I am grateful to Washington and Lee University for something it did for me 45 years ago. My first trip to this campus was as a 15-year-old newspaper sports editor. The University was then the home for the Southern Interscholastic Press Association and regularly honored the best high school newspapers. Our paper, The Hickory Twig, (honest) was regularly a winner in the competition, and part of the reward was a trip here to mingle with other would-be journalists and dip into the school's intellectual richness. As much as any other factor, those trips sealed my early conviction that journalism was an important undertaking.

The title is "Disconnecting from Detachment: Six Arguments for an Ethic of Journalistic Purposefulness." Perhaps it would have been wise to add yet another subtitle: "This is NOT about the end of journalistic objectivity." But that might have kept some of the more combative of you away.

You will also note that the rather elaborate title does not use the words "public journalism." Make no mistake, however, this IS about public journalism; after all, it is what I have spent most of the last five years thinking about. The omission is deliberate. If all you know about public journalism is what journalists have written, you might have entered the hall with a predisposition; or some of you may not have entered at all.

I want to talk about the heart of public journalism, not some of its remote appendages. The heart has not been talked about very much, for reasons unclear (and frustrating) to me. Those reasons are perhaps best sought by asking the journalists who have written about the subject.

I cringe when I am invited into a discussion of "the ethics of public journalism." I cringe because far too much of the discussion about "ethics" in journalism is not really about ethics, in the sense of moral choices, of doing the right thing in complex circumstances. The "ethics" discussions are almost always about common-sense operational decisions and the avoidance of the appearance of a conflict of interest.

There's nothing wrong with that. It is a necessary exercise. Journalists should not take bribes (or, for that matter, murder people). We should not put words in people's mouths. We should honor the truth fearlessly. We should not have proprietary interests in the things we write about, or at the very least should disclose those interests. We should be fair, clear-eyed about the facts and honest with ourselves and others about them.

But the ultimate ethical question for journalists, as with any person, revolves around the question, "What are journalists for?" in both meanings of the word "for." That is the question public journalism seeks to answer in a deeper way. Until we face that question, we have no ethical framework in which to operate. Until we make our answer to that question a public one, our work will be forever suspect by non-journalists who know fairly clearly what they are "for" and don't for a minute buy our protestations that we are not "for" anything-except, of course, the First Amendment.

So let's go to the core of the matter of public journalism. The core is the interdependence of journalism and democracy, and that journalists have an obligation to accept its centrality and incorporate a concern for it into the ethical framework in which we operate. By interdependence I mean that democracy cannot exist without free and independent journalism, and journalism cannot exist without democracy. We all are in this business of democracy together: citizens, scholars, students and journalists.

In short form, here are the six arguments I will make:

1. Detachment is not the fount of journalistic credibility.

2. There is 'way too much truth out there.

3. An announced bias is just as good as no bias at all.

4. Detachment presents impossible human and moral dilemmas.

5. Self-interest and public interest require moving away from detachment.

6. Walter Lippmann doesn't work here any more.

You may have concluded that the primary title seems evasive. You would be wrong. Let me explain.

Disconnecting from detachment does not mean becoming improperly attached. A part of us, particularly the journalist part, dislikes ambiguity. If it is not white, it must be black. If we let go of detachment, we are inexorably drawn, like iron filings to a magnet, onto the opposite pole of attachment. And for journalists, becoming inappropriately and unprofessionally attached-emotionally, spiritually, practically-to the events and people we cover is anathema. And it should be.

But detachment and attachment are not either/ors; they form a continuum. On one end is the line of total detachment. It insists that the ultimate job of the journalist is to sit on a mountain watching the end of the world and our only obligation is to get the date and time right. Such a proposition presents, as we shall see, impossible human and moral dilemmas. The other end of the continuum is total involvement. I call it the William Randolph Hearst line: "You provide the pictures, I'll provide the war."

It is both possible and desirable for journalists to operate somewhere in between those undesirable poles, with the relative distance from either pole subject to the application of ethical judgment to the community's needs and situation.

That is what journalists do anyhow. We just do not admit it often enough, preferring to wrap ourselves in the cellophane of detachment, a disguise that fools no one save ourselves and an occasional first-year journalism student-for a little while.

