Coverage of the 2003 Edward R. Murrow Symposium

Good evening I'm all the director of the Edward R. Murrow cool off communication a Washington State University. Welcome to this wavy my moral symposium a national forum for the discussion of the important political and communication issues of the day and the venue of which we honor our standing achievement in communication and related fields with the morrow a word symposium is made possible by the generous support of the Thall and that you have foundation of the. Art school the privilege to bear the name of our most illustrious alumni. And the brightest torch bearer for tomorrow tradition which call for the highest standards of ethical performance in journalism broadcasting and communication. I would like to read to you a message from Kate tomorrow. Tomorrow. Good generation the bad morrow. All offspring are grateful for W-S use

continuing recognition of the legacy for the morrow School of Communication. We are also proud of the Admiral's name associated the podium with that of Daniel Pearl. They determine how the dornbos whose death we all mourn. With best wishes Casely. Indeed we have a sighting in the form of the program for I am highlighting people and journalistic performance. The admiral would have been very proud. Here is the order of the bill. Barber at the end of the College of Liberal Arts to give a welcoming remarks to be followed by a preview of Edward R. Murrow produced by Tulo a long line and featuring a broadcast journalism journalism. Let him be Elaine and president of Washington State University will then be on the morrow for vision to be

followed by a video. Previous to Daniel for this year's recipient of the Moro war. President Raul in-fill then give me more accepting for the Pearl family who could not be with us tonight will be will be. Brian Grilli Danny Pearl's friends and colleagues at The Wall Street Journal. After the awards presentation we will hear from a distinguished panel about war and war. The challenge for today's journalists the night program can be viewed live via video streaming through through the shoot and the morrow web page. I would like to welcome the Pearl family and staff from the United State Department who are watching. It is now my pleasure to call Barbara a quitter. Being a liberal are for welcoming remarks. Good evening. Thank you Alex. And thanks to all of you who are

joining us tonight and especially to our supporters who travel great distances to be here. I want to give a special welcome to the students from high schools and community colleges across the state who are here for career day. It's really wonderful to have you here. We hope to see you back as students in the world of communication. You know one of the great privileges of university life is taking part in academic discussion in a collegial environment. In tonight's discussion promises to be a shining example of that tradition considering world events as they exist tonight. I really can't imagine a topic of greater importance this year Merle's symposium than the role of journalist in time of war. The Edward R. Murrow school has brought together individuals with the expertise to provide a broad. Stimulating and important dialogue on this topic.

Know I might not be the only one who has been reminded of Edward R. Murrow while watching recent war report. However Murrow was one of the first and one of the best when he brought the impact of World War Two to life for Americans. He set a standard of excellence that reporters today still try to emulate. Merle taught our nation and the world not only what it meant to be a good broadcaster but also what it meant to be a responsible journalist. When you consider the history of Edward R. Murrow and the Edward R. Murrow Award which will be presented tonight in memory of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl you began to see a pattern. Which has attracted many of the brightest and the best from print and broadcasting to this campaign at Washington State University. The tradition of

excellence is alive and well among the faculty staff and students of the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication and those who attend the symposium and get. To lend their expertise and their support. I thank you and I hope you enjoyed tonight's program. Thank you. Edward R. Murrow came from a tiny hamlet in northwest Washington. He shaped his ideals and values as a student at Washington State College and in Europe and through his style of journalism changed the way we look at the world. And Mauro was an inspiration not just to his generation but to future generations or journalists to come. And for those of us who are lucky enough to work with him he was our mentor and Murrow made it plain to all of us who have been lucky enough to follow him at

CBS News that he was a reporter with a conscience but accuracy fairness and the courage to face down pressure from government from big business pressure from power is the sure sign of a good journalist. He had his run ins with all of the above and he never lost his way. His fresh eyes his eloquence and his willingness to go in harm's way made him a reporter's reporter. And I can think of no higher tribute. Murrow joined CBS in 1935 and was soon stationed in London. He brought World War II into American living room. Gilbert had no other bird and the idea that. All the nearby guns are not worth the third leg or dealing almost directly overhead. Now we go to birds the moon there in a moment. They fired me

from here at now on radio to see it now on television. Merle expanded journalistic horizons with his courage to stand up against Senator Joseph McCarthy and his investigation into the plight of migrant workers in Harvest of Shame. Edward R. Murrow with professionalism his integrity his courage are well known. But I want you to think about another of his qualities. He was a progressive. He experimented with television and like the popular phrase is he pushed the envelope. He did things that hadn't been done before and he did them successfully. Merle left CBS in 1961 and worked for the Kennedy administration as head of the United States Information Agency. He was knighted by the Queen of England and in 1964 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom with distinction. A pioneer in education through mass communication and brought to his endeavors. The conviction. That truth and personal integrity. The ultimate Persuaders man

and nation. His legacy does not need my endorsement. But I cannot imagine broadcast journalism without the early formative years of Edward R. Murrow. His ethics and values. And dedication to the essence of the craft of this business. Of reporting what he was seeing in a way in which he did it factually. But at the same time in a way the whole country could understand what it was that he was talking about and come to care about those events however separated they may have been from them. I think it honors his memory far more to say not let's do it exactly as Edward R. Murrow did it. But. Let's do it the way Edward R. Murrow might do it today. His devotion to the truth is fearlessness in going after him and into to set a standard that is going to live as long as journalism. So I'm

sure. Good night and good luck. It's my great pleasure to be able to. Recognize the moral or immoral or honor a person or persons exemplifying through service or performance of professional ideals and what are. Those ideals that we just heard described and that many of us with gray hair and remember the performance and Invalides expressed I thought I would just list some of our all of our past award recipients. Daniel your 2002 Christian. Who receive the award for distinguished achievement Howard Stringer

for International and intercultural communication. Bernard Shaw for lifetime achievement in broadcasting. Ted Turner for his lifetime achievement in communication Jackson and the longing for lifetime achievement in broadcasting a new hard for achievement in journalism. Mor-Yosef Saito for international communications. Walter Cronkite with a lifetime achievement great blessing for lifetime achievement in journalism and Sam Donaldson. For lifetime achievement in broadcasting. This year's possible war. To Daniel Pearl. Is I think very appropriately given. The whole nation was deeply moved. As we watch the saga. And heard the. Story. As we learn more about Daniel Pearl. And as we reflect on his career we understand. That.

Not only his tragic death. But his wonderful life and the values that he expressed. Really are deserving of this great tribute. We now have a video of you to prove. The world got to know you as the president the road reporter who lost his wife in one of the world's most dangerous troubles but Danny was more than just a great journalist. He was a man who loved the music of life. He had a gift for storytelling. He went out to see the world for himself and he wanted to tell people what he saw and found. Danny grew up here in Southern California. This is the face of a boy who will spend his life trying to make the world a safer place. The Pearl family album is full of pictures of people who are enjoying each other's

company. It's clear that Danny's humanity was homegrown and he would pass it on to others when he started writing and putting you know he was also a musician and chef. I think I as a teenager it was always a lot of fun just having him around while in. River. I knew him as a foreign correspondent. He was a born reporter who loved to dig for original stories that were hard to find. He had a great eye for detail and a gift for explaining the human side of

complex international situations. Here he interviewed Soviet dissident this summer. It was an accident you actually to do but it didn't matter if you did not try to get it you. You don't know what to do with him. Danny loves life and he was lucky enough to find love of his wife Marianne. They met in. Their. Life together became an international event.

Then Mariam became known around the world for her courage and grace as their story became part of the current crisis. Last month on May 28 Marianne gave birth to their son. She said. Danny will live through me and our son. They have blown out of Campbell that might feel. At the World War will be accepted tonight for the poor family bride and groom good friend and colleague of Danny Pearl the Wall Street Journal and members of my family and.

The way. That. Thing weighs more than Danny. I'm so honored to be here. Thank you. Never been to Pullman before flying in today. It's gorgeous. This is a beautiful beautiful place. It's a great university a beautiful campus. And this is such a classy program. Would be so honored is so honored to be here tonight. Right. So thanks. President Rawlings distinguished

faculty and Ruth Murray on camera in the shower if you're watching. And especially to the scholarship winners. Congratulations on winning. $500 thousand dollars $2000. Enjoy it because. That's about what you're going to make your first year. I have some remarks to read from you and Ruben but first I'd just like to tell one little Danny's story of my own and I directorates in particular. To those young people out there who are striving and aspiring to do what they needed. Which is. Make it easier for all of us. The small white black. Young. All. Female Male whatever. Martian. Are.

To communicate. When I first came to the Journal in 1995 is a difficult place to learn. It's a weird newspaper if you read it you know that little different than other newspapers and it's really different inside. And I was supposed to cover the Justice Department about which I knew almost nothing I knew nothing at all. And the reporter who preceded me who had left the paper. Was to leave me what we call a beat Memel a beaten up always like a list of here are the sources you need to know names and phone numbers and advice and what you're supposed to do beating them up. Memo I got from my predecessor it. Was. It was it was a whole page but she could have cut it off half a page. Because there was only 13 names on it and I knew most of them and it was useless. Three months later Danny went off to the London bureau. Against our wishes. We wanted him to stay in Washington and he went up to London and he left I took over his beat which was

telecommunications and Danny sent his beating and. It was over 30 maybe he was over 40 pages long. There were over 300 names and numbers. There was an additional 15 to 20 pages of story ideas. Some of them were good at it and they were all. And then woven throughout. With little bits of advice from Dan on how to deal with sources. This guy could get him out to shoot pool to. This woman only called her at home. She's afraid to talk of work. This guy likes this kind of angle but he doesn't like that kind of thing. My favorite. Was about a guy who I developed into a great source. And then he gave me the ultimate warning simply by writing his name Joe Blow his number 2 0 2 5 5 5 1 2 6 5 and then in parentheses. Spin Spin plus spin plus spin plus spin equals lie

and that's all I needed to know about this guy. And the reason I tell you that is. That. 40 or 50 pages says so much about Danny. Who's filled with his intelligence. With his hard work. With his sense of humor. And with his generosity. So my young friends colleagues. You want to know what do you want to be the next thing you want to be a great journalist. That's why we. Do it. This is a message from. The. Family. On behalf of the family of Daniel Pearl. We would like to express our gratitude. To the faculty and students of Washington State University for honoring our son. All right that's enough for honoring our son Danny Pearl.

With the 2003 Edward R. Murrow Award for distinguished achievement in journalism. It has been heartwarming for us to see people from all walks of life. Reaffirming their commitment to the ideals for which Danny stood in. Truth decency. And compassion. We draw great consolation. In Danny's legacy turning into inspiration for young people to pursue these ideals seriously and consistently as he did. This is especially true for students of journalism. Like yourselves. Who will soon be following in the footsteps. We know that many of you armed with sharp pens. And sober eyes. Will continue Danny's quest for truth and understanding. And will venture to eradicate ignorance and hatred. It took Dan. Like. Inspired by the unfinished mission of reporters like Danny. You will carry the banner of dialogue to remote corners of the earth.

And like him. You will not compromise fairness. And truth. In the face of adversity. Take pride in your new profession. You are now Danny Pearl's him. We wish you great success. In your new career. The program. Thank you. Thank you very much Brian. Certainly a fitting previously the Daniel Pearl a journalist in the moral tradition we are fortunate to have with us tonight a distinguished panel of journalists. And note that this caller from the Morath go to discuss one of the most pressing issues of the day press coverage of war. I would like to introduce our moderator who will then

introduce the panel to. Get her body. Our moderator is the executive editor of The Oregonian under Peter's leadership the Oregonian won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for public service. The most prestigious of the Pulitzer awards. And another for feature writing among his former positions. Our executive editor of the Fresno Bee managing editor of The Sacramento Bee and managing editor of The Dallas Herald. He is the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He is a member of the Mauro's school's professional league professional Advisory Board. The other is the medium of Pohlman and the from on high. So welcome home Peter. Good evening everyone. Let me let me just begin by saying

Go Greyhound's and go Kruger's. It really is a great honor and privilege for me to be with you this evening. Washington State University has played an incredibly important and pivotal role in my life as many of you know my father served on the faculty here for 40 plus years. And the way I look at it is everything I've been able to accomplish in life everything I've been able to do in life is directly a result of this great university if for no other reason because it gave my dad steady work for all those years. And indeed I grew up grew up literally a block from here when I was a kid where we sit today was many of you will probably remember well this was a big flat playfield for my buddies and I used to run wind sprints getting ready for high school football back in the late 60s when we were going to high school here. So it's it really is really something

for me to have this opportunity to be with you this evening and thank you very much for that for that privilege. It's certainly been an extraordinary last month for those of us who labor in the trenches in journalism you know. Embedding has become a word that we all use without hesitation which you know used to be sort of what happened in the spring around here when things were muddy and you threw something into the ground and embedded. Now it's a term dart journalism that we've that we've come to accept in that we've that we talk about in our newsrooms every day as as we as we've tried to cover the extraordinary events and watched the war unfold in an extraordinary way over the last several weeks in Iraq. I'm sure the timing for this evening's event couldn't be better in the sense that the war is in some fashion winding down and the middle school has put together an incredibly talented and able panel of journalists

and and people who otherwise professionally involved in these matters to talk about it this evening. So with no further ado what I would like to do is I will introduce each member of the panel one by one and ask them to come up as I introduce them and then we'll begin by asking each of them to give some opening remarks and then we will dive right into the conversation. One thing I want to emphasize is there are microphones in the audience and I hope that you will be aggressive as we would as journalists in joining in the conversation. When you when you care to pose a question or or to join the conversation please identify yourself and your affiliation whether student faculty staff somebody who just walked in off the street because they thought there was a basketball game whatever. Whatever the case might be. So please please introduce yourself when you when you ask questions. So the first panelist I'd like to introduce is Danny Schechter. And these are all these biographies are also in your program so although

you'll hear a few details that perhaps are not included in program then he's the author of media wars news in a time of terror a book that is being released as we speak it's available in Europe but I hear from reliable sources it hasn't made it to the booking yet. But it should it should soon. Dan is the co-founder and executive producer of global vision a new york film and TV production company. He's executive editor of media channel dot org. The world's largest online media issues network for which he writes a very spicy weblog that I've become hooked on in the last few days titled The news dissector. He is a graduate of Cornell has a master's from the London School of Economics and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and has had a long and distinguished career in broadcast and print journalism and perhaps most importantly hasn't 8000 album record collection. Please welcome Danny Schechter. We're fortunate to have with us this evening to choose the Seattle bureau chief of The Associated Press.

In your programs you'll note Tom can't the foreign editor of A-P was to originally join us. He's a little busy these days but we're grateful that Dale can be here in his stead. Dale's been in Seattle with the AP for the better part of the last decade. He's worked for the AP for the past 22 years that's taken him all over the country. Columbus Albuquerque any number of other places. He's a graduate of the Ohio State University. Worked in small dailies at the beginning of his career and like many of us in this business has the has the dubious distinction of being a sports editor in his past. He's also covered the State House and any number of other issues since coming to the northwest to anchor a peace operations here. Please walk him down. Next to Susan Ross who's an associate professor here in the middle school. She specializes in the law the first amendment and media coverage of under-represented groups.

Professor Ross has an impressive academic resume including her undergraduate degree from Wisconsin a master's in journalism from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in mass communications. She's been a cougar since 1996 a recitation of her publications on mass communication related topics would more than fill the rest of our time this evening. But she's written extensively on a variety of issues around the first amendment including contemporary issues related to terrorism and public access to meetings in the electronic age. But perhaps the most shocking thing I've learned about her as a Pulman native is that she lives in Moscow Idaho. Next to Peter Colebatch. Peter has been with the foreign service since 1980 and is the director of the Office of Public Diplomacy Bureau of East Asian affairs in the State Department. Prior to that he was the director of the State Department's foreign press center's director of the agency

charged with coordinating U.S. government communication efforts directed at foreign audiences and director of the USA's Office of Strategic Communications. He served overseas in Japan Morocco Bahrain and Yemen. His is from West Wing and he holds master's degrees from Berkeley and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He studied overseas for a year as an undergrad at Banaras university in India which happens to be my father's undergraduate alma mater. Previous to the Foreign Service Peter worked as a teacher a freelance photojournalist a dormitory headmaster a stevedore and as a stonemason. COMPERE. Finally you've already met Brian Groom. He's a senior editor in the Washington bureau of The Wall Street Journal. He was part of the journal's team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of 9/11 and wrote one of the journal's lead stories for the next morning's editions. He also is a

songwriter and wrote a song dedicated to Danny Pearl's son Adam that's been featured on CNN and elsewhere. He grew up in Detroit graduated from Notre Dame and has already tried to make a bet on next fall football game with President Bush. And you should note his first car was a 1970 olds 98 midnight black with a red pinstripe. Amazingly after that he is now a responsible father of three children. Please welcome Brian again. So will begin with not to make the sound like a political debate. But we thought everybody should have the chance to make some opening remarks on this broad topic from their particular fields of expertise. And I think we'll go in the reverse order of the way people were introduced. Brian forger's I get to go first. You going to go OK I can remark on that subject to have to say one thing first. This is for all the kids young people who are here.

I go to school. I like taking young journalists out. This involves intense debate we had earlier about where we go. I'm going to go to the president's house for a little thing and then I'm going to show up. There was debate back and forth back and forth. My office Ricos my office. It's Ricos show up. I'm buying sort of Dow Jones. I'm serious. I'll be there. You'll be there. Hey you have to take the first annual Danny Pearl cocktail hour and maybe will go down the street at the place and it'll be the first panel Danny Pearl. OK. This is what I think. I like you. You know I didn't. I've never covered terrorism per se and. I'm not a war correspondent never have them. But like all of you I've watched and read like crazy WorkCover.

