Remarks by Bob Giles

On accepting Gerald M. Sass Award at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication convention, Phoenix.

08.11.00

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Gerald M. Sass, left, and Bob Giles.

(Editor's note: Bob Giles, former Freedom Forum senior vice president and executive director of the Media Studies Center, was recently appointed curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The Gerald M. Sass Award is given by the Association of Schools of Journalism and Mass Communication to honor distinguished service to journalism. Until his retirement in 1997, Sass oversaw The Freedom Forum's journalism education and other programs; he continues as a Freedom Forum consultant. ASJMC is an association of journalism deans and administrators.)

This is a very personal moment.

It is personal because I am being honored in the name of a man whom I have known for more than 20 years and who has been a mentor, a role model and a friend.

Jerry Sass is uncommonly well centered. He does not need to impress people, but once in his company you are impressed by the sound insights, the self-deprecating humor and the gentle spirit of this man.

Jerry has a way of making people feel as if they matter. Sometimes, it is as simple a gesture as a thank you.

To me, this is one measure of good journalism: recognizing that people matter, that they can make a difference, that they should be listened to, acknowledged and encouraged.

I share with other recipients of the Gerald M. Sass Award the desire to receive it with the characteristic humility that has shaped his work and his life. Thank you, Jerry.

This is a personal moment because, as I've wandered from one journalistic post to another, my hard-working, loving companion and supporter is a woman who, time and again with compassion and understanding, has sacrificed her own career for mine — my wife, Nancy.

This is a personal moment because so many of my friends from journalism and journalism education are here this evening.

We have shared many struggles and successes in our common mission to improve journalism through the education of new generations of aspiring practitioners.

My connection to journalism education began quite by chance when Del Brinkman and Susanne Shaw invited me to Kansas in 1976 as the Gannett professional in residence.

At KU, I quickly came to understand how demanding is the craft of teaching. And there it was that I formed the first of many lifelong friendships with journalism educators.

It is a personal moment because I am in the midst of a transition from one extraordinary foundation to another, both of which share a passion for news.

I came to a life of journalism during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was a time when newspapers were more important in the world than they seem to be today.

The great papers of those days were no match for the great papers of today, perhaps.

But I think of it as a special time because of the pre-eminent journalists who were admired for the standards they upheld and for the ethical manner in which they worked.

I think of Scotty Reston and Harrison Salisbury, of Ralph McGill and Meyer Berger and Ed Lahey.

These men were my heroes.

My first boss was John S. Knight, who was, to me, a towering figure in our newsroom in Akron.

He seems today, in memory, as he seemed then — a formidable presence and a stern taskmaster who held us to his own high journalistic standards.

As I've thought about JSK over the years, I have come to appreciate even more that he was a voice for journalism when the ownership of newspapers was becoming big business.

From Jack Knight and from my other heroes I learned that only a responsible press can remain free, that only a responsible press deserves to be a public trust, that only a responsible press can, in the words of the Hutchins Commission, "provide a truthful, meaningful account of the day's events."

These men inspired me by practicing journalism as an independent instrument essential to the survival of a free society.

This is a personal moment because the presentation of this wonderful award allows me a few minutes to speak from the heart to the leadership of journalism education.

I come to you this evening to ask you to be a voice for journalism, each of you. And together, to be voices for journalism.

I ask you to be a voice for journalism in your own classes, in your school or department and on your campus.

And to be a voice for journalism by engaging in the national dialogue where a far-ranging examination of our practices and standards is reaffirming the core values of a free press in our democratic society.

The forces of change are being felt throughout the news industry.

These forces are driving the future of news. Digitization. The Internet. New distribution patterns. The power of the marketplace. Branding. The rise of shareholder interest.

Nancy Maynard, in her important new book, Mega Media, worries that news is becoming so frivolous and profit-driven that it will become useless as an instrument of public understanding.

"Strangely," she observes, "little helpful information has emerged from the debates over the future of information.

"The main reason: the United States has a news industry and a news-criticism industry. The news industry is reinventing itself around seismic changes in information technology.

"Some of the new journalism falls short by almost any standard. The critics are mostly reporters, editors and producers who mourn the good old days. They often scold but rarely provide solutions."

Journalism educators are studying these changes and restructuring course offerings, trying to create new values for learning that will effectively prepare students for the growing universe of opportunities spinning off from the new information technology.

The University of Kansas, a journalism school close to my heart and best known for the rigor of its reporting and editing courses, now extols its "pioneering curricular efforts to prepare students for media convergence."

Media convergence. The words fall uncomfortably on my ear.

Where, one might ask, do the core values of journalism fit in media convergence?

Is journalism at the center? Or has the traditional attention to standards been diminished by a new emphasis on teaching students how to write for multimedia audiences?

