenneth Starr tomorrow ... is not so clear") And whether used at the beginning of a story or the end, such fillips are not the real problem. The menace is the incredibly shallow, incurious, and cynical view of life that lies behind them.

Within limits, the effort to put attitude into a news story is a worthy one--or, at a minimum, one this magazine should be slow to condemn. In one way or another it has urged for years that reporters use as many tools as they can to share what they've seen--what they know--with the reader. It was in this very magazine, a mere 25 years ago, that I wrote (at the dietation suggestion of the editor) a review of Ward Just's book of short stories, The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert. The point of that review, and of other Monthly articles passim, was that a Flaubert-like, novelistic sensibility can add to a full understanding of public life. This was in contrast to the preceding "just the facts" wire-service ethic that led some of the funniest people in the press to write dull, constipated stories and to use euphemisms like "tired and emotional" to describe politicians who were drunk and stuporous on the Senate floor.

Yes, there should be places where the facts come through straight and plain. The lead of a story is usually such a place. Yes, there should be clues to the reader about what is a clear-as-we-can-make-it factual summary and what is the extra interpretation. But trying to move beyond the straight facts is not the big problem here.

The problem, I think, is that the people writing these stories are less interested, and therefore less interesting, than reporters really need to be. The mark of a great reporter is boundless curiosity--a desire to find out all there is to know. Name your era, and anyone we think of as a great reporter from that time was distinguished by omnivorous curiosity. Stephen Crane in Cuba. Charles Dickens roaming through America. John Hersey in Hiroshima. James Agee in the South. The grossly underrated John Gunther, in his Inside series of books. They made their mistakes, but they wanted to learn every single thing they could about as many topics as they could.

Today's most famous journalists, by comparison, (a) spend a much larger proportion of their time spitting out opinions and predictions, especially on TV, rather than taking in new material, and (b) are curious about a much narrower slice of the world. It's somewhat exaggerated, but basically fair, to say that today's pundit and star political-writer class is not driven by fascination about the world in general, or even about politics in the broadest sense. Rather, its members are fascinated by one specific question: which politicians are gaining or losing power. That's why they package every public event in a "Dogged by criticism ..." wrapping. That's why they spend so much time on pointless prediction and speculation about future shifts in strength. That's also why they're so cynical, since boiling life down to this one simple struggle is as deadening as any other reductionist view. (Imagine a coroner who let his dealings with other people be reduced to calculations of how long before they showed up on his slab.)

The game of musical chairs that leaves some people in office and some out is a legitimate topic. But it makes up about 2 percent of what's significant and interesting in life. As long as it occupies most of the imagination of the political-writer class, their claim on the public imagination will shrink.

JONATHAN ROWE:

The problem is not just smart-alecky journalists who grind their axes on the front page. The tendentious numb-brained quality of much American journalism today is largely a product of its forms. Daily journalism is frozen in a set of rituals and conventions that preclude nuance and provide formalistic cover for lazy thinking and reporting.

A few suggestions.

Ditch the Inverted Pyramid. This antiquated form requires that a story be about one thing, called the lead. It pushes the reporter to highlight the egregious--the outrageous charge, the gaffe--and often the irrelevant. The relentless built-in metronome sends the story barreling past the questions that are screaming to be raised. Instead there is ritualistic balance in the form of opposing (and generally imbecilic) quotes.

The inverted pyramid is a remnant of the days of telegraph. Telling the story over and over in increasing detail, it provided insurance against the breakdowns in transmission which were common. Today it provides a cookie-cutter form that makes stories easy to write and cut on deadline. These are valid concerns, but they do not justify the violence the form does to the presentation of reality. The inverted pyramid works okay for car wrecks, fires and shootings. For anything more complicated--a congressional debate, for example--the journalist should simply strive to write as an honest and intelligent person relating an event to others.

Enough Idiotic Quotes. The quote has become the main crutch of American journalism, and a source of continual idiocy in reporting. No statement is too obvious or banal to find its way onto the front page of The Washington Post or The New York Times. Henry Hyde says that impeachment is a grave and solemn constitutional duty. Clinton's pollster says the public wants Congress to move on to other things. What else are they going to say?