And. You sit here you know that guy is an idiot and why did he say that. Boy that's terrific. Why didn't they write this story why did they do that you know just because we're like this is acting like real Americans you know people who have know nothing about supposedly know nothing about journalism probably know a lot more about it than we do the readers and the viewers. And I was thinking about this today and I thought that. The coverage with the embeds and all this intense way inside coverage of the war has in a way exposed our greatest strengths and our greatest weaknesses. So very briefly. Among the strengths. It has done what all great journalism should do. Which is take. The person who reads the paper turns on the television or turns on the radio or clicks on his computer take them where they can't go. You can get there because your press pass. My wife asked me she goes why are all those reporters. In Iraq. I said because

they can go there. They let them go so we go we have to go. Which we should not go. We have to go. So just like if you're covering the city council you want to take them behind the closed doors or in the corporate board room or in the huddle of the Cougar you know the cougar football huddle. You want to be there. You take your chances that you're great journalists will find the great stories. And I think we've seen them on TV we've seen images that have startled and amazed us and kept us interested and in print we've seen. I'll give you one example. Bill Branigan story in the post. You all remember about the poor Iraqi family in the van that drove up and they didn't hear the warning. And the soldiers blew away. And the Pentagon put out one thing. And it was 60 percent of the truth. The bill Branigan was there in his story the next day. Aside from being just one hell of a read. Was the truth.

What really happened. And I'm damn glad we were indebted. To that. As well. I think one of the other strengths that is exposed in us. I think this is true as well with the 91 Gulf War it was our ability and particularly in print to explain and illuminate. Things that aren't so easy to put in images through no fault of my colleagues and broadcast. You know talk about. How difficult it is going to be to reconstruct Iraq. And what various military military strategies are and how the war affects the economy in Peoria or for that matter. And I'm struck as well by images that. You. The reader to star for too jarring to put on television but that work well in print. And I'm thinking of two colleagues of mine one of whom Mike Phillips just got to Kuwait City today finally out. Wrote a story last week about.

A Marine encounter group where they're talking about killing people in the story open with the image of Marines seeing an Iraqi laying on the floor. He was reaching for his rifle and the 21 year old man pumped two bullets into his head. Make you read the story. And it's hard. It's hard to do that. It's graphically on TV. You can do it in print though and then you can take readers into a world and think about the complexities of telling someone and experiencing somebody firing on you that you couldn't do otherwise. I think as well of my other colleagues when Cooper story. And this was at the very end of the story. Where she toured an encampment of Iraqi soldiers who had just departed maybe two hours before whether there were still warm soup you know in a big pot. And the captain was taking her around through the various parts of this encampment this building and he came around the corner and he said and now you will see the dogs of war. And there was a mother dog there who had

died and her puppies were all. Eating her inside which was a stark and horrible image but boy it brought home what this is all about without any Rajar flashback. It also brings up our weaknesses. I think our tendency to be homers. It's sometimes it's almost like and forgive me if are sportswriters in the crowd but you know this is the way it is it's. It's sportswriting. And I think the first several days of the war before we figured out to be a little tougher. Than we thought. You know it's it's kind of rah rah. And. You know God bless the soldiers and Marines and sailors. But. If every single one is an all American kid and every single one is a great kid and he was the true Marine and the best marine ever. Well then it diminishes all of their human beings. And I'm waiting I think six months from now we're going to start reading real stories about these people

in the same way. I think it exaggerated our tendency to see things in black and white and it goes like this. You know for the pendulum to go back and forth because for four days we were just kicking butt we're creaming these guys and then all of a sudden we're going to get creamed we're going to get killed. And you know it was amazing. And. For one thing it just in the narrow focus we have right now looking at the war it seems like we were wrong. But the truth is we're not going to know the real winners or losers of this war for 10 years 20 years 40 years. We're not going to know. Lastly it has as always is often one big stories shown our tendency to be seduced by the temptation. To become the story. The reports I would see where the anchor would say and hear so-and-so and Karbala. And boy he's doing a good job for us. Well I have no doubt that he was doing a good job and I don't want to hear that. Well tell me that three years ago. Take me to Karbala.

We know he's there. Journalists are supposed to be invisible. You know. Behind the camera behind a noble and visible. And then there's Geraldo. And you know what. Yes. A lot of Americans they remember Geraldo and I remember Mike Phillips and going over they remember. That one bad apple spoils the orchard. But I'll predict two things. Is that the best stories about the war. Aside from those terrific inside snapshots the best big stories about the war won't be written for a while here in newspapers and magazines and on TV and documentaries in my life. Tradition is that that. Iraqi flag. The minister of information will be on Letterman because this is America and we are like a knucklehead that should be a top ten list. OK.

Some great points there. We'll come back to you Peter. Well I guess I've been kind of a distant perspective to this. Some of you may wonder what a public diplomacy type does. I guess I need to acknowledge how humbled I feel being here where Ed Murrow went to school because he was also one of the themes of my professional world. As a son in a family of news junkies. We got our first TV set. The year he went on TV in 1951. So I grew up with him as a nightly image in my living room. He as a high schooler a fairly precocious news event conscious kid he became a member of the Kennedy administration and in fact the head of my agency his legacy there is writ large. Two of his stock phrases about our trade are still valid as ever and we're real watchwords at stages in the dissolution of USA

and the incorporation of my profession public diplomacy into the State Department a few years ago. One is he said that we public diplomatists need to be in the policy take off as well as the hard landing by that he meant very simply that in an increasingly democratic world it's important when you consider policy options to consider how they're going to sell abroad and how the reception of those policies by foreign publics are going to enhance them or possibly doom them. Normally I think of our. State Department colleagues that are traditional diplomats look at us to clean up the crashes when a policy crashes and largely crashes because of its unpopularity abroad. The other thing he said well let let me expand on that actually before I go on to the other thing he. Saw I think uniquely that the kind of world that was

evolving a world of the literacy or at least semi-literacy he saw the importance of information I think before we really were in the information age and so in many ways his example as a journalist turned information specialists in the government was was a beacon. The second phrase of his that's become a stock phrase is that we take the information product so they're churned out by. And nowadays the office of international information. Programs. For the exchanges the bedrock of public diplomacy the programs that create mutual understanding and build bridges. The Fulbright program that I'm sure the universities benefited from university linkages the international visitors program that we take those the last three feet when we are serving overseas on an embassy staff and I think in that respect that I identify

very very much with the plight of a modern journalist covering a difficult story in an unstable society whether it's a Muslim society or not. A lot of my colleagues that work in the Arab world where I've spent most of my career have been in recent years and thanks to I think Charlotte Beers leadership is as our undersecretary had a lot of supplemental money to spend on programs to build bridges to Muslim audiences especially young Muslim audiences around the world. But getting out of the embassy getting out behind the telephone and the computer screen and actually going out and meeting those people and building up trust with all the negative stereotypes at considerable personal risk I think puts us a little bit in the same shoes though it is a slightly different scenario. I mean in some ways being a diplomat and being seen as a U.S. official. Complicates it and simplify it.

But at the same time. So we're in that position. In my current bureau we have five countries with significant Muslim populations and a lot of our extra program money is there to reach out to to those people and a lot of my challenge will be to make sure my P.A. goes in the field my public affairs officers. Have those resources. And in my case and based on my earlier career experience they'll I will encourage them to go out when I go out next month. I'm going to want to meet some of those people I'm going to want to go out to the Islamic parochial schools the suntans in Indonesia I'm going to want to do some of that legwork myself. So in a way you know when when Danny Pearl was kidnapped a lot of us and I think especially those of us whose careers have centered on the Arab and Muslim worlds felt an awful lot of apprehension and empathy because in a way we've been there. That said I think I want to talk a little bit about embedding from my experience. One of the

unfortunate things about my career is it's been defined by Iraq three wars which have been a fairly central part of my life and times in the Foreign Service. And the second one I remember that the opaqueness of the U.S. government and its spokespersons became the story the best we could do in that war was the equivalent of what you see from Doha every day when there's a CENTCOM forward headquarters briefing frankly and candidly a crashing bore not newsworthy or really thin gruel frustrated journalists hundreds of miles from the scene and vetting I think from our point of view was a risk it carried risks that bad behavior on our part might be caught on camera. It carried risks that some of our. Journalistic colleagues and I say colleagues advisedly because I think in the field we really

are there to enable journalists to cover the story. We brief them we briefed them on the record we brief them on background if they come into our town for a few days to get a story they'll come and see us and we'll give them the best advice we can on how to best use their time and try to open doors for them. Official or unofficial it is really a huge risk and I have to say as a consumer of news I think there's been a very very high reward. Yes maybe journalists and maybe this time you guys have become the story but I think that the benefits of that have been great. I also have to say I take my hands off my hat my hat my hat off and my hands off her whatever to the courage of the so-called unilateral journalists the ones that are uninvented the ones that were in Baghdad in really grave danger physical danger. I think that we all recognize because they provided a kind of a compliment to the journalists that were with the troops that may be because of the physical danger.

Identified with those troops because of the need to bring a graphic image of American boys and girls at war back to their hometowns maybe plays that superficial hometown story a little too heavily. I thought we got a very nice balance of coverage and that we're still getting that because of those journalists and I frankly take my hat off to the courage of journalists on both sides of the line. Think about what it. Is. Stay there and I'll be very interested to see what kind of questions you have. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Peter. I'm no longer a practicing journalist. And when I was I didn't cover war and. Probably the greatest danger I ever ran into was an irate reader who was responding to my editorial page. And I have not devoted my life to the Middle East. So I assume

my role here is. That of distance of perspective of contact. And. As usual the wall street journal has stolen a lot of my thunder because I think that. Brian did a great job of summarizing a lot of the strengths and weaknesses that that I see in the coverage we have been getting of this most recent military engagement. So I think what I will do is just highlight a couple of points that. Perhaps the rest of the panel will. Feel they'd like to respond to or perhaps those of you in the audience would like to respond to. The first is that already. We've heard this jargon embedded unilateral. That they have new meaning those terms that they didn't have before. And it

struck me quite early on. That. I guess this is what Daniel would call spin spin spin spin spin because. I think of those unilateral journalists as independent. As free whose movements are uncontrolled. And I think there are very strong implications for use of the term unilateral. The same is true for the term embedded. I believe it was Dan Rather. Who said that. It reminded him of the term untuned. When I heard that he said that I thought well maybe embalmed but you know that may be too strong. So and. And as a scholar It is my job to look at the impact of words the words we choose and the way that they are used. It has everything to do with the message conveyed and the

fact that. I actually went on LexisNexis this morning my great I'm a great fan of databases and ended up. A search of news coverage for the last month which of course was thousands and thousands of hits but it was really very very difficult to find commentary discussing why the journalist so readily adopt the terms that the government label them with or labels anyone else with. And it's also very difficult. Virtually impossible actually to find news coverage of the details of the contract. That those embedded reporters had to sign in order to spend the time there following round the truth and giving those personal stories. That were both frightening terrifying heartwarming.

But. Why was it that the reporters these purveyors of truth didn't feel that they needed to tell us the terms under which they were operating. The first kit that I could find that actually details the terms of that contract which every embedded journalist was supposed to sign. I don't know whether they did or not. I suffer under the same imperfect information that the rest of you do. But according to what I found the first story that actually gave details of the contract. Came out on April 1st. And while that was April Fool's Day I don't think that was the reason it came out. I think it came out because it was the weekend previous that we had had the debacle with Peter Arnett. And Geraldo Rivera. Not to go on too long. It is I

recognize very easy to sit in academe. And criticize. And it is extraordinarily difficult to work under deadline pressure. The thing that I think I would would hope to talk about a little bit tonight is the fact that. The conditions that we see in reporting of wars reporting of conflict reporting of terrorism are the same kinds of things that we see in routine media coverage of events. There is a tendency to dichotomize. There is a tendency to engage in boosterism if you will. There's a tendency to demonize the enemy. There's a tendency to stereotype. There's a tendency to simplify. There's a tendency not to contextualize not to give broad issues not to develop trends not to talk about the history of events. And the nature of the environment in which these events occur. As a

first amendment scholar I think this deeply does serves the voters and the citizens of this country and I am I'm deeply concerned about it. But I also think it does serve as a journalist because as a former journalist I think that a lot of the journalists I've had the privilege to know. Really have a missionary zeal that fires them that keeps them going that drives them into these huge situations of danger. And when we agree to jump in bed with or become embedded with the military our ability to exercise that zeal independently is at least subject to question and those questions undermine our credibility and make it incredibly difficult for citizens who want to make reasoned and reasonable judgment to know how to do that. Thank you.

Thank you. I'm sure we will come back to. You. And you're certainly opinionated. Oh you didn't know that before that. I think that there's a lot of there's certainly a lot of truth to what Susan says about the dangers of embedding journalists into with you know military people and certainly. That entire story remains to be told. We don't quite know how much. I mean there wasn't there was censorship in the traditional sense but we don't know how much self-censorship may have taken place. Because people were writing about the people that they were also living with and who were also responsible for their protection in many ways and who might have been responsible for whether or not they got food or anything to drink. The next two hours. So you know there certainly is. You know I think there certainly

are questions that we need to consider. But I think that the notion of embedding while in a war situation is unique. It's not altogether different from many things that journalists do every day in covering stories because you do become close to sources in many instances when you ride the boat. With the whale watchers. And you write the story about the whale watchers. You have a tendency to sympathize with the whale watchers and what they're doing. And I think that our role as journalists. Is the same as it has always been. To distance ourselves and to maintain as much professional distance as we possibly can from the people that we are writing about. Regardless of how dependent we might think we are on those people's protection or ability to feed us

information in the future that. Any reporter ought to be knows that much of what you write in much of what you don't write is dependent in part on the people that you're covering. You know you always walk that fine line between burning a source and not burning a source. I think that it takes on a completely new degree when you are in a battle situation. And it is life threatening. It's not a matter of whether or not this person is going to talk to you the next day it might be a matter of whether or not they're going to tell you to duck when the bullets start flying. So I think that that there are questions I think that there certainly have been benefits to embedding reporters. I think that we have been able to see stories and to learn about stories that otherwise we never would have learned about or only would have learned about weeks months or perhaps even years after the fact.

One of the things I hope you'll indulge me for just a few minutes I'll talk about the AP and one of the things that we did in this war that was different than the dozens of wars that we've covered since 1848 is bad for the first time we opened ourselves up to questions from the public. Many of you who don't know how the AP operates don't understand perhaps that the news. We generally deal directly with newspapers and broadcasters who call our local bureaus and ask questions about stories that were moving on the wire. When we get a call from a member of the public it's really any bad. Because the phone rings and somebody in the NEWSROOM says. Oh my God it's a member of the public. What do I do now. And so this time for the first time we opened ourselves up to the public. We had a feature that we called quick questions and we invited people to go to our Web site

and submit questions. And we actually answered a lot of those questions on the wire and I think it was it was kind of eye opening for people at the AP to see number one that there were people who actually knew who we were and would ask us things. And number two to see that the level of some of the questions that people would ask and I brought just a few of them as examples. What gear goes with pilots when they get the jet from their planes. How are gas mask tested to make sure they work. Do the tanks have air conditioning. I've got the answers if you really want to know. But this has been an interesting experiment for us and it was something that. You know in our history we had never done. And I'm sure it's something that we will probably do more. But I think that you know it has as a wire service it brought

us a little bit closer to the to the public and that ultimately reads a lot of what we're were writing and distributing. I guess that's a kind of a closing note I might mention that. I feel a little bit like a fish out of water because I've never been overseas so I've never covered a war. But as I sit here and I look at all of you I think most of you probably won't either. And. In one sense you feel rather inadequate when you see somebody like Daniel Pearl in it and the sacrifices that he did. That more correspondents make and certainly the Daniel Pearl made. But at the same time. I think that as beginning journalists and that's what many of you are it's important to remember that a large part of their sacrifice was their commitment. And. Any of us can have that same commitment.

I can think for example of one of your own students Kevin Germann who was covering a football game for us it's probably one that you'd all rather forget it was the apple cup this past year. But many of you remember at the end of the apple cup you know things started flying out of the stands. And most of the. Big time photographers at the football game ran for the exits. And Kevin Dermond turned around and took a great picture of somebody throwing a bottle out of the stands. And that picture got used in newspapers all over the country including the big metros in Seattle. And that's because of. A commitment. That he had to tell that story and show that story. And it's that kind of commitment that any of you can also have and demonstrate. And you don't have to go to war to do it. You can do it in many different ways. And I would simply encourage you to have that commitment and be willing to demonstrate.

To the class for the first round. First of all I think we could honor Danny Pearl's memory tonight by joining the various press freedom groups around the world who are demanding a full investigation and accounting of the murder potentially or certainly the killings of journalists in Baghdad. The killing of collateral damage a British journalist lobbing shells into the hotel Palestine. All of these things have upset and angered many in the media world who want answers to questions about why this happened and was that part of the policy. The American government has denied that there was any policy of targeting journalists. American government has a practice of always denying accusations in some cases that later become proven to be otherwise the truth could be otherwise. So I would ask you to remember the journalists who died covering this war and

the unanswered questions about their deaths. I think that's one way we can honor Danny Pearl's memory to join with the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Frontiers and others who are demanding a full impartial investigation of what happened to these journalists. Secondly I would like to begin with a comment a quote from Edward R. Murrow who also like many of you was my mentor as well and he very very neatly summarized and a challenge for journalism he said the obscure. We see eventually the completely apparent. Takes a little longer and I think those words point to a problem of not simply finding out what the news is but understanding the truth and the reality of what happened. I think all of us know that history tends to be revised over time that what we originally thought to be true wasn't true. Alex 10 and I were talking

about the Spanish-American War the the Vietnam before Vietnam and as you'll recall the Spanish-American War started with a pretext that incident the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. Fifty years later they went back they looked at what happened there and they found that in fact the engine room had blown up there was an accident in the main that everything we thought had happened that led to the killing of literally hundreds of thousands of people were traced to an incident that was badly understood at the time a pretext for war. Marshall McLuhan. Talked about the coverage of war he said in a very provocative way if there were no coverage there would be no war. Yes the newsman and the media man we should add media women that came after him are actually the fighters not the soldiers anymore. There are two wars that we've just seen. One of them we saw part of and that was the war in Iraq. Or if you

live in the Arab world that was described described that the war on Iraq depending on your point of view. He lived in Europe most of the media in Europe but spoke of it as the war on Iraq in America. We spoke on it spoke about it as the war in Iraq. Well there was that war and we're discussing tonight and we've heard some admissions from people in mainstream journalism that in fact we may only have seen a very small portion of what happened in that war. But a lot of what we think we know and what we think we saw may not in fact be what we did see what what really happened. And I'll return to that in a minute. But there was a second war and that was the media war and that media war is still underway way and that's a war that's taking place within the media between media companies for market share for positioning for ratings for power for president in our society to speak of journalists as individual players who decide uniquely

how to cover events. How did site what they'll be assigned to do and then how to do that whether to be embedded or not and how to deal with embedding the mis understand the transformation of journalism in our age the transformation of journalism that began many years ago that may have been responsible in its very early infancy with pushing Edward R. Murrow at CBS pushing Walter Cronkite years later out of CBS. And that's the corporatization of journalism we're not dealing today with individual entities individual players. Well there are journalists of conscience who try as best they can to share their values to practice fairness and balance in the search for truth in journalism. What we have today many companies that do not have journalism as their first priority they have of the bottom line

as their first priority. And what that means is is that giant networks are not owned by journalists or by companies committed to journalism and they're owned by entertainment companies companies. ABC owns Disney Viacom owner of MTV VH 1 beat he owns CBS today and across the spectrum we've seen media mergers that have transformed the marketplace. That was once dominated by 50 companies in our country. The five to seven car companies. Moreover there's been a second merger that's taking place that you have to study and appreciate and that's the merger between show business and news business and attempt to add storytelling and entertainment values to the presentation of news and information. We saw this in an in a new integrated forum to use a word that was used to go out and the coverage of the war during this particular the reporting of this

of this conflict particularly on the cable networks where each of them had their theme music their packaging their graphics the the overall presentation which could change on a dime. Suddenly MSNBC a news channel was running promos that say God Bless America support our soldiers. Next day let freedom ring when the United States appears to be successful in Baghdad before that city began to be looted and trash without adequate protection by U.S. soldiers except the two ministries which were not looted and were not trashed. One ministry was the ministry of the Interior. The intelligence center in Baghdad the other was the Ministry of Oil. All the other ministries were burned to the ground but those ministries not burnt to the ground but burned and defiled those ministries were protected by U.S. soldiers. What I'm suggesting here today is that what we saw was a package of them. I speak as part of a person who has been part of the

startup team at CNN who spent eight years at ABC News and has worked in and out of and around network television for many years. I run a media company and joined the media really to help spotlight the problems of the world came to see that the media is one of the problems of the world an unexamined one if you will a problem that often is not analyzed in terms of its corporate structure and in terms of its own interest. I have to go to England to find an article which reported just last week on the political contributions and donations to this administration by major media companies particularly the news company owned by News Corp. owned by Rupert Murdoch and NBC owned by General Electric. This was unreported in most places. Most of us have never thought about the possibility that the coverage that we've been seeing which has

which has fused jingoism with journalism may have something to do with the interest of media companies. It's not nice to think about that perhaps companies put their own interests before the public's interest. But in this particular case on June 2nd in our country coming up soon at an FCC near you is the likelihood that new media rules and regulations favoring the largest media companies in our country will be enacted with most citizens in this country knowing nothing about why and what the interests are because it's simply not covered in the media. And this is a dangerous situation. Michael Powell the head of the FCC said recently that we need large media companies. Why. He said because only the large media companies can afford to cover the war the way these companies did in the war in the Gulf. I'm suggesting this to you not because I have time here to make an empirical argument with a lot of evidence. I try to do that

in my column I've done that to some degree in my book media wars and in my earlier book The more you watch the less you know which. You know is easy to get hold of. But I'm I'm suggesting this to you I'm suggesting this to you because others have written about this in more detail than I. I'm suggesting to you Chris that if you want to really know what's going on you can't rely on instruments of mass deception and mass distraction for that information. You have to investigate it for yourself. Teachers have to teach about it. Students have to ask deeper questions about it. This is what's worrisome to me. I try to promote the coverage of the coverage because when you do that you begin to see what's missing. Why people in other countries are getting information about what is going on in Iraq and elsewhere that we're not getting in our own country. And the evidence is that many Americans are going to Web sites of newspapers in

other countries because they are dissatisfied with and feel uninformed under-informed propagandized by our own media system. And I think this is a problem that I think if Ed Murrow were alive today he would be raising it. Certainly Walter Cronkite enjoying with us on media channel. Or has aligned himself with those who are asking these deeper questions about our media system. The challenge today is really about the future of journalism and journalism of the type practiced by Admiral is no longer very popular in the United States the investigative journalism that he built he engaged in and the willingness to stand up and speak truth to power is not something we're seeing in the media system today. I'm suggesting all of this to you only because I would like to invite you to join us in trying to look at. That the synthesis in some ways the synergy between vested interests and distorted news in our

country and see what we can do about it. Thank you. So how do you really feel about it. Well I I'm going to ask the minister of information interactive help to help us out here. So that was wonderfully said I don't agree with everything you said but it was wonderfully put. Let's. Let's return to the topic imbedding which we've been talking about around here. And you know if there's anybody from the English faculty I apologize for the brutalization of grammar in this inherently involved. But last night one of our embeds came home. From Iraq and I sat down with him for about half an hour and chatted with him about his experience there. He is a seasoned veteran reporter in his late 40s.

He said The hardest part was. Being a fat middle aged man running around with all the hard bodies who make up the military. And and but but he's you know he's a Prothro and he him quite well when I asked him I asked him to describe to me what it was like and how it felt. And I asked him flat out. How do we deal with the fact that he was literally living in the same tent with these guys. And it happened his squad was was all guys and of course naturally there was one from Oregon so there's always a local angle. But. He told me about how the soldiers came to view him as our reporter quote unquote. And how they talk to him. You know they kept asking him did you volunteer for this you know who did you. Who did you upset to get this assignment or are they paying you actor for doing it as they inhaled dust in the desert and rolled towards Baghdad eventually.

I have no doubt that and of course I read his 20 some reports. From Kuwait and ultimately from Iraq. He was not compromised that he did not sacrifice his credibility that he did is that he does his did his job. But I think Susan raises some very important points about ultimately as journalists what we own more than anything else our most precious commodity is our credibility. And if the contract. That we have with our readers. So I guess what I'd like to everybody and please anybody just jump in. As we look back on this and. Knowing that you know to some degree inherent in this was yeah we did have to make a deal. To be there we had to sign the contracts that said we would not reveal everything. We did not we did not reveal that we wanted each story. We could say there's no deal we can say there's no way we can say we're in southern Iraq we couldn't say we're 14 miles south of Al-Masry or whatever the case was. And in fact when they moved into

Iraq we were blacked out for 48 to 72 hours. While the initial operations. Were going on you know the question the question for me that I would pose to everybody is. Is is this contract that this violated our our credibility in some way. Have we have we sold our souls to the devil if you will in this case although I'm not characterizing. Let me be clear I'm not characterizing the military the United States as the devil but I'm just resorting to a cliche which we do a lot of in journalism and is it any different from what we do any other time. Is it different from me. You know what sports reporters do in the locker room is that different from what government reporters do in dealing with their sources. Day in and day out inside the beltway this kind of deal making is something that is normalcy. So. So how does this how does this does this specific hospital question fit him. Is it possible to stipulate to the purposes of argument here that all the reporters were conscientious that none of the reporters were censored suppressed

and or self-censor themselves. They all did a heroic and great job. Can we say that and can we still say at the same time that we were not fully informed that we were not offered the context the perspective the background that we need to make an assessment of what happened here that this conflict was presented more like a sports event. Play by Play boys with toys descriptions of weapons systems and the like then it's pilot what war really is which is politics by other means. Do we know the origins of the policies that led us to Iraq. Do we know the policies that are likely leading us into other conflicts like this what do we know and what don't we know. And I think that you could say that the reporters all did a good job but you could also say in some ways they were like that frog in the well the frog looks up sees the sky thinks that the sky the frog sees is the whole sky but it isn't the whole sky. Well I won't answer it because I can't speak for all of me. I can speak for our and

actually there are a lot more reporters covering the war than the embassies. We we had a whole Washington bureau. We had reporters all over the world and we also had a couple of what do you call your 11 year old truck from off and ship coming through an embed I'm a monitor. But when Mike Phillips or Helaine or next year we would find something from Baghdad it would be a file. Now it goes to Jerry side. Who. Covered the Iran Iraq war and covered wars over there it was that was a hostage there and he and it goes to Carl Robbins who covers the State Department and he goes to Neil King who covers the CIA and all of these people have sources and none of them have any agreements or any of those sources. And it should be a whole this is a collaborative experience not just one person. I would stipulate that it would be great it would be terrific if we could be that pure in every instance to say everything's on the record. Everything you say and do is always always 24 hours seven

days a week on the record but that's not how the world works. There's no Watergate story. If Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein don't catch and deal sorry and there's all sorts there's all sorts of women go up and down the Pulitzer list. I'll bet this year's Pulitzer list. I'll bet there's very few of those. There's not some even said deal. And to talk about signing contracts doesn't make any difference even legally even in a court of law. Saying somebody on this is on background. That's a contract. It's just as binding as if you signed it. So in your newspaper your newspaper which has done an excellent job that part of your newspaper there was generated from that other two newspapers that the Wall Street Journal won for their part. One is the Ghengis Khan like. Editorial The election is a liberal idea. The other one is the news section but there was an article on the media coverage which quoted Kenneth Bacon the former head of media relations

at the Pentagon who said this former Wall Street Journal and former Wall Street Journal reporter who said and was quoted as saying that you know the Pentagon couldn't hire actors to do as good a job as these journalists have done to sell and promote American policy that was in the Wall Street Journal too. But there aren't any. I think you know I think a lot of what you say relates more to cable television than anything because you know I mean you've got 24 hours of air time to fill. You've got to talk about something. And so you end up talking about a lot of trivia. And I think that we all saw that and you know at times we were amazed by what we saw and at times we were appalled. I think that you know the print equivalent was you know you had the local reporter on the USS Lincoln who would write about you know what they ate that day.