Detachment has prestige in our culture. The notion of the detached observer as the most reliable observer is an artifact of the scientific movement. We should be able to weigh, measure, quantify everything, and therefore dispose of ambiguity, science tells us.

That usually works in the physical world, but not in the world of ideas, the world in which journalism and democracy exist. In that world, the most important challenges lie in the messy middle ground, which is full of ambiguity and has little prestige.

To appreciate what follows, therefore, it is first necessary to grasp a distinction between detachment and journalistic objectivity. We journalists use those two words interchangeably in reciting the creed of the denomination: It's-our-job-to-be-objective-detached-and-just-tell-the-news," we incant. To understand what I am arguing, you need to separate the two.

You will note that I talk about "journalistic objectivity." The adjective is added in order to avoid the unending philosophical discussion about whether true objectivity is an available human trait. Journalistic objectivity, for our purposes, has to do with seeing facts in the cold light of day; with fairness and balance; with leaving our biases out of our judgments insofar as possible; with intellectual honesty; with all of those traditional canons. They are Good Things and to be rigorously sought after and applied.

But they are not the same thing as detachment. As David Mathews of the Kettering Foundation so ably put it, we need to "distinguish between the canons of the profession-objectivity, for instance-and the silly axioms that have grown up around them, such as not caring."

Here is a helpful way of thinking about the difference between journalistic objectivity and detachment: Jonas Salk, who discovered the vaccine for polio, was a scientist. As such, he had to be objective about his data, else he could reach wrong conclusions. He also had to be objective because, under scientific protocol, other scientists using his data had to reach the same conclusions.

But he was not detached. He cared very much whether or not he found a vaccine. He did not go into the lab one day to see if there might be something interesting there. He had a purpose, a mission. As a professional scientist, however, he maintained objectivity.

So it can be with journalists. As professionals we can be clear-eyed about the facts but nevertheless concerned about the outcome of the events we write about.

With that distinction in mind, let's examine briefly six arguments for disconnecting from detachment. And, maybe, in the end, we will come up with a seventh, sort of like resting on the Seventh Day.

First, moving away from detachment is not perilous because detachment is not the fount of journalistic credibility. This can be realized with a simple mental exercise. Picture someone you know who has credibility with you: a friend, a pastor, a teacher, a family member. If you made a list of the attributes that give that person credibility with you it would include such virtues as honesty, intelligence, fairness, trustworthiness and the like. And at some point in that process, you would realize that you and that person share some basic values, some common concern about how life goes.

As journalists, we say that we are honest, intelligent, fair, trustworthy; that we possess all of those virtues. Except that we are not allowed to share values-other than the First Amendment of course. Credibility with others cannot arise from a person or profession that openly professes not to care, not to share at least some values with others.

What values should we share, you ask? I will suggest one later.

The second argument: There's 'way too much truth out there. If we describe our job as simply telling true things, we face an impossible task in an information-glutted era in which truths-even relevant truths-overwhelm us in sheer numbers. We must decide which tiny fractions of today's truths to tell in tonight's newscast or tomorrow's newspaper.

The thought puts me in mind of a story. Moses has been on the mountain for a long time. TV crews are waiting in the valley for his return. They spy a figure trudging down the mountain carrying two huge stone tablets, and they dispatch a runner to meet him. Breathless, the runner returns, talks to the TV news person, who turns to the camera and intones: "Moses is coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments from God, the two most important of which are...."

People pay journalists for our judgment about the relative importance of things. And our decisions about what tiny fraction of all those daily truths to use is unavoidably based in values that we hold. But simply describing them as "news values" or "news judgment" evades the issue. It is all news, in most meanings of the term. So what values do we apply, and how do we explain them to people?

The fact that we do not explain them, beyond that vague "news value" term, misstates the essence of what we are good at and contributes as much as any single factor to citizens' distrust of us and our motivations. What value should we espouse, you ask? As promised, I will get to that. That argument leads to the third: An announced bias is just as good as no bias at all. We will never convince a congenitally biased public that WE act without bias, even if we were to do so. Which, by the way, we do not. Therefore, we should clearly articulate our bias.