Quotes generally are a form of show and tell. They do not convey insight or information. They enable the reporter to say "See! I did some reporting." "See! I'm getting both sides." We all know how this game works. Build the story around the sources who echo your own view. Trot out the dissenting voice in a way that makes clear you are holding your nose. Present a formalistic ritual of balance instead of writing the story with a fair mind.

Quotes also have become a symptom of authority journalism, which I will get to in a moment. The answer is to cut them drastically. Reporters should take responsibility for the truth of their own story. They should determine that truth as best they can, in the time available, and then tell that story. They should quote only when it adds real insight or information, not to show that they called both Gephardt and Livingston and therefore have both sides. To get started they might read the Economist magazine, and then go and do likewise.

Exile the Experts and Spinners. American journalism is rapidly turning into authority journalism. The question is not what happened but what some authority said happened. Greenspan said, not what actually is. Hyde or Clinton said, not any action that actually ensued. A fair percentage of front page stories are not stories at ail. They are Big Shot Says stories. Nothing really happened. Instead some big shot said something and the media trumpets it as though something happened.

The Greenspan Says mode of journalism has had a noxious effect upon Washington, a city that has plenty such effects already. It turns the front pages into a spin fest, and encourages the entire city to compete for room on that stage. If Greenspan can say, everyone else wants to say too. People put more energy into contrived saying than into actually getting something done.

The corollary to this pathetic theater is the use of established authority as a substitute for truth. The journalistic standard becomes what a Martin Feldstein says about the economy, what a Norman Ornstein says about Congress, instead of what is true about these. Among other things, authority journalism keeps reporting stuck firmly in the conceptual status quo. If truth is what conventional authorities say, then there's never room for a new idea or an unconventional truth--which is why such ideas always get banished to the journalistic margins. Behind a formalistic facade of "objectivity," the journalist becomes a stenographer for an authority's subjectivity.

My friend Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has proposed a simple solution: Give the authorities, experts and opinionizers their own page. The front page should tell us what happened, the way the old colonial newspapers did. No Greenspan Says stories, no dueling quotes Just what happened. (Often we'd find out that not much happened, which wouldn't be the worst revelation.) Greenspan et al. could do their saying on an inside page, where he and his fellow spinners--from political consultants to those ubiquitous Wall Street "analysts"--could hold forth to their hearts' content.

Play It Again, Please. Washington journalism has no memory. Reporters approach the capital each day as though nothing has happened in this city before. Partly this is a cheap literary device and pose that enables reporters to feign shock--shock--when, say, a member of Congress carries water for a big contributor. But it has a more serious implication, too: Reporters never hold authorities and experts--or even politicians--to account for their stupidities of the past.

Reporters quote what Gingrich said yesterday, but ignore what he said a year or two ago that proved to be entirely wrong. They'll cite the dire warnings of some Wall Street analyst regarding a proposed tax increase, but not mention that analyst's equally dire warning a few years back that was totally off base. Congress could take the lead on this. It could require experts who testify to prepare a list of their prognostications of, say, the past five years. Then the rest of us could know whom we are listening to. The media should do the same, and it should revisit past pronouncements. Those economists and members of Congress who predicted economic collapse if Clinton's early budget was enacted--what do they say now, and why should we listen to them now?

MICHAEL KINSLEY:

All magazines aspire to be factually accurate. Beyond that, their goals vary. Some claim and even actually try to be totally "objective," eschewing all opinion or, as Newsweek used to claim years ago, separating fact from opinion. This is a futile goal (are you going to be objective and avoid any opinion about child molesting?), but aiming for it is a perfectly legitimate strategy. So is what I take to be the current strategy of Time and Newsweek, which is not to have any overt or even covert ideological bias, but to liberate writers from the constraints of objectivity and not to worry excessively if it all averages out as a tilt one way or the other. And that's roughly where we are at Slate.

Another approach is to publish opinion frankly labeled as such but aim for "balance" of views (always, of course, within a spectrum of acceptable opinion). I suppose Foreign Affairs falls into this category, along with the newspaper op-ed pages. Or you can have a public ideological tilt but not enforce it too ruthlessly, or you can just be ideologically confused. The New Republic has straddled those categories for the two decades I've been associated with it.

