But at the same time I do share your sense of how urgent it is to undertake a serious examination of all that goes into undercutting the credibility of journalists and newspapers: an urgency even greater today than when you first began to plan this project. This year we’ve seen ever more widespread forms of exploitative coverage. In the controversies surrounding President Clinton, in particular, the adversaries on both sides of what many among them explicitly call a war have used newspaper and other media in calculated efforts to destroy the credibility of their opponents. They have poured forth calumny and innuendo — what the 12^th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides called "the dust of the evil tongue," and in the process they have contributed still more to the erosion of press credibility.

In this context, I want to stand up for what I take to be a good, old-fashioned editorial virtue, and one indispensable to the rest of us as well: incredulity. Incredulity requires us not to be overly quick to grant credibility to what we read and hear. Such healthy skepticism is more needed than ever when we are confronted with barrages of conflicting messages without being able to weigh the evidence claimed to support them.

The poet and philosopher George Santayana wrote, early in this century, about his father — born in Spain and a great traveler — that he was a man "with a seasoned and incredulous mind." As we ask about the credibility of the press, it is important to stress, on the part of editors, the need for such incredulity in sorting through each day’s personal attacks and counterattacks.

Among many editors and reporters, there is a sense of looking into an abyss, of being drawn into coverage many among you would once have rejected as too sensationalistic, too slipshod, too intrusive, too damaging to individuals and institutions.

I want to look, this morning, at some of the conflicts inherent in the role of editors, in that of the public, and in what we mean by "credibility." These are conflicts that we must bring into the open if we want to take seriously the moral challenges editors face instead of just engaging in another of those "feel-good" exercises that allows everyone, at the end of the day, to return to "business as usual" in a more mellow mood.

Take the word "editor," to begin with. I was surprised, in writing about entertainment violence, to come across a contrast between two meanings of that word — one current, the other 2,000 years old and now obsolete, but bearing on the sense many have of participating in media circus. On the one hand, the most common meaning of "editor," from the Latin ex dato, "out" and "give," is of one who pulls together materials, sorts what will be used from all the rest, corrects errors and pays attention to presentation, then gives out, or publishes, the finished product. On the other hand, the term "editor" was also used, in ancient Rome, to designate those who produced the vast, bloody spectacles in the arenas for the Romans to enjoy.

The editores ludorum were those who helped send emissaries to track down lions and tigers and other wild animals from around the farthest reaches of the Roman empire to take part in wild beast hunts in the arena. They oversaw the training of the gladiators who were to fight to the death and lined up slaves and convicts to be slaughtered in combat or to be thrown to the beasts. The productions took place before crowds, often including many thousands of cheering spectators and fans — the amatores.

"If it bleeds it leads," could have been the motto of many of these editores. And while they stood to profit handsomely, since they were in the service of the emperor or various commercial and political sponsors of the spectacles, they were also vulnerable to pressures from these sponsors and to the vagaries of public opinion.

These editors vied with one another in how best to coordinate the music, the flags, the colors, the entertainment, with the violent spectacles, freely laced with sexual exhibitions. Yet neither the earliest Romans nor any other civilization had anything like the wild beast hunts nor the gladiatorial fights in the arenas.

As a result, the words "bread and circuses" used by the satiric poet Juvenal would have meant nothing to the first Romans. Rather, the practice grew out of funeral rites at which races were held and ritual combat, to expand over time into the vast spectacles of the Roman empire. Both the editores and the public they served became increasingly desensitized, numb to excesses that would once have shocked them all.

We need to keep both senses of the word "editor" in mind as we ask about the role of editors in addressing the credibility of newspapers and journalists. Part of the anguish for today’s best editors is the conflict they sense between doing their job according to standards they have been trained to uphold and overseeing offerings to entertain and titillate today’s public. News and celebrity coverage are presented as public spectacle; political campaigns as horse races, sometimes as hand-to-hand combat; and ever new twists in the forms of sex, scandal, and violence are provided for an increasingly jaded public.

The mounting strains between these two editorial roles, and the huge financial stakes riding on how they are combined, intensify the conflict on the part of editors about what standards to hold on to and which ones may be out of date or simply untenable in today’s media climate.

But it is important to go beyond the reasons often provided for breaching one or another standard, such as that regarding the checking of sources or respecting the privacy of individuals covered; or not "pandering to morbid curiosity about details of vice and crime," to quote the code of ethics of Sigma Delta Chi, The Society of Professional Journalists.

And it matters to scrutinize much more critically reasons offered for giving up on such standards as "Well, once other papers had done it, we had no choice but to go along"; or "Well, if we add the words ‘if true’ in discussing rumor and innuendo we no longer have to be responsible for checking our sources."

Here I do think that the ancient meaning of "editor" can provide a cautionary example — of how easy it is, over time, for numbing or desensitization to set in, so that one begins to think that slipshod coverage, or exploitative photography, or lurid headlines that would once have seemed egregious really are not so bad.

I think Sandy Rowe is absolutely right about the need not only to take the traditional moral standards of journalism seriously but to communicate with the public about each one and about the reasons for controversial editorial decisions. To do so, we have to keep in mind that as people confront all that comes to them via the media, they don’t always stop to separate what they see on the screen or on the printed page, least of all now when many newspapers have gone online. Nor do they always distinguish between what they find most inaccurate and disrespectful in news coverage and in editorial contents.

The public distrust of the press that comes across in opinion polls is rooted in profound skepticism about editorial and journalistic standards, such as the respect for privacy, objectivity, fairness and truth; and about the methods that some journalists employ and that some editors permit: slipshod, at times fraudulent, at times oppressive to the point of inhumanity, as in "media watches" surrounding people "in the news." Above all, the public is skeptical about editorial and journalistic motives such as profiteering from playing up violence, scandal and sex — all to gain readers and advertising revenue.

So the challenge many in the public would put to you as you undertake this project on credibility is how to overcome their suspicion by going beyond talking about standards, character, and journalistic ideals, to bringing about change in practice.

But, of course, editors nurture a corresponding suspicion about these expressions of public skepticism: "You say you are tired of the wallowing in sex, scandal, and violence in the media, but look at what you turn to first in the papers or on the screen: precisely the latest twist in the Clinton scandals, the sleaziest sex, the most shocking killings."

And it is true, we in the public are conflicted, too. We criticize the media but consume their products. In answering polls, we tend to portray ourselves as the people we would like to be rather than as our everyday confused selves.

Take the charges and countercharges of lying and cheating surrounding the White House: Many people find themselves split between two ways of looking at the events as they unfold: as citizens and as spectators. In the civic mode, they consider the damage being done to innocent people being smeared, whomever they may turn out to be. But that mode of civic engagement remains on hold for many in the public until they know more about who is doing the lying and who is being lied about.

With the civic mode on hold, the field is wide open for the spectator or entertainment mode. While final judgments are postponed, why not take in what resembles yet another show about sex, intrigue, and mayhem in and around the White House? The shock value of such goings on has surely worn off for anyone who has seen some of the recent plethora of films imputing every form of iniquity and treachery to presidents and other public officials.

This mirroring between lurid media coverage and public tastes is hardly new, nor uniquely American. Witness the British yellow press or the marvelous novel by the German writer Heinrich Böll, published in 1977: "The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum."

What is new is, rather, the volume, the variety of channels, and the intensity of the public’s exposure to sex, scandal, and violence both as news and as entertainment. And the desensitization that threatens editors in both the meanings of that word is a genuine risk for the public as well, not only in the entertainment mode but in the civic mode itself.

And this desensitization, in turn, has an impact on the question of credibility. It will be harder and harder for editors and others to shore it up, if growing numbers of journalists and members of the public cease to care much, no matter what they may say in opinion polls.

As we ask about credibility, it is indispensable to keep these dual roles among editors and the public in clear view. Otherwise, it will be too easy to be uncritical, perhaps to invoke the usual incantations about "shooting the messenger"; or about the public getting what it asks for — a form of "shooting the recipient," to dispel any serious questioning about what it might mean to seek to restore credibility.

A distinction is sometimes made between the credibility of newspapers in the eyes of the public, the trust the public has in them, rightly or wrongly, and the ethical standards of newspapers, bearing on, not only their credibility, not only on whether or not they are trusted, but on whether they are, in fact, worthy of trust.

Some papers may be able to coast along for quite a while with their outward credibility intact even if they come to be shot through with ever more serious violations of basic journalistic standards. What has finally become clear now, I believe, is that what is at stake is not just the credibility of the press with respect to the public image it has acquired, nor only how it can be enlisted to ravage the credibility of others. Rather, the profoundest doubts have arisen among editors themselves about their own credibility and about the ability of newspapers to maintain even a semblance of the standards that both outward and inward credibility require. What is at issue, therefore, is also their self-respect as editors, not at all only in the eyes of the public or of media critics but in their own eyes.

It is that concern for your own self-respect that I take to be at the heart of this Journalism Credibility Project. And change in this regard is possible at every level, from the day-to-day concerns of each individual to collective action such as that which ASNE will be considering. It will be necessary, for the collective effort, to go over the materials you have gathered, to explore case histories of shifting journalistic standards, and to re-examine the traditional codes of journalistic ethics. Throughout, it will matter to think, not just about the rights of journalists, but very much also about their responsibilities.

I want to mention, in this regard, the Universal Declaration of Human Responsibilities that is now being debated at meetings across the world. It is to be proposed at the United Nations this fall, 50 years after the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This most recent declaration has not been covered, so far as I know, in the U.S. press. But it is immensely helpful when it comes to thinking through what responsibilities go with our rights, which ones we owe as human beings to all others and what this means for us also in our working lives.

I would like to read to you the article that deals with the responsibilities of the media. Such talk of responsibilities can surely sound vague and idealistic and unrelated to the real world, but we have to remember that the same criticisms were once made regarding the Declaration of Human Rights.

Sandy quoted Charles Kuralt. All of us can think of people of character we have met in our own lives. I want to close by leaving you with one more example of a person of character, by the Chinese philosopher Mencius, in the fourth century B.C. Mencius calls this person a great man, but he would surely wish to include women as well in such a category, were we to ask him now: