Interview with Tom Rosenstiel, Committee for Concerned Journalists, Director

July 16th, 2004
Transcription by Ben Tupper

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: All right. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you do here.
TOM ROSENSTIEL: My name is Tom Rosenstiel. I'm the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And when you look at the build-up to the war in Iraq, how do you evaluate the performance of both the print and broadcast television news media?
ROSENSTIEL: Well -- Covering the argument for whether a country should go to war is one of the most important things that the press has to do in a democratic society. It's also one of the most difficult, particularly in a situation like this where the rationale for war had a lot to do with intelligence information that was held by really only a few people in the government. The number of reporters who covered the intelligence community is really rather small. We're probably talking about 8 or 12 or no more than 20 reporters who really cover the intelligence community in a serious way, in a full-time way. So whether or not there were weapons of mass destruction. Whether or not there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. This is information that was in the hands of so few people. And there were so few reporters really able to assess that information that it was extremely difficult. This is not a situation in which you have governments where the information is widely distributed across a lot of people and hundreds and hundreds of reporters could assess it. A debate over Medicare and the impact of a policy on seniors across the country, hundreds of reporters can go out and work on that kind of a story. Whether or not a country has weapons-grade uranium, maybe there are half a dozen reporters who could know.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And so when you -- Can you speak on general terms, when journalists cover issues, are they more driven by events? Or do they cover issues as issues over periods of time?
ROSENSTIEL: Well. Generally, journalists are better at covering news that breaks than news that bends, if you will. By that I mean, when there's an event that precipitates something that is a hook to hang a story on, something dramatic happens, that's what journalists are familiar and comfortable covering. Long-term, systemic things that don't change dramatically over time, global warming is much harder to cover than a fire. And so the answer is, journalists are more likely to cover events than issues.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And you see anything that the press could have done better leading up to the war in Iraq?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, certainly we know that key organizations such as the New York Times have already acknowledged that they relied on sources for information about events in Iraq who have been proven to be wrong subsequently. And that in some cases, they would corroborate these stories by going to friends of those sources in the government who where basically a closed circle of people recycling the same, as it turns out, faulty information back to the newspaper. And in some cases then, those same officials would go on television and elsewhere in the press and cite the New York Times as the authority for this information. So you really had a very closed circle in which the news organizations were being manipulated consciously by policy makers as a justification for what they wanted to do.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: [Technical issue] Hold on a second.
ROSENSTIEL: But I would reiterate what I said before that is somewhat simplistic for people to say, "Well, we should have known there were no weapons of mass destruction there." It's not as easy as some people might think because of the limited circulation of that information in the first place. I think there was another failure, however, which is compounded by the behavior of the Democratic party. The Democrats basically capitulated on whether or not we should go to war. And so you had a few lone voices, Senator Kennedy, Senator Byrd, and a handful of others, who were making major statements questioning the rationale for war. And those arguments probably were under covered, I think, by the press in general. Because a political calculation was made by the journalists that these arguments were not going to prevail, and thus didn't deserve that much coverage. As opposed to the arguments themselves being weighed on their merits, and a feeling by the press that regardless of whether or not the war was going to happen, there needed to be a robust debate among the public about it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: After the Congressional resolution was passed on October 10th and 11th, it seems like the debate that was happening within the international community, there was a lot of questions about the weapons of mass destruction. And a lot of issues they were bringing up that the media, in a way, almost assumed that we were going to war and it didn't matter.
ROSENSTIEL: Again, I think the press tends to see things through a political lens of what will happen in the same way that we give politicians that are running for a race -- The serious candidates, the ones most likely to win the nomination, get the lion's share of the coverage. And the people, regardless of their arguments, who are not seen as viable, getting much less coverage. There's a kind of realpolitik mentality that dominates the press, which may be more problematic when the issue is, "Should or should not the country go to war?" There's also a rallying around the flag effect that occurs when a President summons the nation to war. The public tends to respond. The press sees the public polls, and the press tends to respond. And it was probably ever thus. We know now, that the predicate for the war in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution also had problems. But we didn't know it at the time. Or we certainly didn't know it as quickly as we've come to know that there are questions about the rationale for the weapons of mass destruction. A third point that's probably worth making is that -- The President has an enormous power to set the agenda, and probably more so today than at other times. Because of the country being under attack and the president wanting to do something. This is what Bush said we needed to do. And a fair amount of the American public, at least according to public opinion polls, although ambivalent or uncertain about going to war, were willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt. And at a time when most news organizations are under pressure -- that their audiences are under pressure, they have declining circulation or declining ratings -- there's a pressure to sort of want to build up ratings, to go with the public flow, to follow where public sentiment is. And this pressure, this economic pressure, can undermine the journalistic responsibilities the news organization has to provide people with information even that might be unpopular.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And from your recollection, do you think the United States needed a second resolution for the war to be actually legal under international law?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, I can't. You know, I'm not an international law expert. I'm not a lawyer. And I'm not in the business of giving political advice. So I'm happy to talk about the press' behavior, but I'll leave that to others.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well then, I guess the question comes to, you know, there was a big debate over this. France was saying that it wasn't legal. And most of the world community was, that their actual -- They seemed to be covering that there was a conflict at the UN, but the actual substance of the debate was not covered.
