Summer 2002

Batten Symposium: Dinner Keynote Highlights
Speaking Truth to the Power of Wall Street

Hodding Carter III, President and CEO, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, delivered the dinner keynote address.

In the course of this day I have heard every possible thing that could be said on behalf of this venture in which all of us have taken some deep stake and said better than anything I can now say.

… Jim Batten would be happy and perhaps even surprised to discover that 10 years later we’re still talking along these lines. While he was a man of great vision and decency, he was not a fool. He knew precisely the forces that were working against what we’re trying to do.

Nobody who has been involved with this enterprise over these years could be considered some crazed – what was it she sang in “South Pacific” – cockeyed optimist. In fact, people who knew and understood this business intimately … came together nonetheless to press for changes, which they found to be absolutely necessary.

Rebecca Rimel took a flying leap into the unknown … to take a chance on an idea that had not been confirmed by the conventional wisdom, had not been endorsed by the industry to which it was going to be applied and which carried with it what it has brought – the possibility of paranoia, mean-spirited response and utter ignorant condemnation by the profession it was seeking to help.

She not only sustained it in the initial phase … she gave it breathing room. Not three years, not five years, not eight years – a decade. That does not happen in this world except occasionally. It particularly does not happen when what it gets you, from your home newspaper to some of the major organs of American journalism, is the notion that you are an enemy not quite to be defined, a mortal enemy of everything journalism is supposed to be all about. That is what this venture brought her.

… Walker Lundy today spoke of the newsroom culture of conservatism … that while any journalist can call for immediate recognition of Cuba tomorrow, if you move one chair in the newsroom they go berserk. And to ask that you do fundamental reordering of the way you do business is to invite rebellion.

Newsroom Conservatism

… Our business as a whole, when it is not obsessed with the business of business, is eaten up with a form of cultural conservatism that is truly amazing. More often than not it is eaten up with pure reactionary-ism: Don’t bother me with a new idea. And yet we demand it from so many places.

Philanthropy actually shares with civic journalism the opportunity and the obligation to do a number of things and, like journalism, is eaten up with conservatism and the desire not to be the first … Yet we share something that is such a rare opportunity that to give it up because of our conventions or our conventional wisdom or our timidity is to give up something so precious as to be unfathomable to the vast majority of our fellow Americans.

We can be the conveners. We can be the catalysts. We can be those who enable others to do that which they are wise enough to have thought to do.

… When I’ve been asked to be a player in the occasion of the consecration of a “breakaway church,” preaching is called for. So let me say that it can and must be true – it can be sustained, because it’s unthinkable that it will not be. That is not serious and rigorous reason. It is simply the kind of faith that is supposed to inform not merely a breakaway church but the great creation that is embodied in that institution we serve and that was founded upon the principle of the First Amendment and of freedom unimaginable in virtually all societies.

A Crisis of Connection

Why is there even a need for what you all have done? The words rolled out today. Because there truly is a crisis of faith and there truly is a crisis of connection and community and connectivity. I really have to say, nonetheless, that as much as I loved a great deal of what was said today, I cannot say I agreed with all of it. One thing specifically I have to call into account. I told Walker I was going to do this. I’m doing it.

The truth is not that the problem is the newsroom does not understand capitalism. The problem is that the front office does not understand journalism. The problem is not that the average reporter does not understand what it is that’s necessary to make the payroll, to make the good edifice, to make the thing that he wants. It is that those who control too many of the edifices have actually come to believe that Wall Street has wisdom and that that wisdom should instruct our business.

Let me just say something categorical. There are vast enterprises that reverse that successfully. They tell Wall Street what to believe about what they do and Wall Street, a prostitute, does precisely what it is told, because the money is there. That we, to believe for one moment that a Wall Street that consecrated an Enron, that believed in Arthur Andersen and that touted the dot-com bubble is able to tell people in journalism what it is that the system of capitalism demands is a perversion of capitalism. It’s a perversion of journalism, and it’s a perversion of the notion of journalistic integrity. [Applause.]

The truth of the matter is, as in most of the enterprises that Wall Street chooses to be an expert on, they neither understand nor care. They care about one thing – the levels of profit margin.