It is a fair question, a question that obligates me to ask the leadership of journalism education to be a voice for journalism that does not forget the traditional values in a world of remarkable new information technology and emerging opportunities.

Over nearly a century, each new technological innovation has been introduced with the expectation that it would change the fundamental values of our craft. First it was radio. Then television. Then cable. Then the Internet.

As each of these new media has cycled from birth to maturity, the values of journalism have survived, even though at the margins reckless practitioners have increasingly undermined public confidence in the credibility of journalists and their news organizations.

And once the fascination with the newest technology wore off, it was acknowledged again and again that it was the core values of journalism that enabled the new technology to serve the public.

Even if a generation from now we reach an era dominated by the Internet, in which the newspaper is distributed in a paperless form, the standards of journalism surely will be sustained.

Today, and as far ahead as any of us can dream, it remains true, I believe, that students must be firmly grounded in the professional disciplines of gathering and verifying information, thinking critically about the facts at hand and preparing a reliable, accurate and fair account.

The extent to which today's marvelous new technology — and tomorrow's — enables its practitioners to provide a public service will depend on journalism. I ask you to be a voice for that.

Leading news industry organizations and foundations are working hard to understand deeply held public concerns about declining standards that have contributed to the erosion of trust in news organizations.

The surveys, studies and focus groups that are part of these efforts document a significant resentment of the press and its practices.

At The Freedom Forum's center in New York, we have completed a three-year examination of how the public sees the problem of fairness at newspapers and in broadcast news.

Among our most important discoveries is that the public's definition of what is unfair is broader and deeper than that of most journalists.

The public believes that newspapers are unfair:

When they reflect arrogance and elitism in the language by which they characterize individuals and institutions.

When their stories lack authority because reporters and editors don't know enough about complex subjects in the news.

When they rely on anonymous sources and won't name names in stories.

When there is cultural bias, insensitivity, racism and lack of diversity in staffing and coverage.

When they are insensitive in the newsgathering process, taking advantage of people who are not media savvy or who are in shock as the result of personal tragedy.

When they concentrate on negative news, allow ideological or political bias in stories, or when they reflect the newspaper's editorial slant in the news columns.

When they get the facts wrong or present stories in an inaccurate context and are unwilling to publish full, candid and prompt corrections or clarifications.

When they frame stories inaccurately or won't acknowledge, after all the reporting, that maybe there is just no big story here.

When they are unwilling to devote adequate time and resources to worthy stories.

Some journalists might be tempted to dismiss these concerns as evidence that the general public is naïve or unsophisticated about the news media; that it simply doesn't understand; that it doesn't have the basic technical vocabulary of media criticism to intelligently articulate its concerns.

We think it would be a grave mistake to do so.

The public's tendency to group different kinds of journalistic missteps under the general heading of "unfairness" persuaded us that fairness is a larger and more important part of the overall media credibility problem than many journalists may have thought.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors' Credibility Project is in its fourth year and the sustained commitment to it by the society's leadership reflects an intense desire by editors to re-establish the daily newspaper as a center of public trust and public service in the community.

The Committee of Concerned Journalists, organized by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, has involved hundreds of working journalists in crafting an important statement of shared purpose, setting forth core principles that effectively define a theory of journalism grounded in a search for the truth and service to readers first.

It is a statement worthy of study in every reporting, writing and editing class.

At no time in my memory have combined voices spoken and acted with such passion and determination for the improvement of journalism.

I ask you to become one of these voices. Engage in the dialogue. Examine the findings and the recommendations.

Introduce your students to the standards and values that are being so widely discussed and debated.

Be a voice with staying power in your own institution to ensure that these standards become or remain at the core of your curriculum.

I ask you to be a voice for diversity in journalism — diversity in news coverage and in staffing.

As you prepare students to work in a multimedia world, you also have a responsibility to prepare them to live and work in a multicultural world.

As my friend Félix Gutiérrez says, the new generation of journalists must be open to learning about and being comfortable with those who are different.

This is one of the great challenges for journalism and journalism education.

If we cannot be inclusive in the recruitment of students and faculty, and in hiring for our newsrooms, how can we possibly carry out our mission of public service to a free society that becomes more racially and ethnically diverse by the day?

The New York Times has examined the question of how America talks about race in a brilliantly conceived series of stories.

These stories are voices for journalism because they demonstrate the very best uses of a newspaper's resources as a public service addressing an extraordinarily complex issue.

These stories should become the texts in journalism school classrooms everywhere for discussions about race and about covering news in a racially diverse society.

These stories echo a statement by the newspaper's deputy managing editor, Gerald Boyd, in the introduction to a remarkable new document on race and the news published by the School of Journalism at Missouri with funding from the Ford Foundation.

"Race is not a minority issue," writes Boyd. "It's the most important domestic issue this country faces."

A report published in 1996 by the Associated Press Managing Editors put the problem for newspapers in blunt language:

"America's newsrooms are two different worlds. The newsroom experiences of white journalists and of minority journalists contrast so sharply that they're nearly [negative] mirror images of each other."

The wide perceptual gap between white and minority newsroom professionals suggests how far improvements in hiring and promotion, and in news content, have to go before newspapers can become truly representative of the larger society they serve.

Over the years, individual leaders in journalism and their news organizations have made progress in hiring more journalists of color.

But in spite of bold initiatives and heroic efforts by individual journalists, editors and their newspapers, the gap between the racial and ethnic composition of America's newsrooms and America's communities has not narrowed.

The main source of talent over the years, of course, has been our schools of journalism.

The stark reality is that there are not enough aspiring journalists of color in the pipeline to significantly increase the diversity of the nation's newspaper newsrooms.

The leadership of ASNE and APME has concluded that mainstream journalism education is not likely to increase sufficiently the numbers of students of color who plan to follow the pathway to newspaper jobs.

They are now working in a partnership with The Freedom Forum to find aspiring journalists of color in nontraditional places and train them for newspaper work.

And so I ask you to be influential and effective voices in your own educational communities by opening a dialogue that will examine the issue of race as Gerald Boyd has defined it: the most important issue this country faces.

I ask you to do it through the recruitment of students, in the selection of faculty, in the content of courses, in carrying out your public service obligations and in helping students to find internships and full-time professional employment.

Finally, I ask you to be a voice for the First Amendment.

Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on freedom and liberty tell us precisely why the leaders of journalism education must be a voice for the First Amendment.

To Jefferson, freedom was the absence of restraints imposed by others ... and the presence of rigorous restraints imposed on ourselves.

I believe this to be the essence of our freedoms under the First Amendment.

And I see it as a glorious opportunity to inspire students with the clear sense of individual obligation to exercise these freedoms responsibly and with self-scrutiny.

I recall a news item from 1997, when Chelsea Clinton was a freshman at Stanford and a newspaper published her campus address.

In the public discussion that followed, a student at Berkeley was interviewed about it.

"What's wrong with printing where Chelsea Clinton lives?" he said. "Isn't that just freedom of the press? Isn't that the ... whatever amendment?"

My own concerns about the First Amendment and journalism education were influenced last year, during a conference of deans and directors who were talking with some of us at The Freedom Forum about teaching future generations of journalists.

When we asked about the First Amendment and its role in journalism education, the comments around the table conveyed a sense of indifference.

Yes, (some said,) we believe in the First Amendment, but we do not see it as our responsibility to be an advocate for First Amendment values when controversies arise on campus about free speech or free press. Nor is it a subject that has a high priority in our courses, (they said).

If there is no strong voice for the First Amendment in our schools of journalism, where on campus might it be found? we wondered. The answer, it seems, is nowhere.

The First Amendment Center's new survey on the State of the First Amendment suggests we are a nation that sometimes loses sight of its most fundamental freedoms.

Responses to the 2000 survey suggest that Americans respect the First Amendment as an ideal but are ambivalent when it protects offensive ideas or troubling speech or journalistic behavior.

Ken Paulson, director of the First Amendment Center, says that Americans today rarely see free speech or free press in a heroic light. "While the 45 words of the First Amendment have gone unchanged since their adoption, unchanged does not mean unchallenged," (Paulson wrote).

Respondents to the survey embrace the ideals of the First Amendment but have reservations about the reality, as is suggested in the response that says 51 percent believe the press has too much freedom to do what it wants.

The original American rebels who gave us the First Amendment clearly understood what freedom means.

This meaning should be critical to sustaining the values of academic freedom on the campuses of our colleges and universities, where the free expression of ideas and diverse points of view, even when unpopular, should be vigorously defended.

And so, in asking you to be a voice for the First Amendment, I encourage you to bring a 21st century spirit to an 18th century ideal, and to ensure that one of the bedrock values in your journalism classes is to develop broad student understanding that the right to express unpopular opinions and provocative ideas is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

As we come to the end of this wonderful evening together, I want to say how much I am looking forward to this new experience at Harvard as an opportunity to celebrate and advance the core purpose of the Nieman Foundation: to support and elevate the standards journalism.

I ask each of you to join me, in your own world of influence, to be strong and courageous voices for journalism.

When you speak for journalism, you are not speaking alone. I am willing to help and to join with others in newsrooms and foundations across the country who can lend moral support, resources and helping hands.

You have honored me tonight for a working life that has been anchored in a shared purpose: a passion for news and the love of an ideal that a democracy depends on a free and vigorous press.

Thank you very much.

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