ROSENSTIEL: Whether or not the country needed more international support, and should have had more international support, I think that's -- that was a major issue and probably was one of the main issues that did get coverage. I remember certainly when Colin Powell went to the UN to make his case, an event that now has been sort of tarnished in retrospect, that got significant amount of coverage. In part, because Powell was considered hesitant about the war, and because he'd made a forceful case, he's a particularly dynamic speaker in public -- that had an influence on the press as well. But I think the question of international coalition -- got a lot of coverage, perhaps more than "What is a legal coalition?" or "What legal mandate?" Because I think the press probably tends to see those legal arguments as fundamentally political arguments.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I guess -- From what I saw there was a lot of coverage, almost attacking -- They were taking the administration's word that it was all France's fault, when in actuality they were making legitimate international legal arguments. If you read Michael Getler's -- some of his articles -- on March 18th, the Washington Post even had an article that said that most legal scholars disagree with the Bush administration's rationales. Now this is something that could have been covered back in October. Why is this issue of international law -- Why was it left until the very last second?
ROSENSTIEL: I think for all the reasons that we talked about before. The fact that there was a sense that the war was going to happen anyway. The realpolitik mentality of the press. The popularity of what the president wanted to do. The tendency of the press to follow public sentiment, particularly after we've been attacked, and there's rally around the flag syndrome that kicks in. And the fact that, as we began this discussion, there's more of a tendency to cover events than ideas in the press. The quality or substance of ideas, the legitimacy of one argument over another on its merits is ground that the press feels, to a fault I think, uncomfortable with. We know how to cover process, but covering ideas, which argument is more likely to result in a transportation bill in creating better roads, "Hmmm, that requires expertise." Who's got the votes? Who's going to win? Now that's the area that a political reporter, where he or she, is most comfortable.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: In looking retrospect, in seeing these phenomenas of institutional biases, and the ways that -- the overlooking of this aspect, it seems to me that it became a difference between war and peace, in a way. Do you think that -- What are some of the things that the journalists could do to acknowledge that there might be a problem here, first of all? But then what to do to correct it?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, it's not the -- It's not the press' job to decide whether or not the country goes to war. It's the press' job, in the end, to provide the public -- both leaders and the general public with all the information that they require for them to decide -- for the public and leaders to decide whether there's a consensus for war. My suspicion is probably that there was sufficient support for war, regardless of what the press had done in the end. I don't believe that the press, had it covered this event differently, would have stopped the Bush administration from going forward. Even now, with hindsight, an acknowledgement by most that there are no weapons of mass destruction, that there was very limited contact between Iraqi officials and anyone in al Qaeda, and no proof that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11, support for the president and the war effort is still, you know, quite sizable.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, I guess it -- The issue comes to what happens when the Democrats and Republicans agree. And there's still debate, what does the press do?
ROSENSTIEL: That's a very good question, because while the press --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: -- I'm sorry, I not going to be including my questions, so.
ROSENSTIEL: I mean -- There's a very important issue here, which is that the press, in the end, is much better at covering official debate than it is public debate. Public debate is something that occurs around kitchen tables, and at water coolers, and at lunch tables, and in courtyards where people work, and on golf courses, and in the stands at little league games. We're not really very good at covering that public conversation. What we're much better at covering is what House members and Senate members are arguing back and forth with each other. Or what interest groups in Washington have to say vis-à-vis interest groups on the other side. That's an elite debate that we know how to handle. In this case, that elite debate was much narrower, and more limited than the public debate that was going on around those tables, and that's a failure of the press.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: But it wasn't a public debate in my opinion. It was an international debate that was happening at the UN Security Council. These are debates that were happening.
