Issue: Tuesday, July 2, 1996 - page 5

Journalists filled the pages of the party organ. Journalists aimed for the high calling of being the 'Bible of Democracy.' Journalists challenged the government when they failed to give the whole truth to the public. And now journalists don't know what to do, says E. J. Dionne Jr., who diagnosed the current crisis of conscience within the modern journalist and made his prescription for the future in the Monday morning Amphitheater lecture.
   Calling for a "resurrection of concern for what is true" tempered by an effort to draw people into the political debate, Dionne recommended a "journalism of engagement" and "investigative reporting of ideas" as an answer to the media's current debacle.
   At the heart of today's problems within journalism, Dionne said, lies the paradox of objective journalism versus adversarial journalism. He retraced the history of journalism from its early days as the voice of Walter Lippmann and the advent of objective journalism, which thrived from the 20's to the 60's. But in the 1960s, Dionne asserts, Theodore White's book, "The Making of the President," Watergate and Vietnam transformed journalism from the objective model to the adversarial approach. Based on a "skepticism of appearances," this modern journalism became fixated on the subjective, the appearances, the political tactics and the consultants. Dionne quoted John Kenneth Galbraith to illustrate his point: "The time has now come to inform the media that their coverage of electoral campaigns is, not to put too fine a point on the matter, a national disgrace."
   Consequently, the ideal of the open platform and a democracy based on deliberation seems to have been replaced by a cynicism that human beings are "not powerful, deliberate souls, but collections of impulses to be stroked and soothed and entertained," he said.
   But, he added, "I think we are becoming so cynical as a country that we are becoming cynical about cynicism itself. And I think (that) is a good think."
   He finds people are, if not cynical, skeptical about journalists.
   But Dionne is unwilling to blame journalists entirely for the moral and political crises in America. He challenged politicians who blame journalists.
   "Any politician who believes it is all the presses' fault should be locked in a room and required to watch five consecutive hours of negative, trivial campaign commercials that run on television in every campaign," Dionne said.

   Shifting to the upcoming elections and previous campaigns, he discussed the atmosphere surrounding the 1994 elections, not as a mandate for the continuation of the conservatives figt against big government but as a display of disappointment with bad government.
   Many people still believe in government as a problem-solving body, Dionne said, as he scratched beneath the surface of the conservative revolution to find a country "mad, not moving toward the right wing."
   He saw Clinton as elected for a specific program—health care reform, welfare reform, the deficit and political reform. Of these tasks, Clinton only accomplished a balanced budget. Disappointment, not conservatism, was the main point citizens tried to make known in their voting actions.
   Dionne finds the 1994 elections and the current moral and political climate of America symptomatic of the need to return to the progressive ideal. He finds "the clearest analogy to the time we are going through right now is that period between the Civil War and the turn of the century that culminated in the last progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson."
"There were revolts against congressional salary measures. There was the sense that politics was hopelessly corrupted. There was the sense that the family was collapsing. There was the sense that we were losing our patriotic values. the progressive movement restored great order to both politics and the economy," Dionne said. He cited the G.I. Bill as an excellent example of the progressive ideal in assisting soldiers and creating America's great middle class.
   Dionne sees the current revolt against the press as indicative of systematic problems within journalism today. Journalists no longer know what they are doing or who they are obligated to. In response to this, he prescribed a two-fold solution. First, journalists must "rescue fairness" and attention to veracity. Second, journalists must seek to broaden public debate by engaging the public and investigating ideas.
   Dionne also placed the burden on journalists and citizens alike to foster an attentive society in the American progressive tradition. As a model, he used Chautauqua, a community "rooted in too-easily forgotten aspects of our American democratic tradition, the ideas of an open platform, of democracy being based on deliberation and reasoned argument, of a citizen's obligation to self-improvement and education and, above all, to the idea of having confidence that ordinary men and women with a thirst for knowledge can acquire it and master it, and after the experience of doing so will want to learn and understand yet more."