A dear friend, Charles Eisendrath, now running the Michigan journalism program, is fond of saying, consider it this way: GM, which is averaging 6 percent now, suddenly is making 20 percent. Would you believe that their cars are still as safe? Would you believe that their cars are still as efficient? Would you believe their cars are still as good? Who would dream of asking GM to make that argument? Yet we are sitting here swallowing the idea that you can take margins from 15 to 20 to 25 to 30 and that at end of day [news organizations] are going to be as good, as effective, as safe for the democracy as they were when the margins were 15.

It is actually required of us these days to do something even before civic journalism, because the best intentions of civic journalism are not going to work if the enterprises in which you offer them are not meeting their basic necessities. Another of you today spoke about the fact that we do not have enough money now to do what we used to do, and there is less money now than there used to be.

The fact of the matter is, there is. Not merely against some marker of 10 years ago but against need, against the world in which we live. No matter how fast you run with civic journalism, if we are not able to re-convince those who control this medium that, at end of day, the business of this business is not business but the news – if an absolutely ignorant, venal and unresponsive institution, the Wall Street analyst world, is to be our guide – then we’re lost.

I was, in my brief time in daily journalism, an owner of a small newspaper in which it was understood that everybody was the public editor, because we were too close to the ground to be anything else. I did not understand it was even possible to make a profit for the first three months of any year given the kind of world we lived in. We put out a pretty lousy paper in a lot of ways. We didn’t have the money. We didn’t have the knowledge. We didn’t have lots of things.

But another word that was used today is something we did have – that was passion, and that was conviction, and that was certainty that what we were about mattered so much that you had to put it all on the line every day to do it.

… One of the nice things civic journalism has done is asked some folks to put some things on the line and say we have to change some things. You begin to hear some voices out here that I hope we will heed. They’re saying there’s a second level of things we have to do, particularly to make this first one work. We’re going to have to start speaking a lot more clearly with some truth to a lot of power. Not government’s power; our own business’s power.

Tim McGuire at the ASNE convention spoke of the need for a constant conversation now between editors and publishers. Len Downie, speaking to ASNE’s board before the convention kicked off, said he did not see why 15 percent [profit margin] was any more than you had to make. He suggested a rigorous set of conversations between those who run the newsrooms and those who control the budgets.

Is that asking too much? Too much bravery, too much putting it on the line in the one area that it matters to put it on the line? To finally have that face-to-face conversation, not with the public, many of whom you don’t know, but with those who control the enterprise, most of whom you do know? The answer, of course, is: It’s easier to do almost anything than it is to speak directly to those who have the purse strings, who control the budgets and your own destiny.

This is a terrible time. It is a bleak and fallow time. I’ve been going to ASNE for 52 years. I have never seen a time of more dispirit, more discomfort, more frustration, more fear, more resignation, more cynicism. That is not a set of adjectives we wish to apply to our business, to our calling.

There is a whole set of other words you want, and they were said by so many of you today: passion, commitment, belief, community, context, continuity. We are, finally, the custodians of something much better than our jobs.

Civic journalism believes that, and it believes that with great intensity. But for civic journalism to work, those who run our news operations have got to prove in their daily encounters with those who control the budgets that those words are not simply something to be trotted out to justify ever-larger profit margins but to be trotted out to justify creating products that a free people and a free society will turn to for information, for understanding, for invigoration and for connection.

___________________

A Celebration of Hope

Buzz Merritt, Author
“Public Journalism and Public Life”

Surely, this is a celebration … It is a celebration of you, the journalists and scholars who made a leap of faith, and the people in foundations and institutions and community groups who supported your efforts … No, it’s not a funeral, but it is a transition. To what, we’re not quite sure. But then 12 years ago, we didn’t know what even the first step would and could and should be.

… So what did we build? Or more precisely, what are we building? A lifeboat for print journalism just when many insidious pressures attack its foundations? I believe so. A platform for new construction on the information highway? Yes. A new heart for like-minded journalists who have become persuaded that just telling the news is not enough and who need a more worthy goal? That too we’ve built. An agora where citizens can become reengaged in the core business of democracy? Certainly. A laboratory for experiments in journalism and democracy? Surely that.

But what we really have built and are building is even less concrete, though more powerful, than those abstractions. It’s hope. Hope that the future of both journalism and democracy can and will be better than the recent past. Hope that deeper engagement by citizens in public life, including politics, will accelerate civic renewal. And hope that journalism, by recognizing that civic renewal and participating in its growth, can reestablish itself as a useful and respected profession.