ROSENSTIEL: There are all kinds of debates that happen the UN Security Council that get limited coverage in the American press, because they're going to have a limited effect on American public opinion. You know, we can't be naive about this, and there is some reason to -- You know, there's an understanding that the Bush administration made it very clear that we're going to go and do this with or without international support, and they did.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And do you see that there's any economic constraints that, since there are -- News organizations have to make something that's interesting to people, and since international law isn't interesting, they don't cover it? And people aren't interested in it?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, I think that's a factor. I mean international law sounds like something that is even more abstract than laws that are going to effect people here. Who's ever been to the international tribunal at The Hague? Most Americans don't even know where The Hague is -- or what it is. Sure, I think that's a factor. And it wasn't going to matter, and that's a factor.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So when you say, "that is a factor," the economics of the situation? Or what?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, that's not the economics of the situation -- that has to do with how interesting that story's going to be to people. The economics of the situation would really have more to do with, I think, how many reporters are all over the story, and things like that. I don't believe that the coverage of a single story, you know, the debate at the UN Security Council over international law -- In a larger sense, there's a sentiment that journalists are going to want to produce stories that are going to be popular -- that are going to be interesting. But if we're down to the nature of one story, I wouldn't really call that an economic issue.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: One of the principles that I see is that the job of journalists is to make something that's significant but not interesting, it's their job to make it interesting.
ROSENSTIEL: Right, I think that's, you know, basically a core principle of journalism --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: What -- I'm sorry -- What is that --
ROSENSTIEL: It is one of the core responsibilities of a journalist to try to make the significant interesting. But I think there is a debate over how significant was a debate in the Security Council over international law. Different journalists can differ over that. It's not as obviously significant as some other issues that probably didn't get covered.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: But, I mean, from a global perspective, it seemed like a lot of other countries thought it was extremely significant.
ROSENSTIEL: Right, but journalism isn't produced from a global perspective.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And is that a problem? I mean, it seems like we're in a global, interconnected community now. Is it the same institutional biases of the US government to only think about United States' self-interest? Is that -- Does the US media just follow into that as well?
ROSENSTIEL: If you're the Toledo Blade, and your audience is in Toledo, your audience is in Toledo. So, I mean -- Journalism is a cultural artifact. It's produced by people in a culture, for people in a culture. And it was ever thus, and I believe always will be. American journalists are going to cover events differently than British journalists -- or even Canadian journalists. And if you move into another language, the differences become even more profound because of the change in language. I don't believe there is such a thing as "a global journalism." I don't think there is a place -- a mentality this is the universal journalist. I think journalism is produced "By a people, for a people." And the journalism that is produced in one place ends when you get to the borders of another country. I just don't see -- and other people may disagree with that. I know they do. Some of the people here disagree with me on that. But that's how I feel about it.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So even -- Well, I'm not specifically talking about the Toldeo Blade. I'm talking about New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal.
ROSENSTIEL: The Washington Post doesn't have any readership overseas.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: But these issues, I guess -- I would argue that if they were looking at international law, they would have found holes that Humvees could drive through in the administration's case towards war. And in fact, the anti-war movement was pointing out these holes, but they weren't being covered because they didn't fit in.
ROSENSTIEL: Right. Look. I believe there were failures in the coverage in the run-up to the war, but I would not get hooked -- or hung up over the question of just the matter of international law. Because lawyers will make arguments on both sides, and ultimately it's not for journalists to decide which of these arguments are right. It's for journalists to basically lay out the arguments on both sides, and maybe interview legal experts. But that process is simply one that we cover. It's not one that journalists resolve.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: In the Columbia Journalism Review, Brent Cunningham did an article on "Rethinking Objectivity."
ROSENSTIEL: Yeah.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Do journalists actually --
ROSENSTIEL: I thought -- You don't want to know my opinion of that article. It was a rehash of -- a naive rehash of old ideas that I think were off the mark. We've written extensively about objectivity and what it should mean. And I, you know, I think he's off the mark. He's basically calling for a more activist, partisan kind of journalism in that piece, and I think he's wrong.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Well, it's not necessarily has to be partisan -- if there's a right answer. What if there's a right answer?
ROSENSTIEL: [laugh]
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I mean, if there's a right answer that is very clearly determined, and a journalist can see that -- Why does he have to be constrained by objectivity?
ROSENSTIEL: I don't that think objectivity is neutrality. And I think Cunningham in that article is mistaking objectivity with neutrality, which is an old mistake.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So, in other words -- Let's say that if a journalist has a hypothesis that he wants to test, and he's interviewing different people. And he sees that he's coming to a conclusion -- You know, in the age of public relations both sides are going to want to have their point of view regardless of whether or not it's true or not.
ROSENSTIEL: Right.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So how do you cut through public relations, when you can't say whether one's --
ROSENSTIEL: The fact is, I mean, we're off the mark here, but -- The fact is that many journalists today do come to conclusions. There's a very robust, and growing journalism of opinion, and a growing number of journals of opinion, and bloggers. The debate is probably -- that debate is more robust than it's ever been. What is malnourished and underserved, both by audiences and by journalists, is original reporting of facts that uncover what's going on -- that's the foundation up which journalism of opinion is built. Our journalism of verification of fact of information is the thing that we need to not abandon. And Cunningham's argument, which is basically for a partisan journalism, although he won't call it that, moves us further away, and will just weaken the foundation of a journalism of verification. There's no shortage of a journalism of opinion. There's more of it than there has ever been, at least since -- Well, there's more of it than there's ever been in the United States. There's no absence of that. That's not the problem.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I guess the -- Well, let's move to the different principles. Can you give an overview of some of the principles of what journalism should strive to be?
ROSENSTIEL: Well. Journalists agree, and more importantly citizens demand a few basic things from journalism. Those are, first, that journalists should try and get the facts right. They should tell the truth. Truth, not in an abstract, undergraduate philosophy class sense, but, "Tell me what happened." "What did the president say?" "What did he not say?" And to the extent that you can get at it, "Why?" Not to derive all the meaning from that, but just to tell me what occurred in the public square. Second, journalists owe all of their loyalty to their audience, not to their companies, not to their careers, but to the citizens and their country, and the audience with whom they have a bond. That connection -- that allegiance is the that will protect them and insulate them from all the various pressures that journalists face, and will be their guide for how to make the right choices. A third core principle is that they be independent, independent of faction -- that they not be secretly writing speeches for one side or the other, that they not get too close to one side or the other. That doesn't mean that journalists have to be neutral. It does mean, however, that they need to come get independent judgments. And that their purpose to be -- to inspire debate among citizens. Not to have a certain outcome occur in the political spectrum, which is why it's not the job of journalists to decide -- or try and determine whether or not the country go to war or not go to war. In fact, it's important that journalists maintain an open mind for as long as they possibly can, and not jump to conclusions. And try and shed, as much as they can, their partisanship that they personally may feel underneath their work.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Can you also talk about keeping news comprehensive and proportional?
ROSENSTIEL: Yeah. In many ways, journalists need to think that what they're producing each day is a map. A map for their fellow citizens to know how to navigate their way through the culture, and through the society. That map analogy is helpful because it shows us that the news needs to be comprehensive. You can't leave things off of the map. We need to describe everything that we can that people would need to have to navigate. And the second thing that the map analogy tells us is that the map needs to be kept in proportion. Proportionality, of course, is a rough estimate based on what a journalist thinks is important. But it means that if you take the Lacy Peterson murder trial and write about it as if it's the impeachment of the President that you're distorting the things on the map. You're turning England into a country that's the size of Greenland when it's really not that big. Things need to be kept in some rough estimate of their significance. So that the citizens know what matters and what doesn't. It's not that one journalist determines that for everybody, but if all journalists individually are trying to keep proportionality in mind, then the society gets a kind of a rough consensus of what matters and what doesn't. Because as we reflect the arguments of elites and general citizens and others, we get a sense of who we are and what our values are.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And when you look at the month of October of 2002. Why was the sniper case such a big story nationally?
ROSENSTIEL: Well. It was a big story here --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. -- "It" -- the sniper case was --
ROSENSTIEL: Right. The sniper story was a dramatic and significant story because you had a whole region, people in more than one state afraid to buy gas. That, I think in any era -- be it the tabloid era that we're in now, or a more sort of serious era of news -- I think that would have been a major story. These people were on a massive killing spree, and police were unable to catch them. And everyone and anyone regardless of where they lived or who they were might be an innocent victim. The randomness of it, and the shear terror that it invoked was extraordinary.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I guess the issue is -- When a television news organization may have 10 stories a night, does this story really justify four or five stories with all these sort of enterprising stories that add nothing to the safety of people in Oregon?
ROSENSTIEL: Well. I mean, I don't have content data that tells me they were doing four stories or five stories on the nightly news on this. I don't know that that's the case. I thought the cable coverage of the sniper story was completely out of control, and probably a low point for cable. But it -- That had to do with the nature of the stories they were doing. The amount stories -- I mean, cable in some ways is a lost cause. They over cover every story. They only really cover four stories a day on cable news. And they over cover all four of them. And they do that because it's cheaper than covering a lot of stories in a serious way.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And can you talk about the analysis of the state of the news media. And what sort of conclusions or insights did you gain on, let's say, the television news media? And how -- What did you find from them?
ROSENSTIEL: Well. You have to divide television news media into three distinct parts. There's broadcast, network broadcast television -- and there are differences depending on the time of day. There's network -- I mean, there's cable television. And then there's local television news. Network television news has actually become more serious in the last few years, particularly evening news. During the 90s, the number one topic on network TV evening news was crime, even though crime was declining across the country. That sort of fascination -- that OJ-ificiation, if you will -- of the evening news is over. International events are much more important on the network evening news than they used to be. Obviously, September 11th had something to do with that. And they've come to discover, I think, in general, that the audience that watches those programs is still a sort of more serious news audience. Morning television network news is somewhat more entertainment-focused and softer, although it too is more serious than before 9/11. Cable news is a different breed of cat. First of all, it's not built around storytelling. It's built around live report of stand ups and live interviews. Although they're on 24 hours a day, they really focus on four stories a day. And many, many topics -- most of the news agenda is left out. There's usually politics, crime, some soap opera kind of story, and celebrity is very important. Politics is a major issue, and given events in the world, Iraq is also very important. Local TV news is largely built around mundane incidents -- crime, fires, accidents -- things that are very predictable. Things that are sort of guaranteed to generate stories. Politics is a minor issue. Crime represents -- Crimes, fires, and accidents represent about 30% of the stories on local TV news, but closer to 50% of the lead stories. And -- All of television is suffering quite mightily, declining audience, almost 1% of the audience a year is leaving television news -- except for cable. And -- The economics of television are becoming increasingly difficult. Journalism on television is in a dire position, and television is also suffering more audience loss to the Internet than any other medium.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Do you see any sort of -- There's two arguments, I guess, of what has more influence. The people on the right say, "Journalists are biased liberally, and that dictates the coverage." And then people on the left will say, "No, it's all ownership-based, and that dictates --" Can you speak to that debate? And your sense of what is actually happening.
ROSENSTIEL: Well. The problem with the debate over bias is that both sides are just right enough that they can't resolve this issue. Ownership plays a huge role in setting the budgets, deciding who the bosses are going to be, how much resources, what the profit margin is going to be, in deciding the quality of news. They create in that way, a whole set of biases that influence the press coverage we get. As does the -- certain journalistic morays that gives the establishment bias to coverage. We cover officials. We cover experts. We cover the establishment. And the non-establishment view tends to be shut out -- not because of ownership, but because of certain journalistic routines. On the other hand, the conservative critique, although exaggerated, has some merit as well. There are more liberals than conservatives in news rooms. And surveys would suggest the number of people who self-identify themselves as conservatives in newsrooms is declining. While I think the critique on the right by some, there's some manifest conspiracy by people who are more liberal in the news to help the Democratic party, and somehow weaken the Republican party. I think that's manifestly untrue. But the imbalance, the absence of conservative voices in the making of news in newsrooms is a problem. A problem that journalists need to come to grips with, and that they basically won't face.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And do you see that liberal bias has more of an effect on domestic issues as opposed to foreign policy issues such as Iraq in the build-up to war?
ROSENSTIEL: Sure, I mean, I think, generally, we've known for a long time, there tends to be more bipartisan consensus on foreign policy than there is on domestic policy. Leaders in both parties when they're in control of the House and the Senate tend to follow the President. There's a kind of courtesy. It's built into the Constitution that the President has more leeway into foreign policy initially. In colonial times -- I mean in -- I'm sorry. Initially, in the earliest days of the country, the President was perceived as having largely his duties limited to foreign policy, and Congress was more of a domestic body. And the press tends to reflect that political sensibility. You know, I think that the ideology of the press, if you know if you were to map it, wouldn't really follow one party per se. I think you'd probably see a free trade orientation in the press -- A sort of social justice agenda in the press -- to help the little guy, to be a voice for the little guy. And yet there's a fiscal conservatism in the press that sort of howls at deficits and things like that. So if you look at it closely, while there's a problem of liberal bias, and there's a problem of conglomeration, and there's a problem of declining resources, it plays out in ways that don't neatly fit either side's critique.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Do you see a declining in investigative journalism, both in the print and television news media?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, the funny thing is that investigative journalism is one of the few things that the American public still sort of recognizes and respects about the press. And in broadcast journalism, it's one of the things that will build ratings. The problem is that the kind of investigative journalism that we tend to see in broadcast is more consumer-oriented. It might be sort of faux-investigative journalism. "Are there dirty bed sheets in hotels?" Or "Is there bacteria in yogurt?" Or "Will your bra stab you?" All of which are actual stories, which have been in local news in many markets. These are not stories that are -- fulfill the obligation of the press as monitoring powerful institutions in society -- looking for public malfeasance and watching the government to see whether it's corrupting -- or abusing the public trust. That's the real reason that we have the first amendment, and a watchdog roll for the press. And you don't see as much of that in broadcast journalism, I think, as you should. We also see a decline overall in the percentage of investigative journalism in local television news. We've monitored that and mapped that. It was never high, but it has declined as resources have become scarcer. In print, it's a little harder to say. There's a whole architecture of contests and awards in print that sustain and nurture investigative reporting. I'm not sure, however, whether some of that investigative work you see in print is sort of remote -- is isolated from the rest of the coverage. You know, you'll have team that will do a massive 10-part series on something, and it doesn't really integrate or infiltrate the paper overall. The sort of watchdog function on a day-to-day basis that we might expect the press to do is somehow harder to integrate. "Were we watchful?" And "a watchdog over the debate in advance of the war in Iraq" is a harder argument to make, than "Did we do ten good investigative projects last year that were sort of planned out ahead of time?" And had to do with the sewer systems, or the roads, or police, or something like that.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Can you talk to challenging power --balancing that with maintaining access? And also with the patriotism, that influx. Does that have to do with economics? Or just talk about all those factors.
ROSENSTIEL: Well, you know. First of all, the press is not ever really going to function as a surrogate opposition to the government. The press, first of all, is a conduit for people to talk to each other and for officials to talk to the public. And so, we're always going to be better as journalists at reflecting a debate than creating it. It is the job of the press to speak truth to power, to confront powerful institutions with information that is true, particularly if the powerful are trying to promulgate information that is untrue. And that may be where the issue of the war in Iraq becomes a real problem for journalists. Doing that is made more difficult when resources are stretched thinner. The corporatization and the profit demands and the stock price demands that are on the media have, overall, if you were going to generalize, have resulted in fewer reporters with less time to do their stories, more space to fill, stretching people and resources thinner. And that makes journalism harder to do. It also has added to pressure to find stories that are cost-effective and that will generate an audience. And those sort of pleasing and easy stories built around celebrity, or things like that, take us -- and our time away from more serious concerns of trying to make the significant interesting. All of those are pressures and realities that make journalism more difficult. Then you add to that the crisis mentality -- or the rallying around the flag effect -- that occurs when a country is under attack. The President has a reservoir of support, and it becomes more difficult for journalists to do their job during those moments. Because if you want to challenge the President, the President can say, "Hey, who are you? You're being unpatriotic! Who are you as a press? You're liberal! Who are you as a press? You're getting it the way of democracy functioning!" And politicians of either party are going to do that when challenged. They're not there to make the press' job easier. They're there to promote their policies. And so -- At those moments when the President is particularly popular and the press is less popular, telling people controversial things that they may not want to hear becomes more difficult. It doesn't mean that we don't do it -- or shouldn't do it. But we have to be smarter, and more thoughtful in how we present information to people that they don't want to hear.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Looking at the institutional biases of all corporations, and in some ways -- well, especially with the corporations in America -- is that they have to externalize certain costs that's not going to serve their ultimate -- you know, the shareholders to make profits. Is the public interest being externalized in this paradigm? -- Is that, it's not really being -- You know, there's no check on what the public is getting. And so, is that resulting in more infotainment?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, you know, the paradox is that after 9/11, the press in America spent a lot of money just serving the public interest. They went on the air, they didn't run ads for weeks at a time. They spent an enormous amount of money covering the war in Iraq. They spent an enormous amount of money covering the war in Afghanistan. The spent an enormous amount of money covering what happened on 9/11. Those were expensive propositions. They did that, however, in part, because had they not, the public would have been outraged. And their credibility would have been severely damaged. There are moments when the press does things because the public expects it, and there'd be a backlash if they didn't. The real test is doing things when the public doesn't care. And the run-up to the war in Iraq is one such case. The public was supportive, largely, of the President. And the press acquiesced to that because the alternative in trying to dig into these things was enormously difficult. Covering the debate across the country in official and unofficial places that question the war was -- although popularity wasn't the issue -- it just wasn't an argument that wasn't going to win the day. And the press, reacted in conventional ways of covering the arguments that were going to win and not covering arguments based on their potential merits. And -- To some extent, the press was more accepting of what officials had to say because they didn't expect some of these officials to be misleading them as much as it turns out they were misled.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So, did the -- Should the press assume that the government's always lying? I mean, always be skeptical -- a healthy skepticism?
