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Held at: Willard Hotel - Buchannan Room 1401 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC 20004

P R O C E E D I N G S

(12:40 p.m.)

MS. SHAHEEN: Thank you. I know that there are a few people who have to leave early, so we thought we would go ahead and begin the conversation.

I'm Jeanne Shaheen. I'm the director at the Institute of Politics, and with Alex Jones and the folks from the Shorenstein Center we have sponsored a series of what we called Campaign 2008 Looking Ahead.

Many of you came to Cambridge and were part of some of those sessions that we had with the top strategists from the 2008 race. This series was modeled on something that the Institute of Politics has done since 1972, which is called The Campaign Managers Look Back, where at the end of the race we bring everybody in and talk about what had happened during those campaigns.

This, I think, was an idea that Mark McKennen and Mark Halpren came up with to take a look going forward at how people viewed the race as they went into it. So since many of you participated in those sessions and you have been part of covering this race, and will continue to be, we really were interested in talking to  you about what's going on.

So I'm now going to turn it over to Alex Jones, who is the director at the Shorenstein Center, who is going to do a little Oprah-style conversation with everybody. So Alex.

MR. JONES: Thanks, Jeanne. Thank you very much. Welcome again to all of you. As Jeanne said, the idea of this was to -- as Mark Halpren, I think, came up with the expression -- "Lay down markers," about what the campaigns would do, what they would not do, and talk about to the extent we could coax and embarrass and, you know, shame them into talking about some really serious issues that they all face in conducting a primary campaign, and then of course a general election campaign going forward.

As those of you who were there, I'm sure, will remember, the press took up a fair amount of the time. I mean, we gave the opportunity to these folks to talk about the press because the press, in its broadest form, is their principal mechanism for getting their word out, or at least that's the way it has been in the past. That's one of the issues that I would hope that we could discuss today. We asked all three of the campaigns -- and each of the campaigns was represented by several people -- of the three leading Democrats and the three leading Republicans to take one issue that they could -- if they could speak to you, if they could speak to the people in the press and in the media who are doing the coverage and guiding the coverage of the campaigns, if they could speak to you, we asked them what they would say.

And based on what they responded, we are going to have a conversation today. It's not just going to be a laundry list of things that they said. But they did consistently, and across both parties, raised issues that are really worth discussing.

And it gets back to the essential purpose of this whole exercise, which was we hope to make this campaign coverage better and make this campaign a better one. A better one from the political operative perspective, and a better one from the journalistic one.

And that is our sort of point of departure.

We're not just trying to look at it -- we're not trying to be Pollyanna-ish about it or foolish, but we are starting with the idea that it can be done better and that there's a responsible way to do it and that there campaign realities, as well, and trying to separate those things from each other and lay down some -- at least do some thinking about what the right way to cover this campaign is.

And the realities of both the press environment and the political environment, that's what we're here --we hope to have a discussion with you all about. There is a microphone on each of the tables.

We urge you to speak. And when you do speak, if -- we are, as you can see, recording it -- if you would simply identify yourself before you speak, that would be very, very helpful to us.

Let me begin the conversation thematically with something that one of the campaign operatives said that struck me as both poignantly true and troubling. The issue, in a general sense, was negative campaigning.

And the questioning was about, "What would you do if you had information that was damaging to a rival campaign? Would you be willing to give it to a news organization, and would you insist on anonymity if you did?"

And this got into the -- that's an interesting question in and of itself, but it got into a comment that really struck me, and it was this: That the campaigns now feel, and they seem to be united in this, that they have become the research organs for news organizations.

They have become basically the vehicle for news organizations to avoid the expense and trouble of finding out for themselves what so-and-so said about such-and-such.

And have become, in that sense, able to control that message in a very significant way simply by being willing to spend the money and take the time to do this.

This is part of the economic environment that they saw, and also just simply a part of the evolution of what the campaigns have found that journalists are eager to have.

So my question to you, as people on the campaign trail, is there anything wrong with what they are saying or is that simply the truth? I mean, is that the truth for, say, for instance, the New York Times'

Adam Nagourney or is that not? Oh, by the way, this rather particular configuration is not because we are sort of Cambridge eccentrics. It's because we could only -- because of this column, this is the only way that we could configure the tables so that you all could see each other as you talked to each other. Adam?

MR. NAGOURNEY: No, it's because you're Cambridge eccentrics, okay?

A couple of points. I think that's a little bit self-serving. It's like the campaigns are like, "Oh, please stop us before we leak damaging information again." Newspapers, yes, newspapers have less resources to devote, but not significantly less.

And I think that we have probably six or seven people who are working pretty much fulltime on doing research into various candidates, into their backgrounds and to their goals and to what they're like.

Do we and other newspapers go to these campaigns to get information? Sometimes. But I don't think it drive -- they don't drive with anyone near as much as they do. That's point one.