All these strategies are conceptually muddy and force you to draw impossible lines between fact and opinion, opinion and bias, and so on. Only The Washington Monthly has a strategy that makes it easy to be honest. It says: Look, we're not putting this magazine out for our health (or, God knows, our wealth). We're here to publish the truth as best we can determine it. That includes both the truth about factual matters and the truth about policy and other matters of opinion. We don't wear our opinions as decorations--we hold them because we believe they're true. We wouldn't tell our readers that Miami is north of Chicago. Why would we tell our readers that the Postage Stamp Reform Act of 1999 is a good thing if we think it's a bad thing?

Furthermore (goes the unspoken Monthly credo) if we don't have an opinion about the PSRA, we haven't done our job. We should study it and develop one before writing about it. (What's the point of writing about the relative latitudes of Miami and Chicago if you're not going to give the answer?) And if, after studying it, we're truly of two minds, our views are of no use to the reader and we should write about something else.

Like many elements in The Washington Monthly gospel, this philosophy takes an important truth (the futility of objectivity) and extrapolates it until it begs for mercy. The Monthly approach is a useful part of the journalistic mix, but why must it be the One True Path? After all, the Monthly couldn't be put out without The New York Times and The Washington Post. It gets most of its information directly or indirectly from publications whose philosophy it disapproves or. Why can't we all just get along?

SCOTT SHUGER:

It's progress that most of us no longer view journalism as simply the gathering of facts. Some facts are more important than others. We know that what readers should get isn't the facts but the story. A newspaper should help us decide what events mean, and to do this, writers and editors have to interpret, opine, explain, disregard, and emphasize. In short, they have to write and edit. But what's wrong is when newspapers try to hide this aspect of what they do. When they cloak themselves in the myth of objectivity. The reader, in his quest to get the story, is entitled to know what particular point of view the particular story in his hands is told from. Only then can he be an informed news consumer, able to get out of this particular tale what's in it and well advised about what else he still needs to know.

So it's not the point of view, but the smuggled-in point of view that's got to go. Last fall, a front-page Los Angeles Times story reported that as part of the last-minute budget deal, then-Sen. Alfonse D'Amato won approval of a provision requiring health insurance companies to cover post-mastectomy reconstructive surgery. The paper then immediately explained that D'Amato did this to undercut the strong support among women enjoyed by his election opponent, Charles Schumer. It was just assumed without comment that D'Amato had only this motivation. No consideration was given to the idea that D'Amato might be actually concerned about women not being able to afford reconstructions. If D'Amato was indeed so coldly single-minded, that at least is something the paper needed to support with some facts, such as his past voting record on women's health issues. But to flatly ascribe the basest motive to him in passing is precisely smuggling opinion in. As this episode shows, this journalistic offense cuts across ideological lines--liberals are just as guilty as conservatives.

Financial reporting often keeps its agenda hidden. Last October, when a computer problem halted trading at the New York Stock Exchange for about an hour, all the papers gave precise accounts of the standstill with one glaring exception: not one mentioned the brand of computer that failed. This is like reporting a plane crash without mentioning the type of plane, an extraordinary level of incuriosity, helping to protect that company's stock price, but not helping anybody understand what went wrong or what other computer systems are likewise vulnerable. Also, when around the same time, the yield on 30-year Treasury bonds dipped below 5 percent for the first time ever, most of the reporting came wrapped in the alarm the development prompted among stockholders and bond buyers, but generally did not explain that this was very good news for a much larger group of Americans--those trying to secure a home mortgage.

And sometimes it's public sentiment that cows newspapers out of raising questions. For instance, the coverage of John Glenn's space mission (with the notable exception of The New York Times editorial page) was positively boosterish. News stories gave no meaningful space to the idea that Glenn's involvement was pure PR. And even though the shuttle suffered the potentially dangerous loss of a protective panel during launch, none of the papers the next day mentioned NASA's previous "special" astronaut, Christa McAuliffe.

Perhaps the height of illicit editorializing in newspapers is the news photo. With all the pictures available of the likes of Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich, is it ever really necessary to run a picture of them with a dopey expression or a finger in the ear? In a recent New York Times "Week in Review" section, alongside a story about politicians speaking their minds about other countries, was a looming picture of Al Gore, cropped so close that none of his hair is visible and you can see the sweat that's bubbling out of every giant pore in his face. The verbal equivalent of the picture--"Gore, looking like a crazed criminal with something to hide, said,"--would never pass muster. Therefore, the picture shouldn't either.

What to do about smuggled-in point of view? Well, readers should ask themselves, "Whose interests are being served by this story told this way and whose are being left out? And they should communicate what they find out to the papers via letters to the editor and via the papers' on-line sites. When editors learn that readers are becoming more sophisticated about what's missing, their stories are more apt include it. For instance, now that the big papers know that readers are aware of the political role of spin and counterspin, they more often tend to include in their political stories a discussion of the possible spins. (An excellent example was The New York Times piece last August breaking the news that President Clinton was considering using as a defense against perjury his claim to be wielding a certain definition of sex. The story was not only a White House trial balloon, but it explained that it was.)

And the beat system in force at most papers should be modified. Much of a story's hidden point of view comes not from some sort of grand conspiracy but from when reporters have too much familiarity with the culture of the institution(s) being covered, so much so that assumptions held by participants in the culture creep seamlessly into the journalists' reporting and writing. Correspondingly, an able reporter who is less familiar with the cultural assumptions is more apt to question them and look at them in a fresh way. A reporter coming off a Pentagon tour might ask great questions at City Hall, and vice versa. To maintain a paper's institutional memory, you still need reporters with lots of experience on a beat, but they should generally be paired with another reporter with commensurate experience but in another area. In other words, half of a papers' reporters should be kept cycling through.

MATTHEW MILLER:

At the major outlets that shape public discussion--The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the big three network news shows, say--the interesting issue may not be "objectivity," but the simple fact that picking which stories to lead with or put on page 1 is an exercise of enormous and unaccountable power. It may not feel this way to the editors and producers who make these judgments, since they're simply "putting out the paper" or "putting on the show" Still, it's hard to imagine a set of daily decisions that have more influence on the quality and content of public life.

The question is how to make the exercise of this power more accountable or responsible. One answer might be for editors and producers to explain to audiences at regular intervals what went into their news judgment. Imagine if the Times or the Post assigned a reporter to "cover" their internal page one meetings, and then produce a piece for Sunday that detailed the considerations that went into the make-up of page one that week--along with any doubts, second thoughts, conflicts, etc. A note from the editor or similar report would also suffice, so long as the effect was the same: to 'fess up to what every reader already knows--that the press is not just reporting the news, but choosing what is news. By demystifying this process, such an effort would take the press off one of its high horses and treat citizens as adults. I'd also bet it would be a hit with readers. And it would set an example. If a few top outlets made something like this a regular practice, does anyone doubt it would have a ripple effect? Conversely, if none were willing routinely to explain and defend their news judgments, it would suggest how little difference there is between the way media heavies and top political officials prefer to exercise power--in secret.

WALTER SHAPIRO:

As an occasional participant in big-think conferences bemoaning the downward drift of contemporary journalism from its former Olympian heights, I can furrow my brow, sadly shake my head and invoke the sainted memory of Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow with the best of them. But as adept as I am at the public rituals of high-minded hand-wringing, I do wonder if all these lamentations are really necessary. For all my distaste for the preening egos on food-fight TV talk shows, for all my discomfort with the frenzied excesses of gotcha journalism, I do cling to the Panglossian belief that workaday reporters for our major newspapers are doing a good job in the face of sweetheart-get-me-the-Maalox deadline pressures.

So what are Charlie Peters and many of my fellow spear carriers in the Monthly alumni army so apoplectic about? Let's start with Charlie's pet peeve which he has often repeated, most recently on "Meet the Press" As Charlie instructed Tim Russert, "President Clinton made a speech in August from the Vineyard announcing an executive order giving protection against HMO abuse to 125 million Americans. The New York Times gave that three paragraphs on Page 30." Yes, Clinton unveiled this executive order in his August 29 radio address, and the Times the next day erred by downplaying it with a brief AP story. But this is far from an outrage like the Miami Herald skulking in the bushes to spy on Gary Hart and Donna Rice.

Now we'll put this miscue by an unknown weekend Times editor in context. Remember, these were not exactly ordinary times. The vacationing Clinton had been a virtual recluse on Martha's Vineyard for the prior 10 days, nursing his wounds from Monica Madness rather than mulling high policy. The HMO executive order may indeed prove to be the second coming of the New Deal, but Clinton himself devoted most of his five-minute radio address to rehashing old arguments about his already abundantly covered legislative plan for an HMO Bill of Rights. Moreover, Clinton normally uses these Saturday radio speeches to announce Dick Morris-style small-deeds fluff. Major policy initiatives, in contrast, are presented with the trumpet flare of detailed fact sheets and on-the-record briefings by Cabinet officials and senior White House aides. But Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, who is responsible for implementing this HMO executive order, wasn't invited to Martha's Vineyard. Nor were top advisors like Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed on hand to answer questions. Small wonder the Times and the rest of the press missed the story of a lifetime.

Since the early days of the Nixon administration (it's kind of embarrassing to admit that we all go back that far), the Monthly has been rightly stressing another kind of truth about the White House press corps. No matter how talented and hard-working, White House reporters are prisoners with golden handcuffs, trapped by the exalted prestige of their beat. They are forced to take their cues from press handlers and spin masters as they react to the torrent of often manufactured news emanating from the Oval Office. And, yes, they often become afflicted with a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome. It's certainly not that these reporters love their captors, but they do adopt the dominant value system of their jail. If the White House looks at every issue through the narrow lens of polls and political positioning, reporters in their stories will reflect the cynical world view of a Chicago wardheeler. Answer me this: Name a White House beat writer who is as obsessed with political tactics as Bill Clinton. Clinton, after all, is a president who approved every soft-money ad script for his 1996 campaign and encouraged Dick Morris to conduct a poll to help him decide whether he should stonewall or confess his sexual misdeeds.

But unlike the fabled good old days (The Carter years when the press became inflamed over killer rabbits? The Reagan era built around Mike Deaver's visuals?), the press now stands accused of twisting facts to fit pre-determined mindsets and yielding to the siren song of cleverness. Oh, the horror of it all. Are journalists really out to savage Clinton because they are ideologically outraged by his bland-is-better moderate agenda? Do they hate him for supporting abortion rights or courting the gay vote? Yes, there is palpable animus directed at the president. You know why? Because reporters--and this is a saving grace of the profession--hate being lied to. (Sorry, the proper White House word is "misled.") Forget Monica, if you can. Clinton is a man who claimed in the 1992 campaign not to recall receiving an Army induction notice. I can recall dozens of whoppers Clinton unashamedly told to cover up his 1996 campaign scandals. The president has spent years in public perfecting the semantic dance steps that he so memorably employed in his grand jury testimony.

I got so caught up in Clinton's veracity problems, I almost forgot that it is the press who are in the dock accused of the high crime of excessive cleverness. Now I'm not going to defend every cynical put-down that has made its way into print, especially the ones that aren't very funny. Nor am I going to deny that too many hours wearing TV makeup can give print reporters an exalted sense of their own wit and wisdom. But some of the wise-ass commentary that the Monthly decries is merely the adolescent way reporters rebel against a political culture in which they are manipulated and spun to death. Also, at a time when serious newspapers are fighting for circulation, some reader-friendly irreverence can be justified as a small compromise on behalf of a greater good.

The subtext for this symposium, I suspect, is frustration over a year of non-stop scandal-mongering in Washington. I will resist the too-clever temptation to claim that the press is being blamed for Clinton's sins. But ! do think that the President is the indirect cause of the jarring one-note repetitiveness of recent Washington news. Long before the scandal hit, the Clinton administration was running out of energy and ideas. Granted, there are major stories not being adequately covered in the press, but the locus of most of this real news is outside the capital. Confronted with a Washington news vacuum, the press did what it always does--over-reacted to a story reeking of sex, cover-up and ersatz drama.

So as the Monthly gets ready to aim its mighty arsenal at a younger journalistic generation that does, at times, take self-expression a bit too far, I feel compelled to shout a slogan that was current around the time this magazine was born: "Don't shoot, they're your children!"(**)

SUZANNAH LESSARD:

The problem with the more subjective elements in journalism today, in my view, is not inventiveness per se but cynicism. During the '80s it became extremely unfashionable to believe in anything or anyone who had anything to do with political life. It was as if the slightest taint of hope or admiration, or of in any way taking seriously what transpired on the political stage, would automatically brand a journalist as credulous. And credulousness, in the atmosphere of those times, held the horror of terminal disease. This came about, perhaps, because the Reagan propaganda about America was so patently and dangerously delusory and yet pervasive that any positive note might automatically seem to join the Pollyanna chorus.

Whatever the reason, this legacy is destructive. One H. L. Mencken is probably enough for all time. Imitations are really a kind of comedy act that are more about the writer than they are reflections on current affairs. The value of inventiveness in journalism is that it brings to reflection the full spectrum of responsiveness and the variety of the ways in which we see things. Faith, hope, and charity are elemental ingredients in that mix.

But this is not to say that we must have writers who are positive about what is going on. The distinction has to do with a richness of tone. One can excoriate in a tone that implies that things could not be any other way; and one can excoriate in a way that admits, implicitly, the possibilities of what could be. It's the latter tone that is capable of grief, of authentic outrage, of compassion, all of which "betray" belief of a kind.

Idealism--one could call it an underlying tone of love, as opposed to scorn or contempt--is always risky and exposing. We see it still appearing calmly but courageously in the writings of older commentators who do not, on the whole, avail themselves of creative devices. Among the more inventive generations it's almost obsolete, and we are all impoverished for it. It can't be true that inventiveness necessarily leads in this direction: Great fiction is always work that arises out of love, however ghastly the events and characters depicted. The argument that the cynicism only reflects the debasement of the political world is arrant nonsense. It's a rule of thumb that where humanity is gathered in significant numbers the full Shakespearean panoply is present.

GREGG EASTERBROOK:

In a bid to curry favor with powerful insiders, Gregg Easterbrook today sent Charles Peters an article telling him what he wanted to hear about trends in contemporary journalism. Easterbrook spun the article as an honest effort, claiming in a brief telephone interview that his were "the best points I could think of." But sources close to the article, including a Washington Monthly staff editor who spoke on the condition that her name would melodramatically not be used in order to make her quote seem more exciting, said that Easterbrook and Peters had actually discussed the content of the article before it was written, and that "Charlie told Gregg to come up with something interesting?" This was seen by well-informed but nameless observers as another instance of Washington journalism placing spin first and content second.

Sensing a hostile press corps at his appearance before the House Subcommittee on Bridge Abutments, Pancreas Research and Airport Reforestation, Easterbrook tried to depict himself as merely "an author" who was "trying to dream something up." He said that "generations of Easterbrooks have worked the soil of this great land, trying to dream something up" This appeal seemed carefully calculated to deflect questions about whether he and Peters had privately met before the story was published. Easterbrook refused to answer questions about his sexual life, asserting that "this has nothing to do with public policy matters" Subcommittee staffers winked at each other at this statement. Reporters interpreted the winks as proof that there was something not being said.

Pressed to defend his so-called "article," Easterbrook offered the subcommittee an example. His example came from the Dec. 2, 1998, New York Times front page. Headlined PENITENTS CALLED BY GOP SPEAK ON PERILS OF PERJURY, this article was an account of the previous day's testimony before the Clinton impeachment panel and was presented as a straight article, not a news analysis. The article began,

"WASHINGTON. The way the Judiciary Committee billboarded the day's hearing--`The Consequences of Perjury'--had the ring of the pulpit to it, much as the sermon topic `The Wages of Sin' has generated countless spiritual revivals across American history. Revival was most definitely the Republicans' hope, with their attempt to impeach President Clinton still failing to win over the American public. But instead of fire and brimstone, the Republicans presented two penitent miscreants--two ordinary women who were convicted and seriously punished by the government for having lied under oath about their sex lives."