ROSENSTIEL: Well, there's a difference between a healthy skepticism and assuming that government officials always lie, which is probably an unhealthy cynicism. You know, it's not good for journalists or the country if our public officials have severe credibility problems. In the end, Vietnam was damaging to journalism even though it led to a heightened respect for the press. It created a kind of cynicism in the press about government that then reinforced by Watergate -- led to a period in the, I think, 80s and 90s of real deep cynicism about public officials -- and an erosion of the relationship. And has led to the kind of Machiavellian, manipulative, and coercive relationship we now have between journalists and the people they cover.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: In the case of the build-up to the war in Iraq, there seemed to be disproportionate representation of skeptical voices. That anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of Americans wanted more time for inspections. But those voices were, if you look at the television news media leading up to this time period, you know, it's certainly not anywhere close to -- it may be 5 to 10 percent, but it's nowhere near 40% of the coverage expressing this viewpoint.
ROSENSTIEL: Yeah, I don't -- I mean, that's sort of difficult. I don't know that the press should or can weigh public opinion and then have its news coverage reflect a perfect balance what that opinion is. I mean, if you look at polls suggesting that people want more time for inspections, the President also tends to have a sway over public opinion when he says, "that won't do any good." And the President may have had a credible argument there as well. More time for inspections, I suspect even Hans Blix thought, might not have yielded much more. I probably shouldn't say that because I think he may have argued the opposite, but -- Just sort of scratch that, and say -- You know, I think that the -- If the President argued-- When the President did argue that more time for inspections were not going to make any difference, I suspect that a majority of Americans probably agreed with that. They just didn't really want to rush to war.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: But when the President is trying to discredit this weapons inspections process, why not go to former inspectors on the both sides? I mean, Scott Ritter or someone who's actually studied the declassified document history from the Gulf War syndrome released from the CIA, John Prados of the National Security Archive. These people are out there who have been looking at this issue for a number of years, who have on-the-field experience who were just shut out, almost editorially -- just like it doesn't matter.
ROSENSTIEL: Well, I think that again -- We're covering the same ground as we covered before. I think the press decided that it didn't matter that the administration had made up its mind and was going to do what it was going to do. And with the realpolitik mentality the press operates under, probably to a fault, they decided that politically these counter arguments weren't going to have any impact.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: I guess -- What I'm searching for is a solution, in way, like -- How do we -- We look at what happened. We see -- You can see it clear as day in hindsight, but it may happen again. And if the Republicans and Democrats agree on many issues -- they agree on many issues that are very critical for -- around the world. If there's a -- how do you legitimize a critical mass of people? Academics? Experts? Is that the role of the journalists? Did they fail? What happened?
ROSENSTIEL: You know, the question of whether or not the press failed in creating a critical mass of opinion that might have changed the course of the country going to war is very important. In the end, I suspect, but I can't say for sure, that it wouldn't have mattered. That the Bush administration appears from all evidence that I can see, that it was going to do this even in the face of almost universal -- not quite universal, but almost -- international objection. The press I suspect in the end, did not do enough. Would it have made a difference? We'll never know. But I think the answer is probably not. Most of the history of journalism suggests that the press will never, in the end, serve as a kind of surrogate opposition. Once the Democrats decided to acquiesce to this -- and the President so obviously wanted to do this -- I don't think there's any stopping them. The press while a very powerful institution is not, in the end, an actor in policy making. And the public in this country tends to follow where its national leader wants to go on international policy. If going to war was a mistake, that's a mistake the President made, and was going to make regardless.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And let's see. How do you see -- Do you see that the role of public relations, and sophisticated persuasion techniques that are being more and more incorporated -- government officials being "media trained" -- is that -- Can you talk to public relations and how it interacts with journalism? And are there ways to counteract it?
ROSENSTIEL: Yeah. One of the fundamental problems facing journalism today is that we are more corporate. We are more focused on demographics and audience and delivering an audience to advertisers. We are somewhat less insulated from that, and somewhat less see ourselves as just operating in the public interest. That results in infotainment, in stretched resources, and a variety of other things. Matched against that is greater sophistication than ever of policy makers and politicians on how to manipulate us. For years they have studied us more than carefully than we've studied ourselves. They understand our tendencies better than we understand them ourselves. They understand our weaknesses better than we understand them ourselves. And so you have, in a way, a distracted press corps -- and a thinner press corps -- matched against a more sophisticated government and political body that is out to sort of use us. The fight is unbalanced, in a sense, if indeed the relationship between journalists and policy makers is a fight. There is an inevitable tension there. And -- Our response tends to be to doubt them and to try and filter what they say or to pull back the curtain and reveal that things are concocted or this is spin as opposed to just policy rhetoric. But I think that's probably an inadequate response. Also, that's not interesting to the public. They don't care. And so in our political coverage you see more and more coverage about polling, and about spin doctors, and consultants, and not about policy. The public doesn't respond to that insider coverage. But that's the response that journalists tend to have to try and react to the growing sophistication of the people who would manipulate them. So we need to come up with a better response. But there's no question that people all throughout the government, for many years now, understood how to manipulate the press better than the press has understood those manipulations.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Do you see that, the issue of sound bites matched up with long debates -- I think you have a sense where debates are very shortened, in a way to very -- 15 to 20 second bites -- entire issues debating --
ROSENSTIEL: 8 seconds. 6 seconds.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. Right.
ROSENSTIEL: Yes. I mean. There's no doubt that an electronic media world -- the television world that is more truncated than it's ever been -- and is more distracted by events and declining audience and economic pressures than it's ever been -- is less well-equipped to handle complexity. Even though we have more tools technologically -- we can intersplice messages from around the world into one piece, and get satellite footage, and match things up and check facts. We have more capability from a technical standpoint. The end product -- particularly in the cable environment of 24-hour, ongoing, constant news -- the ability to handle complexity in electronic journalism is probably weaker than it used to be -- when you had a sense that the audience wasn't distracted -- that hey were going to sit down and watch this show, and pay attention regardless of how complex the issue might be. Now there's a feeling that you've got to sort of wave a colored flag and say, "Sit. Watch for a few minutes." And "I won't bore you, I promise. We'll do this fast. It'll be painless, and we'll move on."

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: In looking at the build-up to war in Iraq, there seemed to be things that -- shifts in rhetoric, say "a regime change" to "weapons of mass destruction." Does there need to be a beat where they're looking at the public record over a long period of time so they can notice these changes, and try to explain them.
ROSENSTIEL: Well that's everyone's beat. The problem is we're a country of amnesiacs communicated to by a profession of people who are extreme amnesiacs. In journalism, we don't tend to keep files and have a long memory. There was some coverage of that. But again, in the end, the press needs a robust party of opposition to do its job well. Because it can't be relied on to supply that for itself. I think that was covered, but the public tends to be trusting of its leaders. And if the leaders want to lead in a certain direction, to make that stop requires something more than just journalism.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: And final question. Why did we go to war?
ROSENSTIEL: Because the President wanted to.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Is that the role of journalists? -- Is to tell us? I mean, is that a legitimate answer? -- "Just because he wanted to?" Why? What is our self-interest? There seems to be more drive there as to why.
ROSENSTIEL: I mean, that's beyond my area of expertise. [laughs] Why did we go to war?
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: [laughs] Okay. And is that something everyone should know in America?
ROSENSTIEL: I mean, we didn't -- we didn't --
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: It's a very important question.
ROSENSTIEL: You know, we didn't go to war because of something the press didn't do. It's more complicated than that.