If we move away from that false detachment and act out of known, public values clearly and openly articulated, we have a chance of regaining some of journalism's lost authority. Such a pronouncement gives the public clear ways of holding us accountable. When we proclaim values other than the First Amendment and the eternally and annoyingly vague "news judgment," the public is understandably alienated. Those are values they may or may not understand in the same way we understand them and may not fully share. So they make up their own measuring devices and we, inevitably, fall short.

What bias, you ask? I will suggest one later.

The fourth argument for disconnecting from detachment is that detachment presents us with impossible human and moral dilemmas. Among them:

1. It dehumanizes journalists, and thus their product.

2. Sitting off on Detachment Mountain makes it impossible for us to hear the conversations going on below or see the myriad small actions and associations that form public life. Because we cannot see and hear from such a mental distance, those conversations and actions are rendered irrelevant in the world that we represent to readers and viewers. Therefore, it is a world that they know is incomplete if not downright inaccurate.

3. Most important, sitting off there on the mountain and recording the end of the world, with no other imperative than to record it, is simply amoral. That is, it does not trouble itself with moral questions, and it does not participate in a moral discourse.

What sort of discourse? What sort of questions? I will get to that.

The fifth argument is a matter of professional self-interest as well as the public interest. Moving away from detachment enables journalists to recapture and live out the motivation that brought most of us into the business in the first place.

Often when I talk with other journalists and students, I ask them to consider why they are journalists in the first place; what attributes do they share that drew them to the craft. The list always includes such things as, "I want to make a difference, I want to make things better." Then I point out that some things are missing from the list, for they always are. "How many of you," I ask, "are here because objectivity is your thing?" No hands go up. "How many are here because 'I'm just sort of a detached person?' No hands. "How many are here because you have no values?" No hands, and a chuckle or two. "Why is it, then, that you are in a profession that insists that you act that way?" I believe that much of the congenital unhappiness in our profession arises from that contradiction between personal motivation and professional demands-demands that I believe are artificial and unnecessary. We can, as journalists, have a clear public purpose beyond telling the news and yet maintain the things important to our profession such as credibility and journalistic objectivity.

What purpose? It is coming, I promise. The sixth argument is that Walter Lippmann doesn't work here any more. Literally, of course, that is true. He is dead, after all. But more importantly, some of his ideas don't work here any more.

The world that Lippmann's version of democratic realism projected is not working very well, particularly his insistence that government by elites is the only viable alternative for democracy.

When Lippmann, in the 1930s, characterized the public as composed of "hopelessly inept, bewildered, biased, frivolous and incurious" people, his philosophical opponent John Dewey had a prescient response: "The very ignorance, bias, frivolity, jealousy, instability which are alleged to incapacitate citizens" from governing themselves, he said, "make them even less able to submit passively to rule by a governing elite."

I believe that two emerging and important trends in public life represent the sounds of Dewey's citizens being distinctly un-passive. The rise of the conservative right with its demands of less intrusive government is one. The other is the still-tender but growing civic renewal movement where people are organizing over and around traditional government and institutional structures-including, by the way, over and around traditional journalism-to attack problems in their own ways.

Political ideology aside, each movement presents journalism with opportunities, provided we act out of a value that resonates with those disparate movements and also serves our own interest and that of democracy.

And here, as endlessly promised, is that value, that bias: Broad citizen engagement in public life in all its aspects. That's all. That is what this is all about. Democracy works best and best preserves its institutions-including journalism-when people are broadly engaged in public life. Public life is the way that democracy is expressed and experienced. It includes, but is hardly limited to, politics.

To the extent that people are not engaged in public life, democracy is dangerously weakened. And if democracy is weakened, so is the free press. They are inextricably bound together.

Further, if people are not engaged in public life, they have no need for the most important work that journalists do.

Whether we journalists like it or not, or are comfortable with it, the way we do journalism affects the way public life goes. Therefore, we incur an obligation to do journalism in ways that engage people in public life.

That is the value that we need to add to the undergirding principles of our profession, to make a part of our ethical construct. As a matter of fact, it should be the first principle, for all else depends upon that: The vitality of democracy, the ability of people to reasonably govern themselves, the revitalization of our profession.

So I could add a seventh argument, the ultimately ethical one. I will call it the Wilfred Brimley postulate: It's the right thing to do.
 

By special arrangement between Washington and Lee's Knight program in ethics and the University of Minnesota's Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law, this lecture was delivered at both universities in November 1997.