Here are a couple of stories from the newspaper business. A few years ago, after I had been editor of The Inquirer for several years, I was invited to the annual dinner of a community organization that was giving an award to one of the writers from the paper. It was a small, local group, based in a predominately poor, predominately African-American neighborhood of north Philadelphia. The people at the dinner were very committed to the improvement of their community, and most of them had devoted years of hard work to a variety of neighborhood organizations and causes.

In addition to celebrating the accomplishments of their group over the previous year, they were recognizing the efforts of The Inquirer writer who had written a number of enlightening stories on one of the issues this group struggled with in its city neighborhood. They were pleased with The Inquirer, were happy to see us and were very friendly and hospitable.

I spent 15 or 20 minutes meeting people, shaking hands and engaging in cordial small-talk when all of a sudden, a short, tough-looking woman walked up, shook my hand brusquely and then just plain let me have it. She lit into me with fury, her mouth twisted and her eyes flashing. She criticized me, The Inquirer and the entire profession of journalism, concluding that the whole lot of us are unethical and dishonest.

"Your newspaper is not honest," she said, "and you don't bother to tell the truth about anything."

I was taken aback. I knew there were many readers-thousands of them-who had issues with the paper, who thought we worked our own agenda instead of theirs. I knew that most members of the Philadelphia establishment felt that we had an anti-establishment bent, and that many people who were not part of the establishment felt we were apologists for the power structure and did not report on it as aggressively as we should. But " . . . dishonest? . . . not truthful?" I thought most people knew we had a strong commitment to the truth, that we made every effort to be honest, that we had multiple levels of editing for every story to ensure that each was as accurate and fair as possible. How could this woman think we were not honest? Maybe she was just one of those "crazies" who are always calling up and screaming at us.

Still, I thought, I need to hear what she has to say. I spent about 25 minutes with her, listening, questioning and talking. When I was done, I knew she was no "crazy," and that she had a criticism of our coverage that was not only valid but was troubling as well.

Her accusation was simple: When there was bad news-a shooting, a big drug bust, a building collapsing into the street-The Inquirer was right there, covering every aspect of the tragedy. So was everyone else from television, radio and the other papers. But when the tragedy subsided and life went back to normal, no journalists were there to chronicle what "normal" meant. No one showed up to write about the church leader who tutored a teenage orphan so the child could get his high-school diploma. No one returned to cover the block party at which everyone joined forces to clean the sidewalks, the streets and the abandoned back yards. There were no cameras to record the moment when the residents-tired of waiting for action from the city-hired their own tow truck and removed the junked car at the end of their block. No one wrote the profile of the young mother on their street, living alone with her children, who worked two jobs and took in a boarder in order to stay off welfare.

These moments composed the true picture of her neighborhood, she said, not the few awful happenings we had covered. How, she asked, could we claim to be honest when the only picture we painted of her neighborhood was one of crime and violence? The people who live there, she said, know the truth about their community and know that the news media don't tell that truth. Of course, I explained to her why we cover major crime stories, why they are of interest to the whole region we serve, why they are important to the everyday lives of her neighborhood, so similar to the everyday lives of all the other neighborhoods, why we have to respond only to major news and respond to the interests of our readership in such events.

I explained that we did the sort of "good news" stories she was talking about, but we did them all over the vast region we cover and we do not often hit any one neighborhood. I was sorry, I said, that we had not done one recently in her neighborhood. Perhaps, I suggested, she could consider those stories from other neighborhoods to be symbolic of what was happening in her community. I explained all that; she listened, she had heard it before, and she was not buying it.

Frankly, neither do I.

If we reduce both arguments-this woman's and the newspaper's-to their simplest terms, ours does not stand the test of intellectual rigor. Our argument is that we subject each and every story to thorough editing to see that it is accurate and complete. We would never willingly print a story that is wrong or incomplete. We are right about that. But that is only half the picture.

