Values examination from someone who knows

Chicago Tribune publisher says accuracy, honesty, avoidance of deceit are the basics that must be upheld

Fundamentalism these days does not get a favorable press. It frequently is used interchangeably with the word extremism, usually by journalists who write at a pace beyond the speed of thought, insinuating intellectual rigidity and perhaps a predisposition toward violence.

But as Jack Fuller would know, fundamentalism comes from the Latin fundus, from which we also get foundation, or, more broadly, a sense of groundwork or underlying principles. In journalism, then, fundamentalism is fidelity to the first principles. In journalism, there is nothing in common between the fundamentalist and the extremist. The former works without losing sight of the values that Fuller explores, while the latter, liberated by the illusion that change has overtaken first principles, goes forward or sideways or around in circles to whatever Top-40 tune the pipers at the workshops and seminars are playing.

Fuller declares that the "essays in the book represent my effort to understand the underlying public values a newspaper serves and the implications of those values for journalists' behavior." His book has three sections. The first looks at the claims of truth that newspapers make and what these mean for doing journalism. The second is about expression or the business of writing. The third takes up the future of newspapering, which with all due respect is pretty much anybody's guess.

The first two parts, however, are not guesswork. They are reminders - often stern, as reminders of bedrock values ought to be - of what is right and wrong in the conduct of newspaper journalism. What are these bedrock values?

Accuracy for one. As Fuller writes: "Reporters who do not meet the simple standard of accuracy should not be taken seriously, however stunning their work may appear to be in other respects." In fact, such reporters are often praised for their cleverness at peripheral skills, such as the literary lede celebrating another mundane event in the lives of real people ("Long afterwards, she would remember what happened that morning as clearly as if it were yesterday - the sound of the jammed appliance, the quarreling children, the smell of toast burning.") or the What-It-Feels-Like-To-Die-In-Your-Sleep narratives. "The whole culture of journalism must change before simple accuracy becomes once again one of its signal virtues," Fuller writes, and I think he is correct.

Intellectual honesty for another. Journalists are not the only people to have trouble with critical self-examination, but they would be better at it if they bore in mind some virtues that Fuller offers: "open-mindedness, impartiality, the duty to be candid about one's reasoning and about what one knows and does not know, the responsibility to put as forcefully as possible the positions of those with whom one disagrees."

Here is a third: The avoidance of deceit and the many confidence games journalists play. Few reporters and editors would admit that their work involves deception. But as Fuller notes, misrepresentation (or non-representation) and bullying, tricking or manipulating sources are not uncommon practices. What is uncommon is the rigorous, self-conscious examination of the circumstances when deception can be excused - or when the just lie, to paraphrase a concept on war held by the Roman Catholic Church, may be told.

And a fourth and a fifth: That there remains an integrity to quotation marks and that mind-reading by reporters and what Fuller calls "journalistic ventriloquism" have become practices that badly are in need of reconsideration.

In these brief comments, I have focused narrowly on what I have called the author's fundamentalism. I have done so because this message is in danger of being lost, and that if it is to be heard again, voices as strong and articulate as his will be necessary.

But Jack Fuller's book is not narrowly cast. It traverses a wide range of problems and opportunities that journalists and newspapers face. The writing is clear, and, of course, coming from a fundamentalist, the book is optimistic. If you have faith in your first principles, you expect them to prevail.

News Values by Jack Fuller, $22.95, University of Chicago Press, 1996, 252 pages

Woo is the Lorey I. Lokey Visiting Professor of Journalism at Stanford University.