The 'NCR' accuses; our editor responds.

I guess I wasn't looking, but at some moment during my two decades of editing four high-brow, low-circulation journals, I became a "media representative." I learned this by way of an editorial in the National Catholic Reporter (March 14, 1997) titled "Catholic Common Ground Shuts out Press." The editorial chastises the organizers of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative for barring the media from its first conference, held March 7-9 in Chicago.The NCR editorial also complains that, despite this ban, at least some "media representatives" would be participating in the session. I was singled out. So was my good friend Peter Steinfels.

Taking advantage of my new-found status as a media representative, let me suggest why the Initiative's decision to close its working session to the press was, if not incontestable, at least reasonable. Let me also suggest that the NCR's editorial is a good example of the "mood of suspicion and acrimony" that was a major impetus for the Common Ground Initiative in the first place.

The editorial, while not reaching the rhetorical levels of some NCR anathemas, made some harsh judgments, especially that the Initiative's "first order of business is to exclude."

The editorial is also flatly wrong in calling the March meeting "secret." Secret meetings are ones that outsiders know nothing about and that insiders are pledged not to reveal. In this case, the conference's place, date, list of participants, and opening papers were given to the media. Its opening session and a post-conference press conference and tele-conference with call-ins were opportunities for news coverage. Furthermore, participants were free to report on the substance of the discussions, but with the understanding that they would not quote or attribute specific remarks to individual participants. "Secret," in other words, is not the same as "closed to the media" or "not for attribution." Experienced journalists know that the latter two categories are not rare or suspect deviations but conditions that govern all sorts of events. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise. I don't know, for example, whether the editorial discussions of the National Catholic Reporter are open to reporters from The Wanderer, but I rather doubt it. Certainly Commonweal's are not.

At last November's Call to Action conference in Detroit, the aforementioned Peter Steinfels was ushered out of two workshops because the participants believed that a media presence would be inhibiting and destroy the "safe" atmosphere. They had a point, especially after he was followed into one workshop by two men lugging TV cameras. Perhaps the NCR's sensitivity has been sharpened by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops shifting important business into executive session. That trend is disturbing; but almost no one would deny the legitimacy of the bishops holding executive sessions.

It seems commonsensical to me, but obviously not to everyone, that both kinds of gatherings - private meetings where participants can speak frankly and spontaneously and public ones where they can be held accountable - are needed in the church as in all institutions. Exactly what should be the mix of confidentiality and openness depends on circumstances-and it depends on whether a group has official powers, like the bishops, or does not, like the Common Ground Initiative or the NCR itself.

The diversity of the forty participants at the March conference, although not as complete as the organizers had hoped, was impressive enough to rebut any suspicion that the Initiative set out to exclude. The group made its way through a rigorous agenda at eight working sessions. It exchanged insights and opinions at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. People felt free to speak their minds, or to reserve judgment. They could try out ideas they might later retract or modify. Their words would not appear in print or on the evening news. Would it have been better if a project striving to clarify disagreements among American Catholics had begun its work by opening this first conference to the media? An argument to that effect could have been made. But the NCR editorial never made it.

Let's get specific Opening the conference to the NCR would have meant opening it to The Wanderer, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and maybe to CNN and Mother Angelica. Does anyone doubt that the atmosphere of the meeting would have changed? Not a few of the participants have been viciously attacked by The Wanderer in the past; would they have felt confident that their words would not be torn out of context?

And frankly how many participants would have felt apprehensive about the prospect of the NCR's own coverage? The NCR began in 1964 with a commitment to professional and impartial reporting - it has recently shown a tendency to return to that standard. But surely its editors know that it is widely perceived as practicing "advocacy journalism" with different standards of scrutiny for its good guys and its bad guys, and with a weakness for reducing serious theological issues to flippant formulas.

As I said, a case can be made that the dynamics of media presence might not have undermined the objectives of the Common Ground conference. But that case ought at least to address the realities that the organizers faced. As the Common Ground statement, "Called to Be Catholic," suggested in its working principles for a renewed spirit of dialogue, the NCR might have attempted to appreciate "the valid insights and legitimate worries" that motivated a decision to limit media coverage.

At this point, I hear a voice saying "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." Indeed, the NCR's editorial concluded by approximating Harry Truman's gruff criterion for political combat: "If some of the participants are worried that a discussion over divisions could become a bit too scrappy for their tastes," the NCR writes, "then maybe the organizers need to find some replacements."

Scrappy, it seems, is what the NCR understands. Indeed, it has done a service by covering some divisions in the church as political combat. But what if the "scrappy" mode has reached its limits? What if it is precisely an alternative mode, of dialogue, that the Common Ground Initiative is seeking? Can the NCR adjust? Or must the Initiative?

Of course, the NCR approves of "dialogue." Almost everyone does, except, perhaps, a few cardinals. But then the editorial sneers at "an elite undertaking of a few academics and church types for the pleasure and enlightenment of themselves and their invited guests." What it wants, instead, is a "broad and robust conversation that engages a big church that finds itself increasingly battling over important issues." Fine. But how is this "robust conversation" in a "battling" church different from what is already going on, to so little avail? How does it differ from the disputations, denunciations, maneuverings, and mobilizations that have created the current atmosphere?

"How many who hailed the Common Ground Initiative really see it as a new arena for the same style of wrangling, with the same hermeneutic of suspicion and the same arsenal of adversarial techniques? The NCR could do an extraordinary service not by abandoning its concern for media access but by offering a tone, language, and conscientiousness in both its reporting and its opinion columns that indicate it really wants something different. I say that as one media representative to another.