The woman's argument is that this is not what constitutes truth, that truth is a portrait painted over time, and that each story is a part of that portrait. If our portrait over time-that is, all the different pieces we put in about a particular community over the weeks and years-is incomplete or misleading, then it is not accurate, according to this woman. I think she has a point; I think it is a fair requirement that, over time, we paint a whole and accurate portrait of the larger community and its component parts. Since that discussion with this woman, The Inquirer has taken great pains to do more neighborhood coverage, to produce more stories about how life is lived in these communities and how their small victories recreate the fabric of the communities themselves.

But we still do not meet the exigencies of her demand; frankly, we cannot. We cover more than 350 minor civil divisions-cities, towns, boroughs and townships-in three states. In addition, we cover the states themselves, as well as a dozen county governments, the federal government, national and international news and business, sports, entertainment, culture, obits, and weather. We cannot meet the standard she sets for truthfulness, for honesty. If that were all there was to it, I could take refuge in the weak rejoinder that we are simply doing the best we can.

But we are not. This woman and her neighborhood share a further disadvantage, and I fear it will prove very costly to them over time: they are poor.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has responded in the past ten years to the pressure to give more detailed, more complete neighborhood coverage to its readers; for the most part, it has responded by starting up daily, zoned "Neighbors" sections that provide such coverage for four different sectors of our region. The coverage that goes into a "Neighbors" section is completely changed for each different zone, and is left entirely out of the paper for sectors that do not get such coverage. This has allowed us to respond to competitive pressure from suburban newspapers, and, at the same time, provide more thorough, balanced lifestyle coverage, fulfilling an important journalistic goal.

Here is the problem: Each one of these sections has been enabled by the acquisition of new sources of ad revenue. That is, we have justified the expenses of each new section as it has come on line with a projection that shows we will at least cover the cost through new advertisers.

In most cases, we have covered the cost. In at least one, we are making a profit, but none of them is very remunerative. The result of this cost structure management is obvious: poorer neighborhoods are not getting any new zoned sections.

We have struggled hard at The Inquirer to keep a strong commitment to city coverage, to keep a strong team of reporters assigned to the city, and to provide the sort of neighborhood, lifestyle coverage for the city it so clearly needs. But, frankly, there is no real comparison. The city neighborhoods and the poorer sectors of our region are getting coverage that is not even close to the suburban "Neighbors" coverage. The economic pressures inexorably push the newspaper toward more detailed coverage of sectors with the sort of demographics that support the effort.

To make matters worse, the situation is even bleaker when one looks at the other media serving the poorer communities: Most of the weeklies follow the same pattern as the dailies, clustered in middle to upper-middle demographic areas. Television and radio, the primary sources of news in poorer neighborhoods, rarely cover any community news whatsoever, other than crime and violence.

In the past, 50 or 60 years ago, working-class neighborhoods in the Philadelphia region were well served by the news media, with an array of daily and weekly papers available almost everywhere. The residents of these neighborhoods relied upon the print press for every imaginable sort of information-politics, issues, school news, neighborhood developments, consumer information-as well as for entertainment. Today, most residents of many of these same areas, particularly the poorer ones, rely exclusively on television (or television and some radio) for both information and entertainment. I think a strong argument can be made that the residents of such areas are severely disadvantaged as citizens, as workers, and as consumers by the lack of serious coverage from television and the lack of coverage of their neighborhoods by newspapers. The future does not look brighter: I do not see how the economics will change to favor more ambitious coverage of poor neighborhoods. Newspapers like The Inquirer will continue to struggle to do their duty, to provide some responsible coverage of poorer communities, but that struggle is likely to remain a defensive one. As fewer and fewer people subscribe to newspapers or use them, the trend of the past 20 years is likely to continue. Newspapers are relentlessly moving upscale, becoming the property of the intelligentsia and the monied classes, serving their information needs and failing to meet the needs of the poorer communities. Television is continuing to be the primary source for lower demographic groups, offering little more than entertainment.

What does that mean for a democratic society? What does it mean for a democratic society like ours in which there has been a 25-year trend of the poor growing poorer, the rich growing richer, with the divide between the have-mores and the have-lesses growing steadily? What does it mean to a society in which 45 percent of those filing tax returns in 1993 met the federal government's guideline definition of working poor? Or what about a society in which the richest one percent of the population owns almost one third of the nation's resources? The United States today has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation. How will such a society, already being split along class and capital lines, be affected by a media environment in which the rapidly growing poor segment has little access to relevant information? We will come back to these very difficult and troubling questions a little later.

But first, I want to tell you a second story from the newspaper business. It was a couple of years ago at the offices of The Inquirer's advertising division where a group of executives was meeting with representatives of a local home-builders' association. There was one other editor from the newsroom with me, as well as three advertising executives. The meeting was carefully segmented to allow the editors to hear the thoughts and suggestions of the builders about the content of the paper-including the twice-weekly real estate sections-before the sales meeting. We explained that there was a separation of the editorial and advertising functions at The Inquirer, that the editors would not take part in the sales meeting and that the builders should know that no ad sales would have any bearing on content. And, in fact, the builders made clear that they understood this. It was during the discussion of content, though, that a theme emerged that was every bit as troubling to me as the conflict issue could have been. As we talked about the real estate sections, one of the builders kept urging us to tailor our "product," as he called it, to what he described as our "natural" market. As I listened to him, it was clear that this so-called "natural" market was a very upscale, monied group of people and that he thought this represented the only sort of people The Inquirer needed to worry about. I repeatedly corrected him, explaining that we considered ourselves a mass-market publication, and as such, we sought to have the broadest, most inclusive readership possible. In fact, I said, since we thought of ourselves as a key source of civic information in a democratic society, we thought it was our duty to seek a broad, diverse readership. This went back and forth between us for awhile, with the ad executives increasingly impatient with my intransigence; in fact, they sought to reassure the builder that our audience was just what he thought it should be: well educated, professional and well-to-do. The builder patiently instructed me and the other editor on how to tailor our real-estate sections to this upscale audience. I just as patiently explained to him that he would continue to find a variety of content in these sections that would appeal to working-class readers as well as to a white-collar audience. Finally, we reached a cordial if somewhat wary stalemate.

In the weeks that followed that conversation, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the import of it. Who was right, after all: I or the builder? I was very firm, and brimming with idealistic rectitude, when I told him we were an inclusive, mass-market newspaper. But was I right about that? Or, was I just spouting a journalistic platitude that had been overtaken by exactly the sort of reality the builder had been describing? After all, The Inquirer had lost about 70,000 daily readers and 100,000 Sunday readers in the last 15 years, and had lost almost all of them from the lower demographic, poorer neighborhoods of the city of Philadelphia. Despite such high losses-14 percent of our daily base and 10 percent of our Sunday base-we had not heard many complaints from the executives in the advertising division. The reason was simple: Although The Inquirer had lost gross circulation numbers, its demographic statistics-the wealth, education and other characteristics of our reading population-had improved substantially. In fact, although we lost circulation badly in the city, we had been gaining circulation in the wealthier suburban neighborhoods, the exact areas where we had started those "Neighbors" sections. Most of our advertisers were pretty happy about the readers we were delivering and

at least, in the case of the builder, they were somewhat exasperated with me for my stubborn adherence to the notion that we were, and should be, an inclusive publication aimed at the diverse population of an egalitarian society. Increasingly, of course, we were, and are, an intellectual publication aimed at the intelligentsia-the more powerful and influential-of an increasingly divided society. This is not true just of The Philadelphia Inquirer, by the way; it is true of most of the big, successful metropolitan newspapers. It is most true of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the two newspapers that are not metropolitan at all, but truly international, and are aimed deliberately at an elite readership.

This is one reason newspaper companies are doing so well these days. After an early-1990s scare when ad revenue dropped and newsprint prices soared, newspaper companies have come roaring back in the mid 90s, making more money than ever before. That is fine. The companies are prospering, the stockholders (including many journalists) are gaining wealth, and the increasingly upper middle-class staffs in the newsrooms are making pretty good wages and enjoying intellectually rewarding jobs. That is how free markets work, after all: They drive us toward our "natural" customer base, just as the builder said, and reward us for serving that base well. Hoo-rah! Everybody's happy, everybody's prosperous-except for that part of the population that does not quite fit the prescription, the undereducated, the underemployed, and the unskilled. In the last 25 years that population has been losing ground economically while America has become more adept at engaging the global economy and profiting by it.

Well, that is just too bad, isn't it? There are always winners and losers, and they are just the losers. That is the way free markets work.

However, I think there are some very sinister and enduring problems here for America and for the profession of journalism. America's economy may be a free-market one, and doing very well because of that, but America is also a democracy. As such, it is absolutely dependent on an informed and engaged electorate. Remember those earlier questions: What does all this mean for a democratic society? How will such a society, already split along class and capital lines, be affected by media that do not serve the poor?

The answers are not encouraging. In fact, with a large segment of society poorly served by the press and increasingly disengaged from the civic process, it is hard to see how we can continue to be one of the world's most egalitarian democracies. The fact is that the newspapers-almost all of which are now owned and operated by big, publicly traded

corporations-are largely driven by market forces today. Logically, they follow the money. Their nature, whether they are truly inclusive and mass-market or just plain elitist, is driven by market forces more than by editors or idealism.

This would not be such a problem for our democracy or our profession if the same market forces were hard at work providing a truly empowering source of information for the lower middle-class and the poor. So far, these market forces have provided only television, more a source of entertainment than information, and more of an opiate for the masses than a platform of civic engagement.

What really worries me is that I see a spiral here: A market-driven news business that is increasingly failing its egalitarian role in a democratic society. I worry about an American society that seems increasingly comfortable with a growing lower class that is not sharing the wealth proportionately and is increasingly disengaged and disaffected. These do not seem like good developments for democracy or for American journalism.

I am not suggesting we can blame all of society's problems on journalism, or vice versa, but I do think we have here a couple of problems that are interrelated. On the one hand we have a journalism that is increasingly aimed at an economic elite, or, in the case of television, is mostly given over to simplistic entertainment. On the other is a society that is increasingly separate and unequal in terms of wealth and opportunity.

Look at some of this statistical reporting from the 1990s work of Don Barlett and Jim Steele, The Inquirer's two top investigative reporters. From 1970 to 1993 the segment of American taxpayers who could properly be defined as middle class in economic terms shrank from nearly 60 percent to less than half, while the segment defined as "working poor" climbed from 39 percent to 45 percent. And the segment defined as "affluent" has doubled, from 4 percent to 8 percent. These are signs of a burgeoning two-class society.

From 1975 to 1995 the salaries and bonuses of the highest-paid executives of Twenty Fortune 500 companies ballooned an average of five times the nation's inflation rate. Meanwhile, during the same period, the average earnings of more than 73 million blue-collar and white-collar workers across all private industry-from shipping clerks to nurses, from truck drivers to musicians-rose 142 percent, not even keeping up with the inflation rate of 183 percent. These too are signs of a burgeoning two-class society.

Here are a couple of other rather stark glimpses into this system: In 1975 it would have taken the median family incomes of nine families to make up the pay of the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. In 1995 it took the median family incomes of 203 families to equal the CEO's take. In 1975 it required 21 median family incomes to pay the CEO of Coca Cola. In 1995, 124 family incomes were required to compensate Coca Cola's CEO. Again, these are signs of a burgeoning two-class society. Better yet, see for yourself. Just go out and drive around the city and suburbs in any metropolitan area in the United States. You will see the two-class system with thousands of families living in distressed urban ghettoes as dire as those in many third-world nations while dozens of highly affluent, guarded suburban communities are walled and gated to keep society's undesirable half outside.

It is true that in the last two years, real, inflation-adjusted wages for average workers have begun to rise slightly, but the 25-year trend is still down and it is unclear how long the current uptrend will last. Also true is the fact that unemployment is well below 5 percent today. But please remember that many of the new jobs being created today are relatively low-paying, service-sector positions. Unlike twenty years ago, when the U.S. led much of the world in production wages, today we trail many other industrialized countries like Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Japan.

None of this means that our country is failing, or even that it is bad. What it does mean is that a nation that once epitomized egalitarian democracy is moving away from that ideal. It means that the role journalism plays in such a democracy should be examined and challenged.

Interestingly, as newspapers across America have become market driven, such challenges to the ethics of journalism have been few and far between.

One of the most interesting movements of recent years has been that of the so-called "public-journalism." This 1990s journalism reform movement aimed its energy directly at the issue of civic engagement at all levels of society. It directly blamed American journalism for causing a reduction in popular interest in the civic process, government and current issues. American journalism, the movement's leaders said, is cynical, confrontational and obsessed with conflict. Journalism tends to view everything in terms of black and white. It polarizes the populace and leads to a culture of blame rather than an environment of reason and discourse.

Thus, it discourages popular interest in the civic process and good governance.

Indeed, there is a lot of truth to that claim of the public-journalism movement. In its search for drama and impact, American journalism has become too fixated on conflict, too absorbed with the extremes and far less successful at explaining the full range of complex issues. In fact, newspaper journalism sometimes emulates the worst of television, oversimplifying and demonizing issues.

The solution offered by many of the practitioners of public-journalism, though, has not been helpful. To combat the cynicism they decry, the leaders of the movement have urged that journalists, in effect, change their role. Drop a posture of independence, of distance from the civic process, they urge, and join the battle on behalf of the public good. They have pioneered what they view as a new kind of journalism in which editors and reporters jump into the fray, organize public meetings around key issues and try to ignite the civic process. Unfortunately, in so doing, the leaders of this new movement have rejected-in fact, have scorned and derided-one of the ethical cornerstones of modern American journalism:

The neutrality and independence of the newsroom.

Since the 1920s and 1930s, American journalists have by and large followed a credo in which they gave up activism in return for credibility. That is, we have offered an ethical construct to the reader: In our news columns, we will not try to sell anything; we will try to remain neutral and unbiased as much as possible. In return, we ask that the public trust us. It has been a bargain that worked for both sides. It has become a part of the ethical set that guides American journalism: The practitioners are required to give up activism, to commit to neutrality, in return for public trust.

The leaders of the "public-journalism" movement were right to see cynicism in the American press, to see polarization as one of its chief faults. But they were wrong to propose as a solution the abandonment of the journalist's independence. In fact, by so doing, they showed themselves to be completely cavalier to one of the most critical planks in the ethical platform of American journalism. In the debate that has ensued, the movement's leaders have often seemed to be ignorant of the value of this ethic and dismissive of the need for professionalism among journalists.

A better course, I think, would be to take the cornerstone observation of the "public-journalism" movement-that American journalism fixates on conflict-and do something constructive with that. Let us forget about organizing meetings and forget about activism; let us not destroy the independence and neutrality of the newsroom. Instead, let us inspire a new professionalism in which we combine a commitment to issue-oriented, explanatory journalism with a bold, aggressive articulation of American journalism's professional ethics and obligations. This new professionalism would harness the newspaper's distinctive strength-the capacity to organize, articulate and explain complex issues-to the power of professional ethics.

During much of the 20th century, journalists in this country have eschewed professionalism, preferring to rely solely on the power of the First Amendment. In fact, we often have hidden behind the First Amendment's protection of free speech, taking a legalistic position on our professional obligations.

I have attended numerous conferences at which we have been warned by editors, corporate officers and lawyers not to articulate the ethics and standards of our profession, or even of our individual newspaper. We were told that such an articulation could diminish the breadth of our First Amendment protection. We were warned that a strong position on the responsibilities of our profession could be used against us in libel cases.

One result of this timorous posture is a relative lack of professionalism among journalists. Compared to physicians, scientists, academics and even lawyers, ours is a poorly articulated profession in terms of standards and codes. In the last few years, however, this has begun to change, with more discussion about the need for professionalism.

There is a growing awareness that a clear articulation of ethics and responsibilities may be our best defense against a market-driven corporate culture that tends to narrow our field to a matter of what sells best. If we wish to be defined by the requirements of our proper role in an egalitarian democracy, not just by the whims of the marketplace, we must raise our voices even louder.

Frankly, if we do that, I think we will be heard by the corporate officers who direct our companies. In my experience, they are, by and large, good and conscientious men and women who, in trying to manage large and complicated institutions, are responding to the pressures and forces around them. In recent years, these pressures have increasingly represented market forces. As most of America's newspaper companies have become large, publicly traded corporations, their leaders have become acutely responsive to the markets and to market analysts. To some extent, this has been inevitable. For corporate officers to respond differently would have been to court failure. However, the best of these executives do not respond Only to market forces. They are also responsive to communities, to employees and to the obligations and responsibilities of the profession of journalism in a democratic society. If they are not, it may well be the fault of the folks in the newsroom. After all, who else other than reporters and editors should be pressing the case for professionalism?

In fact, I think we have sometimes been guilty of a sort of dual timidity: Hiding behind the First Amendment instead of articulating our ethics and values, and blaming corporate leaders for a failure to champion those values.

I believe it is the duty of the journalist to do these two things: One, to participate in a vigorous articulation of the ethics and values of our profession, and, two, to press the case for meeting these responsibilities on those who run the large media companies. Frankly, I think they will respond positively.

This much I know: To fail to do this-by continuing to hide behind the First Amendment and the profit motive-is to fail our duty.

I want to end by mentioning two professional developments of recent years that I find hopeful. The first is the effort by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to discuss and define our values, ethics and obligations with the aim of better understanding and more complete adherence to them. The ASNE Ethics and Values Committee recently completed a three-year program called the Values Institute, in which it convened discussions among editors, other journalists and the public and summarized them in written form. Most recently, the Ethics and Values Committee, which I have chaired for the past year, has embarked on another, similar three-year program, this time to better understand why newspapers are losing credibility with the public.

The second encouraging effort is the formation last year of a new group called the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which was organized by Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They have inspired an ongoing series of conferences around the nation, principally among journalists, to debate the role of the press in our society. Already, this group has proved valuable in rallying American journalists to a more concrete expression of our values and responsibilities. Because of my belief in the high potential of this group, which includes broadcast as well as print journalists, I signed on as a charter member last spring.

I think these two recent efforts represent an important shift in the thinking of the American journalism community: There is now more willingness to engage the matter of professionalism directly. There is a willingness to discuss our values and ethics in concrete terms, not just vague assertions of the primacy of free speech. We have a better awareness that it is our job-the job of editors and writers and other journalists-to ensure that our values have a place of as much importance as the commercial goals of our companies.

I recognize the validity of those commercial goals, of the profit motive. I recognize that without a healthy business we have nothing. But I reject a construct that suggests that only the commercial goals are important, that the obligations of the journalist in a democracy do not have an equal importance. I will not permit myself, my journalism or my company to be defined only in terms of those commercial goals, only in terms of "natural" markets, as that builder put it. I hope that the next five to ten years will see a strengthening of efforts like the Committee of Concerned Journalists and ASNE's Ethics and Values Committee.

However, I am not naive. I recognize that my hope rests almost entirely on the willingness of journalists to take some risks with their own security to engage this battle for a new professionalism.

I hope to find a greater willingness to articulate and fight vigorously for our ethics, our values and our responsibilities.