Attempting to adopt a jaunty tone he no doubt learned by studying tapes of Tom Hanks being interviewed by Tina Brown about nuclear disarmament, Easterbrook noted to the committee that rather than emphasize the seriousness of a presidential impeachment inquiry, articles like this only contributed to the cynical sense that it's all a big game no one really need care about. Further, he stated in an obvious effort to divert attention from the fact that his stylish new glasses were slipping down his nose, a nose that, as Pushkin once wrote, "slopes/toward a point it never makes," a nose that has never been subjected to rhinoplasty, unlike the nose of Paula Jones, whose graphic sexual claims we wish we could dwell on here, the article's emphasis on political spin makes little of the fact that two women were being "seriously punished" by the legal system merely for trying to keep private details of their sexual lives, which we wish we could dwell on here. Isn't the fact that two women have been jailed for trying to maintain privacy in their sexual lives something that journalists should be upset about, not treat as sport? Madonna and Morgan Freeman, contacted in Los Angeles, said that the lack of sufficient graphic sexual details to allow establishment: news organizations to act like tabloids showed that Washington is a town in crisis.

In the text of his article for The Washington Monthly, which was posted on the Internet before it was written, and then never actually published, Easterbrook would have said that examples of high-tech overly spun modern journalism were scarcely confined to The New York Times, but could be found almost anywhere.

People once turned to intellectual publications such as The New Republic or The Atlantic Monthly (Easterbrook shamelessly named his own employers, in order to hype them for runaway newsstand sales that lead to obscene profits that can then be used for soft-money donations to manipulate the public, which of course is the sole goal of all government officials) in order to find an urbane diversion from the excessive straightness of newspapers and television. But now, Easterbrook said, newspapers and television are so glib and condescending that people are turning to intellectual publications in hopes of finding straightness. Obviously, he was driven by self-interest to say this.

Easterbrook would have made one other point, but was cut off when Dan Rather entered the hearing room and began interviewing Cindy Crawford about Frank Rich's column on Dennis Rodman's new negligee. The point Easterbrook would have made is that once, reporters were far too reticent about stating the less attractive reasons that politicians and government officials did things--to appease interest groups, or win campaign donations, or promote their own names. Today, in contrast, many journalists seem interested only in the less attractive reasons that leaders do things. Coverage downplays, condescends to or skips over entirely the useful aspects of political decisions--that government programs really can help people. By drumming on the shady side of politics and skipping over the admirable side, journalistic glibness fails to reward the country's leaders for that part of their actions which are admirable, thereby encouraging more cynicism to be reported on.

In a subsequent appearance before the House Subcommittee on Air Time and Quotable Non-Sequiturs, Easterbrook denied that he had received payments from Peters for his article, saying, "No one has ever received payments from Charlie Peters." IRS records uncovered by committee investigators contradicted this claim, showing that The Washington Monthly did in fact pay a writer for an article on March 22, 1974. A disgruntled former Washington Monthly business manager, who was fired for making the payment, provided the records to the subcommittee. Investigators hope to link The Washington Monthly to a series of payments to printers, office-supply distributors and take-out delicatessens. Clearly coached by high-powered media spinmeisters, Easterbrook denied all knowledge of the payments.

(*) Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" came to Define American Journalism., David T.Z. Mindich. NYU Press, $24.95.

(**) For Charlie Peters' response to this item, see pp. 5-6.

JONATHAN ALTER is a Newsweek columnist and an NBC News contributing correspondent.

ART LEVINE is a contributing editor for U.S. News & World Report.

TIMOTHY NOAH co-authors Slate's "Chatterbox" column and is a contributing editor for George Magazine.

DAVID IGNATIUS has worked at The Washington Post as Outlook Editor, Foreign Editor and Assistant Managing Editor for Business News.

JOSEPH NOCERA is editor at large of Fortune magazine.

JAMES FALLOWS is author of six books, most recently Breaking the News.

JONATHAN ROWE is a senior fellow at Redefining Progress.

Michael Kinsley is editor of Slate magazine (www.slate.com).

SCOTT SHUGER writes the "Today's Papers" column for Slate.

Matthew Miller is a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report and a nationally syndicated columnist.

WALTER SHAPIRO, is political columnist for USA Today and co-author of the "Chatterbox" column in Slate.

SUZANNAH LESSARD is the author of The Architech of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family.

GREGG EASTBROOK is a senior editor of The New Republic, a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and author of Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt.