KEYNOTE BREAKFAST

Wednesday morning, April 17

Richard A. Oppel, Austin (Texas) American Statesman and chair, ASNE Convention Program Committee, presiding: ASNE members have met in convention every year but one - 1945 as World War II reached its pitch. This is the first convention to begin with a keynote breakfast, and this is the first time in our Society's 74 years that an event has been named to honor someone. As you know, our keynote breakfast honors the memory of the late Jim Batten, who was for many years the Knight-Ridder chairman and CEO.

The Knight newspaper group was founded by John S. Knight along with his brother Jim Knight. Jack Knight once said, "There is no higher or better title than editor." Yes, there is no higher title than editor, and there are no better living examples of editors than the past presidents and current leader of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who grace our head table this morning. Each made notable contributions to ASNE's accomplishments. Let me introduce them in order of the year in which they served as ASNE president.

Beginning on my right are: Tim Hays, Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise, ASNE president at the 1975 convention; George Chaplin, Honolulu Advertiser, 1977; John Hughes, Christian Science Monitor, 1979; Tom Winship, Boston Globe, 1981; John Quinn, Gannett Newspapers, 1983; Creed Black, Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, 1984; Dick Smyser, Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Oak Ridger, 1985; Bob Clark, Harte-Hanks Newspapers, 1986; Michael Gartner, Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, 1987; Kay Fanning, Christian Science Monitor, 1988; and John Seigenthaler, USA Today and Nashville Tennessean, 1989.

And continuing on my left are: Loren Ghiglione, The News in Southbridge, Mass., 1990; Burl Osborne, Dallas Morning News, 1991; David Lawrence, Miami Herald, 1992; Seymour Topping, New York Times Co., 1993; Bill Hilliard, Portland Oregonian, 1994; Gregory Favre, Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, 1995; and our current president, Bill Ketter, Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger.

Now please show with your applause your appreciation to these great people.

Let me ask another distinguished person at our head table to stand now and be recognized. She is Jean Batten, Jim's wonderful wife. Jean, please stand and thank you for being here with us today.

Tribute to James K. Batten

Oppel: Jim Batten was a former executive editor of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, a paper that I had the privilege of editing for 15 years, so I know something about his unique intelligence, personal strength and lasting contribution to good journalism and successful newspapering. As someone who spent the longest span of his working career in an organization headed by so great a man, I am very much touched and pleased to ask Dave Lawrence to give his personal remembrance of my friend and his, the late Jim Batten. Dave succeeded Jim at the Observer, and I followed David.

Remarks by David Lawrence Jr.

Were Jim Batten back with us today, I would not even need to talk with him often. Just knowing he was around would be enough.

If we had the chance our conversation, just as it used to, would start with something personal. Usually, it would be family. We would spend most of our time talking about readers and what sort of newspapers they really need. Not a second would be spent on all this "woe is us" talk you hear so much in our craft today.

Jim Batten had a firm fix on the inevitability of change, and he faced the future with optimism and energy.

Though we worked only a floor apart in our time together in Miami, we were each so busy that days could go by without our seeing one another, but closeness is not best defined as being in the same building. Jim always seemed close by even during my years in Charlotte and Detroit.

A phone call here or a little note there - each so meaningful that I saved every one - or a face-to-face conversation - all those energized me. As much as I had on myself, I was always quite sure that Jim's burdens were greater. Taking up any of his time made me feel guilty, but he always made the time for everybody.

Values were at the soul of Jim's being, but his impact went even beyond values. No one in the leadership of the company for which I have worked almost half my life from Jack Knight to Tony Ridder has scrimped on values. Jim and Tony were partners as chairman and president, and while they might do things differently, they came out at the same place.

Beyond Jim's great values, both journalistic and human, he had been given a quite remarkable gift. Everyone, truly everyone, who knew him even briefly felt a personal relationship with Jim Batten. He had been gifted by God with the ability to touch others in a way that helped us see the godliness in ourselves.

Many of you know what I mean. In the presence of Jim Batten you knew you were with a man of luminous integrity, who cared about you and what you do, who no doubt could do what you did better than you, who knew the soul of this business is journalism, who knew that the best reason for making money in this business is to be able to afford to put good stories and pictures in the paper, who could be tough when necessary but whose gentleness was a powerful strength, who was never cynical, who was at heart a superb reporter, and who as an executive was able to ask the wisest questions, who saw compassion and decency as fully consistent with aggressive journalism, who was unafraid to use the word "love," who believed that shining the light on the human spirit looking at those people in the world who were trying to do the right thing made important reading, who believed in the concept of community and understood how vital a part a good newspaper could play in building community, who challenged us to put journalism and service to community not in simplistic boosterish ways but as a clear-eyed friend willing to criticize, unafraid to praise, urgent in a search for solutions.

Someone so decent comes along so rarely. Jim, ever the humble gentleman, would be distinctly uncomfortable with my saying all this, but it is all true, and Jim stood for the truth. So how then could I say anything less?

When asked to speak this morning, I promptly accepted because it seems to me so important that Jim Batten be remembered long beyond his lifetime, or for that matter, our lifetimes. Living at a time when change shoves all of us around, Jim knew that the only thing that could save us besides change itself is to remember why we came into this business in the first place and to remember the values and insist that they be maintained. Nobody, nobody believed more fervently than he in newspapers and democracy and the crucial connection between the two.

James Knox Batten lived just 59 years. It was way too short a time for him and for us. He was born and raised in rural Virginia. His father, a plant pathologist, died during Jim's teen-age years. Thinking to follow in his father's footsteps, Jim studied chemistry and biology at Davidson College. A summer job at the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer came to be a whole career. Jim Batten was in love, which is exactly the right word, with newspapers as well as with Jean and their three children. He covered the civil rights movement and then government and politics first from Charlotte, later from Washington. He began his editing career at the Detroit Free Press and later became the executive editor in Charlotte. From there he went to Miami on a path that would take him to the chairmanship of a giant newspaper and communications company called Knight-Ridder.

In Miami he participated in pioneering ventures and delivering news and information and advertising to people. Some of it, to be sure, worked beautifully, and some of it did not. Jim had more ideas than most of us, was never afraid to try things, but there was always a prudence to his risk taking.

He was a man who could agonize, too, torture himself worrying about people, but he would work that through with compassion and thoughtfulness and still make the necessary decisions.

As a citizen he was involved deeply. His was the voice never raised in anger or impatience. His was a quiet, unpretentious style. Only in the last year as people heard and read about his terrible struggle with brain cancer was his name more broadly known in Miami, particularly as he was honored for all the difference he had made without ever coveting credit. Jim always made sure he left plenty of running room for the people of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald to do their own thing.

Jim's involvement, most typically behind the scenes, reflected selfless leadership. The best example - indeed a signal moment of the 20th century in South Florida - was Jim Batten's pivotal role in resolving with honor and progress a black boycott after an absolutely dumb snub by Miami politicians of Nelson Mandela. In the complexities of an always complicated, frequently fragmented community, this was a situation that offended Jim Batten's basic moral compass. He could do nothing less than become involved.

Finally, and first, Jim Batten was a journalist. A visionary who believed to his core that journalism mattered, that if we could just get people connected (to use his phrase), just make them aware, just get them somehow, some way to read the paper, then they would care as well and the world would surely benefit. He saw that language used eloquently could move people to good and even noble purpose. He was committed to certain fundamental values that shaped his life and his newspapers: fairness and caring and community and diversity and decency toward all people.

In my memory Jim never scolded. His was the whisper, the conscience that made you want to do your best, reaching a little further than you would have thought you could. When you failed him, you had really failed yourself.

Like so many others, I never wanted to disappoint Jim Batten. I still do not. I do know that he would be so disappointed in us if we failed to listen, really listen to our readers and customers; if we failed to meet our challenges, if we shortchanged our values, if we did anything with dishonor.

Let us resolve to believe in ourselves, resolve to believe in the future of newspapers, resolve not to fail our readers, resolve to live up to what Jim Batten knew we had within us to achieve. To do anything less would be to fail the spirit of the deeply meaningful life of James K. Batten.

Thank you very much.

Oppel: David, thank you. And thanks, also, to Knight-Ridder for sponsoring our keynote breakfast.

Our next speaker is also an editor. He is the first person into his newsroom each morning. He runs the 5:30 a.m. news conference. He works on Page One layout. He edits stories. He writes headlines.

This editor grew up in East Grand Forks, Minn., son of a wheat and sugar beets farmer, drove a tractor at 12 and worked on the school newspaper. He and his wife Phyllis lived in a half dozen states while he was a UPI newsman from 1962 until 1978. He has covered the peace movement, big city race riots, and dodged Richard Daley's nightclub-swinging police in 1968. More than once he has been mistaken for actor Christopher Reeve.

He has tackled his year as ASNE president with unceasing cheer, optimism, and creativity, as we tackled together a cantankerous convention schedule and as he led the Society in many ambitious and important projects. He now leads a staff of 150 on a 90,000-circulation paper that competes with two metros. His paper has won many awards, including repeated recognition by the New England Newspaper Association as the best medium-sized newspaper in the region. You will find none of these awards on his office wall, but you will find an oversized copy of the First Amendment. If you search for the core values of great newspapering - accuracy, fairness, passion and optimism for people, service to community, high standards, and great professional skills - you need go no further than to sit down with William B. Ketter, editor of the Quincy (Mass.) Patriot Ledger, and president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

ASNE President's Speech by William B. Ketter

Thank you very much, Jean Batten, for joining us at breakfast this morning. Jim was indeed a very special person as Dave Lawrence pointed out.

In crafting this president's report to the convention, I sought inspiration from one of my heroes of history - John Adams, the second president of the United States and a native son of my newspaper's hometown of Quincy, Mass.

Adams, as most of you know, was the erudite philosopher of the American Revolution. He loved liberty and he loved the law, and he spoke and wrote eloquently about both.

But what you may not know about John Adams is that he was also a successful farmer, and he had some very pragmatic advice on how to prosper from the soil. Cutting fields out of the forest was not the most important thing, Adams counseled. That was easy. No, the real key to successful farming in New England was clearing the rocks beneath the ground so you could sink roots that would grow strong and produce ample crops.

Well, your American Society of Newspaper Editors sank its roots into the soil of American journalism 74 years ago, and I am pleased to report to you today that those first roots are still flourishing.

This is so because of the rock-clearing work done by many of you in this room over the years, and by the members of the various ASNE committees over the past 12 months, and because of the steadfast effort of ASNE legal counsel, Dick Schmidt, executive director, Lee Stinnett, and his inspired staff.

With your permission, I would like to touch briefly on some of the major new plantings by your Society since we last assembled - plantings that are intended to help newspapers cope with the enormous challenges confronting us in this time of changing technology and newsroom economics.

In that regard, it strikes me that we face no greater challenge than striving to better understand, to truly understand, what today's readers both need and want from us. And then to determine how we can best meet those expectations and needs without imperiling the essential, special role of an independent press that holds no fear or favor. I am not one to advocate that newspapers should seek to be warm and fuzzy, like the family pet, in order to be loved by readers. By definition, that is not our lot in life.

But we can and we should seek respect and affection as credible providers of news and analysis and opinion and, yes, even entertainment.

We can and we should search for ways to make our newspapers more compelling and more relevant to the issues of our time. We can and we should learn to listen to the communities that we seek to serve.

We can and we should suggest solutions along with describing problems. We can and we should strive to strengthen our core mission, which is to serve as a guide dog to help citizens conduct their lives, and as a watchdog against abuses of power and privilege. We can and we must reflect the changing face of America in our newsrooms and in the content of our newspapers. We can and we must look for ways to narrow the gap between public expectations and press performance.

This is our purpose in life.

The task, to be sure, is a daunting one because the level of public mistrust is high. Yet your Society has tried to make a difference this past year by creating the ASNE Journalism Values Institute, with the generous financial support of the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.

You will hear a lot more about the institute at the general session right after this breakfast, but essentially it is a forum for journalists and citizens to talk about what Americans value in their news media, what they expect from journalism and why newspapers are absolutely critical to a democratic society. It is an effort to help all of us improve our capacity to listen and to expand our definition of news. And, yes, it is an effort to help newspapers connect with their communities in a way that encourages editors to take on local struggles that are difficult and dangerous and complex and noble. This also is our purpose in life.

I am not among those editors who believe readers alone should set our agenda. Or that we should put yellow, smiley faces on events that reflect badly on a community. I am one of those editors who feel it is important to listen closely to readers before the newspaper sets its priorities. We are, after all, the last true mass medium. So the bigger our ears, the better we can give people a common base of knowledge upon which to make choices.

There is no need to sponsor formal community meetings, though I do not disparage this approach. Better, however, to get out of the office and engage everyday people in conversation and find out what is troubling them. There are plenty of places to listen and learn about what makes ordinary citizens mad, glad, sad, or even scared. My favorite - and most fertile - listening posts are the commuter train stations, the coffee shops, the post offices, the convenience stores, the shopping malls, the church halls, the day-care centers, the Laundromats, places where people of all ages and color and backgrounds congregate. And, yes, the top editors need to get off their duffs and get out there. Relying only on market surveys and on those people who call or write the paper will inevitably leave you with an incomplete picture of your communities and an inadequate sense of place.

The ASNE Journalism Values Institute has sufficient funding for one more year of study. It is a worthy effort to improve the quality of journalism that we practice, a significant step toward narrowing the respect gap with the public. I urge this Society, in concert with like-minded journalism organizations, to find the means to make this institute a permanent fixture. It is especially important when you peer into the future and consider the potential lax values in the raw information world of cyberspace.

Now, I would like to talk for a minute or two about some VIPs and what your Society is doing to connect them to newspapers before they are lost to cyberspace. I am referring to those very important people ages 16 to 29. They are our future, and it should be our purpose in life to serve them. We have blithely branded this age group as Generation X even though members of it do not like that label. Day by day, individually and collectively, these twenty-somethings are forming habits about where to go for information that is important to them. And, unfortunately, we are not the preferred source, at least not to the extent that we have been in the past. We are not seen as for people like them.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we can turn this tide in favor of newspapers if we will only change the way we treat these young people throughout the paper, and especially in the main sections of the paper. They are put off by papers that patronize them in special sections and ignore them as serious citizens in the main sections. They are frustrated by news coverage that portrays them as body-piercing, tattoo-loving devils, or, alternatively, as guileless angels, resisting the great temptations of sex, drugs, and booze.

They do not want us to generalize about them. They do not want us to talk down to them.

They do want newspapers to show concern for what they know, what they think, and what they are striving to learn. And if we do that, they say they will read us. Not all of them, of course, but a lot more of them than are reading us now.

That, I am happy to report, is the encouraging conclusion of a yearlong study of this twenty-something generation by your Future of Newspapers Committee. The science of these findings comes from the consumer research company of Yankelovich Partners, with the assistance of the Research Federation of the Newspaper Association of America, in particular, Knight-Ridder's Jenny Fielder.

Details of the study will be presented at Friday morning's general session. I believe you will find value in the specifics. I know you will get a deeper understanding of this generation. And I hope you will not adopt the attitude of Jeff MacNelly's cartoon editor, Purple Martin Shoemaker, who replied - "What the hell do they know?" - when informed that 70 percent of his readers under 30 considered the media a bunch of arrogant, pompous, hypocritical know-it-alls.

We are not any of those things, right? But as the researchers always tell us, perception is reality and that extends to how we see ourselves as well as how the outside world sees us.

I mention this because I am becoming increasingly disturbed with the doomsday mind-set we are inciting about newspapers. We are needlessly scaring ourselves into a state of panic.

Even more worrisome, we are scaring the people that work for us into thinking they are crewing the Titanic. God knows what we are doing to those bright young minds thinking about newspaper journalism as a career. If we keep it up, we will surely frighten this business to death, and that is not our purpose in life.

The public, our readers, has every reason to wonder just what is going on with newspapers. Our behavior is out of sync with reality and our best interests. We cannot even get the story right about each other, and I speak from personal experience, having been done in more often than not this year by cynical reporters with a pre-cooked angle on my newspaper's need to reduce costs in the face of obscene newsprint price increases and a sluggish local economy.

I am not appealing for sympathy in mentioning my personal experience with what David Lawrence calls "having journalism done on you." But I do want to impart the message that if we, as an industry, do not require a more accurate, informed, insightful, and just plain fair coverage of our business by our business, then we must go on suffering the fate of fools.

I am also not trying to delude anyone about the state of our industry. We face big problems - problems that go to the very bone of our business. Nor do I want anyone to think I am comfortable with what is going on with the current wave of cost-cutting and downsizing in newspapers. Because I am not. Reducing the news hole and restricting the ability to gather the news that people need and want makes no strategic sense to me. Newspapers are still purchased for their news value, and if you depreciate that value over time, the enterprise will wither.

This Society, this organization of directing editors, has a special responsibility to remind the nation's owners and publishers that news content is essential to success. That it is, after all, what we sell to the marketplace; that this diminished reportorial presence in the community inevitably leads to fewer people relying on newspapers. And that, in turn, results in fewer readers, fewer advertisers, fewer pages in the paper, and down and down the numbers go.

Analyst John Morton describes this negative spiral as "newspapers eating their seed corn." And he is so right. You cannot grow strong and healthy newspapers by denying the newsroom nourishment, by scrimping on our capacity to provide examination and analysis of news that affects people's lives and enables them to make judgments on the issues of the time.

This Society also has a special responsibility to remind the nation's newspaper owners of the need for just plain decency in how they treat their newsrooms as this business goes about the job of reinventing and re-engineering itself. There should be minimal standards of manners and grace that go with reorganization.

When an editor is fired by facsimile from chain headquarters, that is wrong. When a columnist is humiliated by the front office in the newsroom, that is wrong. When the staff learns that the editor is being replaced during a question-and-answer session with the staff, while the editor is on vacation, that is wrong. And furthermore, it is demeaning to the people involved.

The right to appoint and dismiss journalists is a right that belongs to the owners of newspapers. But those owners need to understand that the integrity of a newspaper is put at risk when they practice that right cavalierly and without respect for the need for editorial independence.

I mention this because I am an unreconstructed traditionalist when it comes to the value of newspapers to a democratic society. Newspapers, more than any other medium, can and do help people cope with the enormous flood of information, wanted and not wanted. While we no longer are the first source for breaking news, we can, better than anyone, tell people how and why things happen. We can sort out order from disorder; sense from nonsense. More important, we can cause people to think - and we can move them to action. We can, that is, if we will stick to our knitting of diligent and aggressive and passionate reporting of the news every day and in depth.

If we fail in this responsibility, we fail the more than 100 million Americans who read our newspapers every day and who count on us to tell them about what is going on around them and to tell them what is interesting and what is important in their lives and in the lives of their communities.

There is also an urgent need to extol the fundamental worth of newspapers to our democratic society because our adversaries have never been more aggressive in their efforts to restrict freedom of expression in this country. In the past year alone, new legislative efforts were initiated in Washington:

And that, my fellow editors, only covers the highlights - or more appropriately, the lowlights - from Congress. In addition, federal agencies in Washington alone have denied more than 100 requests from access to government records last year ... the backlog of newspaper requests under the Freedom of Information Act is piled higher than the Washington Monument ... the CIA resurrected its policy allowing spies to pose as journalists, and recruiting reporters to serve as government spies ... the courts are still issuing prior restraint orders ... and our cameras are being barred from far too many state courtrooms as a backlash to the O.J. Simpson trial.

It is my view that this all-out assault on stopping the press stems partly from the long-practiced sport of media bashing - of blaming the messenger for what is wrong with society.

But that is too easy an answer and it is not the complete one. We newspapers are also at fault because we insist on casting this fight for the First Amendment and for greater access as some inalienable press right - and it is not. The rights, liberties, and immunities of our Constitution ... of our laws ... of our democratic society, belong foremost to the people, to the citizens of this land. We are merely their stewards, their surrogates. And, frankly, we need to do a far better job of pointing that out whenever those rights, liberties, and special immunities come under attack.

There is, I believe, a huge, untapped market of good will out there for newspapers - if only we will point out the people's stake in what we do and get off this tired stuff about being members of a special class of citizens, a class apart from others.

So let us promise at this convention to put the rights and the needs of the people and their communities first in our news coverage and in our fight for freedom of expression. John Adams would call it clearing the rocks - so our roots can grow strongly well into the next millennium.

Thank you for your patience. I hope that you enjoy the 1996 ASNE convention, and I pray that you will find it useful to the task of putting out better newspapers.

Oppel: Thank you, Bill, for your outstanding work as ASNE president. Many of the fruits of your efforts will be showcased in the convention that lies ahead. Thank you for your strong efforts that will help us extend the reach of newspapers.

Salman Rushdie may be the world's most famous writer, and he may well be the one person about whom we can truthfully say he needs no introduction. The Miami Herald's book editor recently described Salman Rushdie's latest novel as "brimming with political, artistic, and religious allegory, fairy tales, family sagas, magic, manic hilarity, and pyrotechnic wordplay."

We all know who Salman Rushdie is. He is the man who is not supposed to be alive. Because of what he wrote, the religionist regime of Iran proclaimed him a dead man, walking and talking only as long as it would take its fanatical followers to find him and put a bullet through his body. That was more than seven years ago. And today, after a much too long period of cruel isolation and deprivation, he is once again walking and talking, and writing, in a proud and often lonely defiance of the dark forces of the world for whom any shedding of light is such a terrifying notion that they would resort to the shedding of innocent blood to prevent it. Though not completely free - the Ayatollah may be dead but his death sentence still hangs over Salman Rushdie's head wherever he goes - Mr. Rushdie is enjoying a reasonable amount of freedom, to move about and to continue speaking out against those who would silence him, and to promote his writing.

Most of us here in this room can look at what happened and say, "It cannot happen here." It is such an alien concept to us. Yet, even in this free country there are some forces who would shut down, or render impotent, a medium that still, in spite of all its flaws, sees as its reason for being the shedding of light, and they would do so in the name of freedom - or God.

We here in this room, perhaps more than anyone else, need to be reminded of the importance of courage in what we do. For while it is terribly easy to rail against the Ayatollahs on the other side of the world, it is not so easy to stand up to those in our own communities from the petty to the powerful, who seek to enlist us and our newspapers in their crusades to silence every voice and every belief not their own.

Not all of us hear the call to be heroes like Salman Rushdie, and there is not shame in that. But every one of us can respond to the haunting call to defend the sacred right of all people to express their views. And equally as important, because of who we are and the power we hold, to make it easier for them to do so. Please join me in welcoming a person who has truly earned our admiration - Salman Rushdie.

Keynote address by Salman Rushdie

Thank you. Good morning.

For me it is a great and somewhat daunting privilege to face a press conference of this size, an ultimate press conference, at an hour of the morning at which I am usually not really capable of speech. Although I have to say that after having gone through a recent American book tour, this really feels a bit late. There was one day this January in Chicago when I found myself sitting up in President Reagan's bed - I should say not at the same time as President Reagan - and giving, by telephone, no less than eleven radio interviews before 8 a.m. This is a personal best for me. I recall that when I came to Washington it must have been just about exactly four years ago to participate in the free speech conference here, an aide of President Bush, explaining why no member of that administration was willing to meet me, remarked that, after all, I was "just an author on a book tour." It is hard to put into words how sweet, how satisfying it felt this January, what a sense of overcoming it gave me, in spite of all those early starts, finally to be, indeed, just an author on a book tour. An author on a book tour, what is more, sleeping in the President's bed.

Speaking of presidents, it may interest you to know that when I was finally to visit the White House, during the present administration, the meeting was arranged for the day before Thanksgiving, and scheduled to take place immediately before President Clinton's unbreakable appointment on the White House lawn with a certain Tom Turkey, whom he was to pardon before the assembled press corps. It was therefore understandably unclear whether the president would have time to be involved in my own visit. On the way to the meeting I found myself hysterically inventing headlines for the next day's newspapers: "Clinton Meets Turkey - Rushdie Gets Stuffed" for example. Fortunately, this imaginary headline proved to be incorrect and the meeting with President Clinton was interesting and very useful to me.

I was wondering what I might usefully and interestingly say to you today. I was wondering, for example, what, if any, common ground might be occupied by novelists and journalists, when my eye fell on the following brief text in a British national newspaper: "In yesterday's Independent we stated that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber is farming ostriches. He is not."

One can only guess at the brouhaha concealed beneath these admirably laconic sentences: the human distress, the protests. As you know, Britain has been going through a period of what one might call heightened livestock insecurity of late. As well as the mentally challenged cattle herds, there has been the alarming report of a great ostrich farming bubble or swindle now burst. In these overheated times, a man who is not an ostrich farmer, when accused of being one, will not take the allegation lightly. He may even feel that his reputation has been slighted.

Plainly, it was quite wrong of the Independent to suggest that Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was actually breeding ostriches. He is of course the celebrated exporter of musical turkeys. But if we agree for just a moment to permit the supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent farming of ostriches to stand as a metaphor for all the world's supposedly covert and allegedly fraudulent activities, then must we not also agree that it is vital that these ostrich farmers be identified, named, and brought to account for their activities? Is this not at the very heart of the project of a free press? And might there not be occasions on which every editor in this room would be prepared to go with such a story on the basis of less-than-solid evidence in the national interest perhaps on the evidence of some ostrich-involved Deep Throat?

I am arriving by degrees at a sort of point, which is that the great issue facing both writers of journalism and of novels is that of determining and then publishing the truth. For the ultimate goal of both factual and fictional writing is the truth, however paradoxical it may sound to say so. And truth is slippery and hard to establish. Mistakes, as in the Lloyd Webber case, can be made. And if truth can set you free, it can also land you in hot water. Fine as the word sounds, truth is all too often unpalatable, awkward, unorthodox. The armies of received ideas are marshaled against it. The legions of all those who stand to profit by useful untruths will march against it. Yet it must, if at all possible, be told.

But you may object, can there really be said to be any connection between the truth of the news and the kind of truth one finds in the world of the imagination? In the world of facts, after all, a man is either an ostrich farmer or he is not. In fiction's universe, he may be fifteen contradictory things at once.

Let me attempt an answer.

The word "novel" derives from the Latin word for new; in French, nouvelles are both stories and news reports. A hundred years ago, people read novels, among other things, for information. From Dickens' "Nicholas Nickleby," British readers got shocking information about the existence of poor schools like Dotheboys Hall and such schools were subsequently abolished. "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "Huckleberry Finn," and "Moby Dick" are all, in this news sense, information heavy.

So: until the advent of the television age, literature shared with print journalism the task of telling people things they did not know and sometimes things they did not want to hear.

This is not really any longer the case either for literature or for print journalism. Those who read newspapers and novels now get their primary information about the world from the television news and the radio. There are exceptions, of course. The success of that excellent, lively novel "Primary Colors" shows that novels can still occasionally, just occasionally, lift the lid on a hidden world more effectively than the finest reporting. And of course the broadcast news is highly selective and brief and newspapers provide far greater breadth and depth of coverage. But many people now read newspapers, I suggest, to read the news about the news. We read for opinion, attitude, spin. We read not for raw data, not for "facts, facts, facts," but to get "take" on the news, usually a take on the news that we like. Now that the broadcasting media fulfill the function of being first with the news, newspapers, like novels, have entered the realm of the imagination. They both provide versions of the world.

Perhaps this is clearer in a country like Britain where the press is primarily a national press than in the United States where the great proliferation of local newspapers allows print journalism to provide the additional service of answering to local concerns and adopting local characteristics. The successful quality papers in Britain - amongst the dailies, the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph, the Financial Times - are successful because they have clear pictures of who their readers are and how to talk to them. (The languishing Independent of ostrich notoriety once did, but appears latterly to have lost its way.) They are successful, these newspapers, because they share with their readers, a vision of British society and of the world.

The news has become a matter of opinion.

And this puts a newspaper editor in a position not at all dissimilar from that of a novelist. It is for the novelist to create, communicate, and sustain over time a personal and coherent view of the world, a vision of the world that entertains, interests, stimulates, provokes, and with any luck nourishes his readers. It is for the newspaper editor to do very much the same thing with the pages at his disposal. In that specialized sense, and let me emphasize that I mean this as a compliment! We are all in the fiction business now.

Sometimes, of course, the news in newspapers seems fictive in a less complimentary sense. Over Easter, a leading British Sunday newspaper ran a front-page lead story announcing the discovery of the tomb - indeed, of the very bones - of Jesus Christ himself; a discovery, as the newspaper was quick to point out, with profound significance for the Christian religion, whose adherents were, at that very moment, celebrating Jesus' physical ascension into heaven, presumably accompanied by his bones. Not only Jesus, but Joseph, Mary, someone called "Mary II" (presumably Magdalene), and even a certain Judah, son of Jesus had been discovered, the banner headlines proclaimed. A long way down this article, it was a very long article - far further down than most readers would have read - it was revealed that the only evidence that this was indeed the family of Jesus was the simple coincidence of the names; which, the journalist, admitted, were among the most common names of the period. Nevertheless, she insisted, the mind could not resist the speculation.

Such nonsense has perhaps always been a part of newspapers' entertainment value. But the spirit of fiction permeates the press in other ways as well.

One of the more extraordinary truths about the soap opera that is the British royal family is that to a large extent the leading figures have had their characters invented for them by the British press. And such is the power of the fiction that the flesh-and-blood royals have become more and more like their print personae, unable to escape the fiction of their imaginary lives.

The creation of characters is, in fact, rapidly becoming an essential part of print journalism's stock-in-trade. Never have personality profiles and people columns, never has gossip, occupied so much of a newspaper's space as it now does. The word "profile" is apt. In a profile, the subject is never confronted head-on, but receives a sidelong glance. A profile is flat and two dimensional. It is an outline. Yet the images created in these curious texts (often it must be said with their subjects' collusion) are extraordinarily potent. It can be next to impossible for the actual person to alter, through his own words and deeds, the impressions they create. And thanks to the mighty Clippings File, they are also self-perpetuating.

A novelist, if he is talented and lucky, may in the course of a lifetime's work offer up one or two characters who enter the exclusive pantheon of the unforgotten. A novelist's characters hope for immortality; a profile journalist's perhaps, for celebrity. We worship, these days, not images, but Image itself. Any man or woman who strays into the public gaze becomes a potential sacrifice in that temple. Often, I repeat, a willing sacrifice, willingly drinking the poisoned chalice of Fame. But for many people, and I am obliged to include myself, the experience of being profiled is perhaps closest to what it must feel like to be used as a writer's raw material, what it must feel like to be turned into a fictional character, to have one's feelings and actions, one's relationships and vicissitudes, transformed, by writing, into something subtly or unsubtly different. To see ourselves mutated into someone we do not recognize.

For a novelist to be thus rewritten is, I recognize, a case of the biter bit. Fair enough you may say. Nevertheless, something about the process feels faintly, and I stress faintly, improper.

In Britain, intrusions, increasing intrusions into the private lives of public figures have prompted calls from certain quarters, mostly of the right, for the protection of privacy laws. It is true that in France where such laws have existed for quite a while, to take one example, the illegitimate daughter of the late President Mitterrand was able to grow up unmolested by the press; but where the powerful can hide behind the law, one has to ask might not a good deal of covert ostrich farming go undetected? My own feelings continue to be against laws that curtail the investigative freedoms of the press. But speaking as someone who has had the uncommon experience of becoming for a time a hot news story, of as my friend Martin Amis put it, "vanishing into the front page," it would be dishonest to deny that when my family and I have been the target of press intrusions and distortions, those principles have been sorely strained.

However, I must say that my overwhelming feelings about the press are ones of gratitude. No writer could have wished for a more generous response to his work -or for fairer and more civil profiles! - than I have received in America - and around the world- this year. And in the long unfolding of the so-called Rushdie affair, American newspapers have been of great importance in keeping the issues alive, in making sure that readers have kept sight of the essential points of principle involved, and even in pressuring America's leaders to speak out and act. I am happy to be able to take this opportunity to thank you all for that.

But there is more than that to thank you for. I said earlier that newspaper editors, like novelists, needed to create, impart and maintain a vision of society to their readers. In any vision of a free society, the value of free speech must rank the highest, for that is the freedom without which all the other freedoms would fail. Journalists do more than most of us to protect those values; for the exercise of freedom is freedom's best defense, and that is something you all do every day.

It seems to me, however, that we live in an increasingly censorious age. By this I mean that the broad and indeed international, acceptance of First Amendment values, First Amendment principles is being steadily eroded. Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. Political correctness and the rise of the religious right provide the pro-censorship lobby with further cohorts. I would like to say just a little about just one of the weapons of this resurgent lobby, a weapon which is interestingly enough, used by everyone from anti-pornography feminists on what I suppose they would call the left to religious fundamentalists on the right and I mean the concept of "respect."

On the surface of it, "respect" is one of those ideas nobody is against. Like a good warm coat in winter, like applause, like ketchup on your fries, everybody wants some of that. Sock-it-to-me-sock-it-to-me, as Aretha Franklin has it. But what we used to mean by respect - what Aretha Franklin meant by respect - that is a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention, has very little to do with the new ideological usage of the term.

Religious extremists these days demand respect for their attitudes with increasing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people's rights to religious belief must be respected. After all, the First Amendment defends those rights as unequivocally as it defends free speech. But now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs, to hold that they are suspect or antiquated, or wrong - that in fact, they are arguable - is incompatible with the idea of respect. When criticism is placed off limits as "disrespectful," and therefore offensive, something rather strange is happening to the concept of respect. Yet in recent times both the American NEA and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of "respect" as a touchstone for their funding and programming decisions.

Other minority groups - racial, sexual, social - have also demanded that they be accorded this new form of respect. To "respect" Louis Farrakhan, we must understand is simply to agree with him. To "diss" his is equally simply to disagree. But if dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of "dissing," then we have indeed succumbed to the Thought Police.

I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow citizens' opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not a calm and eventless place, that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is that disrespect that is important and it is the disrespect of journalists for power, for orthodoxies for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, perhaps even for editors, that I would like to celebrate this morning, and that I urge you all, in the name of freedom, to preserve. Thank you.

Questions from the floor

David A. Zweifel, Madison (Wis.) Capital Times: Mr. Rushdie, you are a victim of what we know in this country as Islamic fundamental fanaticism. Do you see any similarities and similar dangers in what we are seeing as the rise of the Christian fundamental fanaticism?

Rushdie: Well, I think there is quite a lot of Christian fanaticism, Hindu fundamentalism, which is one of the subjects of my new novel, "The Moor's Last Sigh," Islamic fundamentalism, after all the prime minister of Israel was not shot by an Islamic fundamentalist, so there is Jewish fundamentalism too. There is a lot of it about. And clearly there are some differences in that I think in many cases these phenomena arise from different and local reasons. For instance, you could trace the origin of Algerian fundamentalism to the corruption of the previously existing secular regime. You could trace the origin of Iranian fundamentalism to the Shah of Iran's rather ruthless elimination of most political opposition except that which centered on the mosque. And so on.

It is a long question to answer but to offer you a thought, it seems to me that essential notion of the 20th century's secularist, modernist project has been the idea of progress. It has been the idea that if one participates in that project, gradually for most of us things will get better.

Another important notion of the 20th century has been the idea of uncertainty. The idea that we, especially after the experience of such certain philosophies as for example Nazism and Communism, we shy away from the idea of certainty. We accept a degree of unknown as an essential part of building a free society. Now the problem with progress is that for many people of the world it was not delivered. The problem with uncertainty is that for many people in the world, it is difficult to live with that. And so as times get hard and the world does become a very uncertain place and people's lives do not improve, it seems to become for some people easy to reach out for an old and crude certainty and then seek to impose that. And I think if there is kind of a broad movement in which all these different forms of fundamentalism participate, it may have something to do with that.

I do think, however, in the end it is more interesting to look at the local differences. I think the reason why the Oklahoma bombing happened is really not very much like the reason why Hindu fundamentalism is about to do rather well as far as one can see in the Indian general election or very much to do with the Ayatollah Khomeini. I think really perhaps the differences are more interesting than the similarities.

Joan Connell, Religion News Service: We live in a world where it seems nothing is sacred and yet everything is sacred. And in this country, church and state are separate and yet our public discourse is shot through with the language of religion and the language of morality, and I think journalists have a real hard time with that, untangling all of those different threads. What do you think, from your perspective as a social critic and certainly a wonderful artist, what do you think are the stories we are failing to tell about this very complicated situation?

Rushdie: How long have you got? I am probably the wrong person to ask about religion, I have to say, because I have had rather an object lesson in the ability of religion to narrow and distort the conversation. Now I am willing at the theoretical level to accept that it can also broaden and deepen the conversation, but my own experience is rather negative. So if I am asked for one sound bite on religion, I would say that I was against it. The great British scientist Richard Dawkins who gets into a lot of trouble for his views on religion every so often pointed out with what seemed to me blinding clarity that every explanation that has ever been given by any religion about the origin of the universe is wrong. And why cannot we say that? No, I mean I think to put it another way, there is something about religion that, whether we are religious or not, does operate on us at a very deep level. And that is in the same way as the Greeks had their myths, we have our stories too. And those stories operate on us whether we believe in them or not. There is plenty of evidence that the Greeks rather sophisticatedly did not believe in their own religion, and that they knew that they were stories and even though they knew they were stories, they still were fantastically powerful and actually defined the way in which people lived. One of the reasons why I have written the way that I have written is that if you come from a background such as mine in India, religion is just such a colossal fact that, India is also ostensibly a secular democracy. There is a separation of church and state there also and yet there also public and political discourse is constantly religious in terminology. And it is simply impossible to walk away from that, simply impossible to walk around that. If you are going to write about India, if you are going to write about the United States, I suspect, you have to learn and accept the fact that these are very religious countries. And yet they are very religious countries that also have an ideology of secular liberalism, both of them, and that there are contradictions between those. I guess it would be a boring society if it did not have contradictions. But I suppose I have become clear of which side of that fence I am on.

Oppel: I think we have time for one more question.

Rosemary J. Goodreau, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot: I was curious about your meeting with the president. You said that you found it useful talking to him. I was wondering what was useful and, too, if the man that you met that day was the man you expected to meet given what you have read about him in the press.

Rushdie: Well, I have to say unfashionably I liked President Clinton. I thought he was rather nice. I had 10 minutes with the President in the middle of an hour and a half meeting with (Secretary of State) Warren Christopher and (national security adviser) Anthony Lake, but clearly it was not a small thing. This was more than two and a half years ago. It was a kind of turning point in the political campaign against the fatwah, because to meet the president of America somehow is to be given permission to meet everyone else. There was a moment earlier in the campaign when for various reasons of, well I do not know, abject fear and total cynicism, it was uncool for various politicians to meet me. I think the simplest thing to say is that after I met President Clinton, it became cool.

Oppel: Thank you Mr. Rushdie. We appreciate it very much.

Your courage and grace are an inspiration to journalists and writers here in the United States and around the world. Thank you for launching our convention with your imagination and wisdom.

Before we adjourn, we have a wonderful treat for you. It is a particularly delicious treat because it will be so brief. I will ask Peter Prichard, who is executive director of the Newseum and former editor of USA Today, to tell us about journalism that makes a difference. Peter.

Remarks by Peter S. Prichard

Thank you Rich. Periodically through this convention you will hear some reflections on pivotal moments when journalists made a difference, in some cases, a momentous difference in the course of American history. These short passages in the convention proceedings are the journalism that made a difference segments that you see in your programs. Six of these segments each a minute and a half long will pepper our program. These examples were prepared by the Newseum, which will be the world's first museum devoted to the past, present, and future of news. It will be located just across the Key Bridge in Arlington, Va., and it is funded by the Freedom Forum. The public will see in the Newseum more real time news sources there than any place in the world, and it will have the greatest collection of historic newspapers and news artifacts ever exhibited under one roof. We will finish the Newseum in less than a year, or I will not have a job, and we are looking forward to hosting the opening reception for next year's ASNE convention on April 8, 1997. And tonight if you get to the reception at the Freedom Forum, you will see a preview of some of our exhibits. Here is our first example of journalism that made a difference.

Let me take you back 220 years to the early days of the American Revolution. In those days journalism was done in pamphlets and broadsides. Most of it was sheer opinion. The editorial page was the front page, and Thomas Paine, like many of the other founding fathers, was a patriot writer. He was the pre-eminent pundit of his day and his work had a huge impact. Paine rallied the colonies to fight for American independence in one of the greatest opinion pieces of all time, the pamphlet called "Common Sense." "The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth," Paine wrote of the Revolution. "The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries tis time to part." The effect of Paine's words was electric on Americans. In three months "Common Sense" sells an astounding 120,000 copies. The Boston Gazette, a leading daily of the time, calls it a "ray of revelation." Paine is not finished. He joins General George Washington's army and writes the "Crisis Papers," a series that begins with these immortal words, "These are the times that try men's souls. Tyranny like hell is not easily conquered." Impressed by Paine's words, General Washington orders the Crisis Papers read to his troops who begin to win on the battlefield. Paine fights too in America and in France. "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom," Paine writes, "must like men undergo the fatigue of supporting it."

Thomas Paine produced powerful journalism, journalism that made a difference. Thank you.


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