And you know it's kind of trivial but you know the people that are reading the paper back home are no no reporter embedded with an Iraqi family. Why was there no effort serious effort made to get at the truth of civilian casualties in this war. I think going to read the war. You have Tommy Franks saying we don't do body counts. The other day the Pentagon said no they will not release any estimate on civilian casualties. Yes the story has been referenced it has been referred to but as a sidebar more than as perhaps the main story in terms of the number of people who have died and will continue to die. Now that story is coming out now the cluster bombs the unexploded ordinance and the rest of it. But this has been largely presented as a sanitized conflict with some deaths some destruction to be sure. But I think the reality of this war has not been presented to the American people the way people in other countries have been seeing it. We'll come back to some of that on the cable TV context and I do want to get back to the question of

ultimately were readers served by the embedding process. I think you have to look at this in the context of a lot of different kinds of reporting that were going on simultaneously. We embedded. The peace unilateral with the people outside the embedding the people in the State Department with Defense Department and in gutter. And you know in those briefings asking very tough and hard questions and contentious questions my clientele the foreign journalists in Washington grilling the Secretary Powell yesterday from my former podium the monthly magazine are that I think took some very hard looks at that central question. And I think we're because radio. Is a little bit less of an engaged media I think we're able to step back and ask some of the conceptual questions about the direction of the war about. The implications. I think they had some great stories on that Danny would have liked a lot on what's been covered what's not been covered. I think there was

really it was really to me as a consumer of media as well as someone that works with me. I think it was it was a real piece because I think it was the complementarity and that there were no reporters were embedded with Iraqi families. I think that speaks a lot to the kind of regime that just fell. I mean one who minister of information I think was a lovable buffoon at best. I mean you know let's face it did provide comic relief. Ask around at the risk of redirecting your comments I guess I would like to follow up on your analogy of sports reporting and also Brian's comments that we make these kinds of contracts all the time and I think that would be my concern. That indeed we do. And I think there is a huge certainly from my perspective constitutionally there is a huge difference between boosterism in the coverage of the cougar football team and boosterism in

unilateral military action in Iraq. That this president justified by saying there there were huge hidden catches caches of weapons of mass destruction. And I do find you. Threw the two weeks of the engagement to find the media. Really looking at that issue and now there is reporting going on saying what they haven't found the smoking gun yet. I think that that reflects. An inherent acceptance of the government line. I think it it reflects. The fact that by and large the media interests are aligned with the government speakers on whom they depend for their daily diet of content. And and if you analyze the content of the media you will see how much the media depend on the speaking heads of government

to fill their pages every day not just when there is a war. So the question that I would like to pose is not is America served by sending embedded journalists to the U.N. to Iraq but is America served by a journalism that has increasingly become embedded with government. But Susan I think that there were plenty. Before the war. I mean there were plenty of instances of questioning about you know where are these weapons of mass destruction. I mean there you had U.N. inspection teams in there for weeks that couldn't find anything. And so I think that there was a pretty healthy skepticism going in there about whether or not these weapons existed. I think certainly now. The fact that virtually nothing has been found thus far as far as I know something's come up today.

There's going to have to be some explanation but so far I think the requirements for accountability have been flying because I think that you're still in a situation there's still a certain amount of combat there's some danger still being posed. I think once you reach a point at which. People aren't feeling threatened. I mean we're not feeling that you know troops are threatened. I think that the level of accountability is going to ratchet up considerably. I hope you're right. I would just say that I haven't particularly that in the. Years so since we stopped actively engaging in Afghanistan. Maybe you're right. I hope you're right. I think we also have to look at something else you know the government information policy is not simply like a reporter asks a question. Here's the information you asked for. There's what they call the message of the day. There's a persuasive

form of communication that tries to persuade us to echo back. What we're hearing often through constant repetition and often even echo back impressions that we have it's called perception management and that's a lot of what the government is attempting to do. Let me just cite something for you in the January 7th Knight-Ridder Princeton Research poll 44 percent of the respondents said they thought most or some of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. Only 17 percent of those polled offered the correct answer none in the same sample. 41 percent said that Iraq already possess nuclear weapons which is not even the Bush administration claims 68 percent of the respondents claimed to have a good understanding of the arguments for and against going to war with Iraq. Only 13 percent of young people could find Iraq on a map in a National Geographic survey. We're dealing with a population

that has over the course of 15 or 20 years since most Americans rely on television for most of their news unfortunately have been deprived of ongoing coverage bureaus have been closed. Correspondents have been what tends to be covered in the world is what the United States is doing in the world not necessarily what else is happening in the world. And I think that we have to understand how a population can be persuaded to believe things that isn't necessarily true and to be reinforced in that belief the Associated Press for example was criticized by the anti-war movement. Why. Because they they basically were arguing that that or they were reporting in a sense that when people said they were for the troops I supported the soldiers they were in effect supporting the war. Many people in the anti-war movement said that they supported the soldiers. They wanted them home safely. They were not criticizing the soldiers but they were criticizing a

policy. Yet that distinction was often blurred and blurred over in some of the coverage. So I think you have to look at what's what's the starting point here. For most people who has an interest in persuading people to think a certain way and I think if you see the way the polls have moved on the basis of assumptions and impressions that are often totally inaccurate and often reflect a kind of a feeling about what the media is reporting through constant repetition the breaking news the updates of the updates that are constantly being pounded into us. It's not surprising that most Americans when asked don't have very much of an in-depth understanding of these issues it's not their fault. It's not our fault. We're not taught it in school. We're not. It's not reported on in most media. That does not mean the Wall Street Journal doesn't do a great job it does that doesn't mean that other reporters aren't doing the great job they do. And I think a lot of credit has to be given to journalists who've been trying to get at the real facts in this.

So I'm not criticizing in a kind of blind way of you know kind of crude way every journalist but I think you have to you can't exempt the role of television in the coverage of this because it's the principle arena if you will. And when you see what happens in most of the coverage you know the anchorman cuts to the Pentagon cuts back to the State Department goes to the military expert left a chart and he's showing you the battle plan et cetera and so forth. It's not surprising you're not getting any contrary perspective. Yeah I was thinking of marketing myself as a retired general. I'd have to shave though so I don't know. I want to again remind you that we would welcome questions from the audience. So let me. Please go ahead. Well a quick question just for everybody can hear it is about.

A young journalist asking about the constant struggle to improve and to get better and to cover the complexity. The good news is that one of the reasons being a journalist never gets dull is that that battle never ends. The struggle to build sources to get stories to discover the truth. And that's what we're about. We're about discovering and printing the truth. Printing at least in in where I am. And that that is not something that comes easily. The great bulk of reporters who are out there are honest hardworking driven people who are trying to get it get at the news to be sure in this atmosphere at this time that it's harder than it's ever been. Personally I think it has a lot more to do with the current administration in Washington D.C. than it has to do with the corporatization of media ownership. There is a determined and relentless drive to control administration and to in my personal opinion restrict freedom of

information in a way that runs contrary to the spirit of the law that was put in place 36 years ago the Freedom of Information Act that's being controlled by. By executive order and by by practice and by overreaching laws like provisions of the Homeland Security Act that in the context of this war that are making our jobs a lot more difficult. But in fact that's going on at the local level too. We have to go to City Hall and battle for every document every document no matter how public it is if the city makes a deal with the developer. The city will argue that that's private. We have to threaten to sue we eventually get the documents. So that's happening across the country. To me that's a larger issue frankly than some of the other ones in terms of what we're trying to do. I'm sorry in the modern era I suppose you don't want to I guess I have to play some I have some free time and production of what I have served every president since Carter. I'm a bureaucrat in modern administration black. Except that I am that with each passing administration in the State Department. I think this regime is one of the most

open I've seen in my career. There is access to journalists in a way I haven't seen I would say probably since Carter. The the first secretary allows investors to go on the record which wasn't the case in the last administration there is more access to senior officials on background. There is the guidance process which is our daily process of responding that the press is absolutely driven by the process. I mean there are people and at 4:00 in the morning to see what the stories are there by about 6:30 or 7 every morning in the State Department there is a tasking list which basically calls every likely question that will be a follow up to the reporting of the day before its farmed out to bureaus by 10:00. The answers are in and by 11:30 or so they're put in a book for the spokesman who goes out there are journalists from the State Department

as tough contentious questions. If there is a kind of groupthink among the American journalists which I would argue there isn't there are a lot of different styles in that room. There are a number of foreign journalists again larger corporate. Journals I have to admit and and wire services and TVs that attend the briefing daily when there are topics of interest any of my nine hundred odd foreign correspondents accredited in Washington are free to go to the briefing and inject questions from their own perspective which sometimes is quite contrary to the American perspective. So I think we're actually at the State Department and I really can speak for the State Department I'm only willing to. I think we're in a more open area right now from Mobile perspective. What's your name. To. Country. You should just tweet me and you here. You should strive. To have the absolute truth no fear or favour. Everything's on the record always. That's the ideal

you always strive for. Ottawa Ontario says when you get out there it gets ugly. It's difficult it's complicated. Should you name a 12 year old who kills her tenure. Should we name rape victims. Should you know should we have if you know if you if you. If you don't talk to this person because you can keep them anonymous. The public's going to the public is going to get screwed. This city council is going to give his brother a 5 million dollar contract. You say well I'm the turn I'm going to be Pierce what we're and you constantly you're swimming upstream and you're making millions and millions of little tiny decisions little ones you don't even know you're making half the time. And you strive towards the ideal and once in a while once you're great while you get there in the meantime just try to put the paper out or put out the team. And if I knew all the answers to those questions I'd probably go do something else. I don't that's why I keep doing what I do. And I try to keep this moving fairly quickly just because there are people go ahead.

I try to keep this really short. I agree with both of you and I. I think that there there is. Perhaps the practice and the State Department. I'm not there reporting. I don't know. How free journalists feel the information is. But I would say from the perspective of a legal scholar the statute executive orders and other policies that have come out of this administration are. Mind boggling. And but I don't want to put the blame on the administration because I'd like to know where the media has been as all of these laws and policies go back more than a decade. I can point to Eric anti-terrorism laws that were closing down information very unilaterally. More than a decade ago. And it wasn't in the headlines and the average citizen doesn't know any more about that than they know about the FCC dropping of the cross-ownership

regulations which are going to open up media consolidation to an unprecedented level. And so I'm an equal blame player here this evening. To go up to the boy to get the very first statement from him. Yes. I was able to get in there. We haven't let. The media have a tendency that the media just happened to see the actor call us an advocate in your opinion you know wanted to change what are is going wrong or what do we need to do right now to ensure that we are getting both sides of this story. Just. Do what you're supposed to do. I mean you can't. I was thinking more at that the first week of the war I was embedded myself for training and sort of speaking. I was just there. They know I was there really. And I watched a lot of coverage because it was part of what I was doing and. It just felt really raw.

And. It's complicated because what do you do. Well how many times do you tell the other side of the story. It's it's like Danny says and like Suzanne it's our Susan says is you have to. Take you know at every opportunity is to Dolly back the camera and tell the history and get other people involved at your paper at your broadcast organizations who have different perspectives who don't have this narrow focus on here's what happened today at Karbala or on Nasiriyah. So we need to like rehire everybody because it seems like everyone. Do we need to hire more people. Partly yes. We've got everyone in there. I would I would make the suggestion. You know I think that we can't let ourselves off the hook either. I think we have to take responsibility for our own media choices for what we read and what we don't read. And to try to seek out more diverse sources of news and information you're talking about consumers right. I'm talking about students and

people who want to know what can be done and how they can find out. There are many sources out there that you can easily access now in our own case again you know a little a little plug for a non-profit project but we came to see that about 80 percent of all the news of the world was coming out to wire services. Some of it was quite good but a lot of other perspectives were not being heard or seen. We set up something called Global Vision news network TV news dot net. It was just written up in editor and publisher with trying to aggregate news and information from 350 different news outlets all around the world. So when you look at a particular story you can see what's being covered by the right wing in Israel by the left wing in Israel by you know a whole range of different sources and you can do that on line every morning and and find out a lot more than what you're getting simply by relying on the media you're relying on now. So I think we have to take responsibility.

You know who won. One suggestion that I. Came across my desk last year when I was running the foreign press centers was that the NPR co-produce with several other sponsors a Washington Week in Review for audiences abroad taking some of the better foreign journalists in Washington to do all the coverage. And my suggestion back to this person at NPR I was talking about is an old friend was why don't you give them five minutes on the domestic Washington Week in Review and we might get a little truth of a different sort. And get some of those perspectives that come up one when my journalists would come to the State Department briefings and then throw their their verbal bombs have contrarian thought and different perspective I think that would be a great idea. Let me. We have 2500 foreign journalists roughly in this country rather than it would be I think very good at some of the news media would take more advantage of their presence and their perspectives.

Let me pose a question to everybody that. It's something that's been that's been kicking around in my head which is often argued as a great vast space but at least by my word. But. One of the things and this really speaks to her question. There is. More than any. War and I'm not old enough to remember very many of them but there's an expectation on the part of the public to a large degree that the coverage of this war should be supported. You used the term jingoistic I don't know if I want to go all the way to jingoism. But you know for example one day 10 days ago and I see you sir and I'll get to you soon as we get through this. We ran a picture on the front page of an Iraqi man. Who was driving a cart in which there were coffins of five or six members of his family. This was after several days of bringing pictures of American soldiers doing this that and the other thing.

That they we had 70 cancellations of the paper which is an extraordinary number. For us. And basically now part of this of course because of the times we live in was apparently fueled by a local talk show host although I can't quantify that in any fashion. But there's something going on out there. In this war that's different. There's an expectation on a significant percentage of the populace of our readers who are pretty sophisticated people that that we should be supporting the war effort. I'm used to that when it comes to you know Lord help us. Oregon and Oregon State football where I live but I don't expect that serious issues of the day. I haven't encountered that from my readers before. Is that something we've done. Is that something. Is that something that's going on in our society is that the nature of this war is that because of imbedding what's going on there. Any any views on that.

Well I can't imagine that. I mean in World War II for example. You know I'm sure that. You know there was a lot of jingoism and there was a lot of support for what we were doing and. You know I can't imagine that now. I mean I would think now if anything it might be a notch below. I think that. You know some of it is fed by just the more media sources you know because you have a lot of media sources that are not you know traditional and do not you know do not feel compelled to abide by the same standards as most news organizations. I mean you know you've got talk radio stations that you know while they play a role in disseminating information. Don't pretend that they're journalists. They classify themselves as entertainers and yet their audiences view them as just like they view of.

Him except they trust them more. And so I think that you have that in play but I'm not sure that that I would agree that people are you know necessarily what your leader covers. Just just to follow up on that comment about the talk shows and. Whatnot. It brings to mind that Thomas Patterson wrote called out of order and in that. In-depth study of media coverage he particularly alludes to Perot's candidacy candidacy and Clinton's. Saxophone playing on Saturday Night Live. Cetera. And. The citizens of this country. Embrace those opportunities to hear the candidate speak directly unfiltered through the media. And at the time there was a lot of media response and saying yes we understand we have to go to a longer town fine. We have to allow. We have to cover the

speeches of candidates. We actually have to. Cover the content of their directives and yet. Study after study indicates that that hasn't happened and that each subsequent election has shorter and shorter soundbites and I go back to a comment that was made earlier I think by Brian that you know the media are increasingly covering themselves. I remember not that long ago just being done one morning coming to work when when I realized that NPR was constantly interviewing its own reporters and I thought when did this happen. And it happened while I was not paying attention. And I think it happened well maybe a lot of citizens weren't paying attention. But I think if we did a nice content analysis of how much of the war coverage is it's journalists interviewing journalists none of us would be very happy with the result. And to answer your question look here. It's just natural. And if you

run that photo you know Japanese turn and turn Japanese back nine point five. You have 7000 cancellations that. Is it's natural to get mad. I have friends. Who could just cover AT&T and one day he did a story on page one of the journal. It just depends. The CEO of a team. And the PR person called him that dangerous. F. You John. He says hey it was like getting the kids no hug from the kids. I mean you do what's right. You strive to do what's right. And. I wrote a whole book about corporate donations going to Knight Ridder. And is there an insidious effect that it goes that young moments or do we need more people of course we do. Do we need more resources. Yeah because the more you throw at it the better it's going to be and in the end. But I really really. Think about. Some young journalists 27 years old. He's covering whatever.

He's thinking or she's thinking. I have a choice. I can tell the readers this great story because it's a great story. And you know maybe I'll win some prizes and it'll be really cool and my pals will toast me or she thinking. I'll just lay off because we'll get more advertising and our stock price will go up. Come on. It's not all here. Mostly it's here. That's where it is. You wouldn't be here. Got to get rich did you do all those who came here to get rich. Or after some other recommend of our you've waited patiently I'm sorry. I'm cowbird I keester was from across the border at the University of Idaho to return to work work in the months leading up to the actual beginning of hostilities. Was the Bush administration's central claims or justifications for this war was that Iraq possessed the capabilities and was on the verge of producing nuclear

weapons. And it turns out that a central piece of evidence was completely fabricated forged documents. What explains the reluctance of the mainstream media to greet that claim with more skepticism at the time it was made. And in general the lack of questioning of the rationale the justification for war in the months when it might have made a difference in terms of the policy outcome. Thank you. Well I think there was there was a lot of scope and there was a lot of challenge but I mean you know we don't know. I mean you know ultimately we don't know what's fair and what isn't and we still don't know for sure what's there and what isn't. But I think that there was plenty of skepticism from the mainstream press in advance of the war about whether indeed there was anything there. I mean if all you had to do was listen to Rush Limbaugh for a couple of days and you know I mean we were all Communists because we were questioning the administration's validation for going into Iraq.

And so I think that there was you know that there was skepticism. But I don't think most people wanted to hear it very much. There was I recall briefing after briefing where were hard questions were asked. At the time. I also will say that on the chemical weapons story without you know talking at all about conclusions that Fox News I think is covered it better than any of the TV stations and that you know the cable but I think that maybe we all love to hate. But they've done this. They've done a pretty somewhat sensationalized but they're hitting the story and I think they're probably pushing often government to come out a little sooner than we'd like to conclusions. You know at the risk of alienating anybody have already alienated two members of our panel who had just realized the real print guy. So of course the journalists here of course look

askance at even a TV critic you know it's like the old story of the guy that says he's an anti-Communist and somebody else says I don't care what kind of communist do you would like to be really heretical. Having worked at CNN in the days when CNN had a 1 rating after the Gulf War CNN had an 11 rating to go for go for one filter to CNN has a global news brand. I believe that there were many television news organizations that couldn't wait for this war to happen. Looking forward to it that we're investing a lot of money in it even though it meant a form of advertising temporarily. I don't believe that journalists calculate what's in the interests of their companies necessarily when they make coverage decisions. I think that's that's too much of a conspiracy theory but I do think that the companies do have interests and the war is a great story. War sells war brings viewers back to television. And so I think that

there was a lot of interest in this and this have to you have to go back to 9/11 and recognize a trend towards a certain patriotic correctness particularly in television media anchors wearing the American flag American flags and the banners and attempt a desire not to get ahead of the audience in any way at a time when when journalists could be accused of being traitors. The second thing that's new and I wouldn't underestimate this in terms of your experience is that there are new so-called news organizations and media companies that specialize in the politics of polarization. They want polarization. They promote New York Post is now you know running daily features attacking the New York Times and trying to show the legitimacy of Fox News attacking MSNBC. And you know a friend of mine Michael Wolff who writes for New York magazine goes to the press briefing in Doha writes an article that says the last place you could

possibly find out what's really happening in Iraq is to go to the CENTCOM briefings. He writes a very clever column about all this I would urge you to read what happens. Rush Limbaugh gives out his e-mail address on the air and his computer system is attacked and is immobilized in essence. In other words there's a way in which media people see themselves as righteous warriors for whatever beliefs they happen to hold and are willing and interested actually in trashing everyone else. The other day just yesterday actually I got a call from the Bill O'Reilly radio show. And what Bill O'Reilly was interested in was. Having me the fan CNN gets the head of news coverage and CNN admitted that CNN withheld some information about its Iraqi staff for fear that they would be persecuted and therefore they had knowledge of certain human rights abuses. But they didn't

report it. So one of those gray areas that you were talking about where you have where things get ugly and you have to make certain decisions and CNN decided not to report this and then admitted as much and try to talk about it. Fox News jumped right on them. You know of course did their competitor. And we're looking for somebody to defend CNN Why couldn't do it. I was coming to the Washington State University so I was on the plane. So another media critic was called and the media critic said well I'm willing to discuss. What CNN did. But you know it's kind of a gray area. And he said well we don't want you. Thank you very much. We're looking for black and white to shade it that way so that they could they could polarize the issue. And it's very much like President Bush saying you're either with us or you're against us. And when you get into that kind of bipolar world truth goes out the window. We're we're just about out of time but if it's all right Alex I'd like to throw a couple people waiting.

So if we can. Ladies we'll take your questions and one of us will answer them and then we'll bring this to a close. Go ahead please. All right. I'm sitting here to say University and one of the things that has benefited me most is my constant 70 hostages Popeye Dr. Eric B-cell. He's a doctor patient guy doctor. Anyway he said we're learning about framing in our country learning about how varied. And basically what he said that the media tells us what to think about. And I know that the media has sensationalized the war just because they can make a lot of money out of it. I mean that's what people want and they want the media to help them. And I know that consequently since we're doing so well in the war that Bush's approval rating has soared by like over 25 percent which is. You know common if you're going to win a war. But then what is the media's initially really critical of his domestic policy and now that focus to

international policy. I was just kind of wondering what you guys thought about when is the war coverage too much when should we focus on the problem rather than those related to the war. Well with all respect to. Your professor. Framing is this something we spend a lot of time in journalism talking about and worrying about. And. The way stories get framed whether it's in print or broadcast to run on radio. Is generally in the eye or in the head of the reporter. And here she is trying to figure out a way to tell the story in the most compelling way. Well of course like I don't know a lot of broadcast reporters but. The reporters I know don't set out with the ambition that you that you just described they're just trying to tell the story in terms of you know one of the things that's really hard to know. I come from a school of journalism that's lowercase s lowercase J

where it's you know you give you give your readers everything you can give them and they'll decide what they want to read or what they don't want to read. And things have a natural lifespan. We tend to. Ride the horse with whatever story we're on until that horse is dead. In other words we tend to we tend to stay with stories too long. I don't feel like that's been the case with the war although you're noticing at least I'm noticing nationally that papers are ratcheting back their coverage as things wind down. And that will lead to arguably the biggest story nationally in the coming months. And this is where the framing comes into it is will. Bush the Younger. Repeat the mistakes of Bush the elder in terms of not paying enough attention domestic policy. You can see Bush was at a. Factory and the president was in a factory in St. Louis today making a speech on the economy. You know trying to pump up support for the tax cut that's gone from 750 billion to 550 billion and will probably be 300 billion or something like that.

And in fact that shift is beginning to happen already it seems to me. But. That does not necessarily relieve the media of its obligation to be very thorough about trying to desex some of these issues because they are arguably still very important go ahead. And that's an excellent question because you just turn the question on its head now now toward winding down. How much is too little. But what I'm really worried about. Is that we're not going to hold the Bush administration's feet to the fire on chemical weapons. What's going to happen. We're going to move on. The spinmeisters will begin. And you know what's going to really change. The Democrats are going to start running for president and they're going to start harping on it. And as weird as it sounds when John Edwards and Howard Dean and all those other guys start harping. It will. Not make an issue bigger. It will diminish. You know it doesn't look like a political issue. It won't be a real issue anymore and it'll

just be this back and forth between nine year olds arguing over semantics. I'm serious really serious about this. And the embeds in Washington those are the ones we should worry about the ones who were their idols and journalists were never going to leave. And say well we're moving on now to trade with North Korea. I know that the story is clear and that's what I'm really really worried. Clearly you are a really hot button issue up here because I'm going to have to go back and maybe somewhat disagree with Peter because as you said. Framing is defined by the fact that when journalists are looking in one direction they do not see what is in the other direction. None of us can look in two directions simultaneously. And I would suggest that as long as the journalists are looking out the government's window they will be following George Bush's agenda. And that I for one am not sure why the economy hasn't been an issue for the last month. I didn't

know that the economy stopped being important because we were at war. Well you know the war is over because Madonna and shark attacks are back on CNN. Hopefully in the same story. A lot question right here. Hi my name is Beth will answer. I'm a lawyer and like if I'm one of the ones he walk in off the street I did start as a journalist. I was a reporter for the Wyoming eagle. In Cheyenne Wyoming and they went out a lot. And ultimately and before I went straight into litigation I worked for the government accountability project in Washington D.C. that represent whistleblowers people with all the issues. And to answer what they said we thought that was one or two that I think that Brian is right that sometimes people have to say things anonymously and working with. The result of people who speak out as

being true because it's the right thing to do. People's lives can be destroyed by that kind of thing. And so being responsible in that regard is good. I came much as I enjoyed the symposium I came because of Danny Pearl and I saw the article that said that he was going to be honored here. I have used him and his story as a beacon. In my own work. And. Try to speak the truth. Try to think from his perspective. You know what would be the right for me to do here. And down. And I think that that has affected people around the world in that way because he stood for thing. Unfortunately. He had to die. For that for his word to become so well no. But I know I whole. You must begin. And my question is

and I guess would be to Brian if Danny were on the podium tonight what would he say. You know don't forget don't forget about this. What would it be any. Better. Than he would be in Baghdad. I thought he would be. You thought he'd be all over this. What would be any say. I don't know. But what particular question. I just don't forget don't forget about. Our pay would. Be any real beginners one particular story. Remember we bombed that chemical weapons factory whose it was we were going around and around. Wherever what it was Danny. The only journalist who said that's bullshit. That wasn't a chemical. Chemical weapons. And he did two or three stories about this. You know you'd think that those. You know maniacs who killed him. Would

see. That he wasn't on their side when at least he was. And. I'd be less worried. A little bit less worried about whether we'll pursue the chemical weapons or if he was here. Because you just didn't hear him. He's right. Here all the way all of you there. All right. Thank you very much being here.