Point two is, what kind of information are we talking about? More often than not, we're talking about very legitimate things. We're talking about, say, last night. I was covering last night's debate, right? If a candidate said something on the stage on a deadline that's inconsistent with something that was said in the past, what's wrong with the campaign sort of flagging you about that going on?

So I guess, "A", I'm not sure it's as bad as they say it is. I don't think it's anywhere near as dominant as they say it is.

MR. JONES: If you want to speak, just give me a hi sign and I will recognize you. This is The New York Times speaking. I don't think anybody doesn't expect The New York Times to be doing this kind of thing. But The New York Times and maybe two or three others are in a very different category. Yeah?

MR. LEUBSDORF: Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News, and that's exactly the point I was going to make. I think that for the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, and some of the networks, perhaps, too, they're going to devote the resources to it, but I suspect there are going to be fewer papers, newspapers especially, that will devote these kinds of resources.

Ours would be a good example of the regional papers that have played a big part in campaign coverage over the last 20 years. A number of us, and we're not the only ones, are cutting way back. And there was a time when we would've done in-depth profiles of each of the candidates and assigned different people to really work through their records, and I've done those profiles over past campaigns.

We stopped that four years ago and we wouldn't do anything like that today. I think there are going to be fewer people. So in a way, I think what they're saying is unfortunately correct.

MR. JONES: Now, are you going to campaigns for this kind of information or are you going elsewhere?

MR. LEUBSDORF: Well, we're mostly, frankly, going to print wire stories or we're going to print The New York Times story if they come up with it. But we won't be doing as much original reporting ourselves. And other papers I think that have cut way back will also be in that boat.

MR. JONES: Well, if you would, what is the reality out there about how the campaigns are actually managing this kind of research? And it's research that is obviously aimed at undermining somebody else's credibility. Yeah?

MR. CORN: David Corn from The Nation magazine.

I don't know about every -- I assume everyone else in the room gets about 30, 40 emails a day from the campaigns. And these are basically opposition research emails. You know, did you know that John McCain said this, but actually four years ago he was against ethanol?

Just, you know, on the record stuff. The RNC does this almost on a minute-by-minute basis. The Democrats are doing it, you know, I think maybe a little less. More about promoting themselves than about others.

But the DNC does it about the Republican candidates.

And it's usually factual. Sometimes out of context, but it's often just quotes. You know, this is what they said, this is a bill they supported, here's their 20 -- you know, for the Democrats, here's the 20 times they raised taxes.

And it's, you know, I assume, and when I've checked in the past, the information is accurate. And I don't see what the campaigns have to complain about. They want reporters to take this and run with it, and they want to shape the coverage, and there's nothing wrong with using it as the basis for a story if you do all the right edict.

MR. ADAIR: Bill Adair from The Saint Petersburg Times, and I agree with Adam that I think there's nothing wrong with this and I think it's healthy, and this just speeding up the kind of opposition research that maybe took longer in the past.

Getting to your question, Alex, about what form does it take before it even comes as the on-the-record email, you get the call from the campaign. I got one yesterday, "Hey, we've got something and we'd like to give it to you first. It's about an inconsistency on so-and-so. Do you want it? Otherwise, we're going to have to give it to somebody else."

MR. JONES: Yes?

MS. BELL: Christina Bell, interning with The Washington Times, just posing another question. You have sometimes, let's say, a YouTube video of a debate ten years ago, and then that gets linked to, say, Matt Drudge. Salon had this great story the other day about the Drudge primary.

So I think that's another thing that newspapers are up against is the actual, original information getting leaked somewhere that it explodes on the internet, and then it doesn't matter whether it's been researched or not, or whether it's been leaked by a campaign, because it's out there and now everybody's seen it on The 24-Hour News Network.

MR. JONES: Well, certainly the YouTube is a very important development and we want to talk about that more, too.

MR. SHAPIRO: Since graciously, Salon's piece, which Michael Shearer wrote for Salon. The primary was mentioned in Salon. I'm Walter Shapiro.

Now I can talk into it. I'm Walter Shapiro, Washington Bureau Chief for Salon, who again wants to thank the reference to the piece that I didn't do. But I do know about the genesis of the piece and I think it speaks exactly what's going on here.

Salon has two people covering politics. We are perceived as a left-of-center news source. We are getting phone calls from both Republican and Democratic party operatives on almost a daily basis, peddling oppo research.

And what that leads me to believe, and the rules I'm trying to follow, is we will not use anyone's oppo research unless we can identify it as being spread by a rival campaign. We won't say necessarily which campaign, but I do not want to just say, "Oops, we just found out about John Edwards because we were reading every single line of the FPC report at 4:00 in the morning."

And I think it's really important to identify it as opposition research. And also, somebody was peddling a piece of opposition research which was factual, which we didn't run with, but which popped up as a key sequence of questions on one of the Sunday morning talk shows.

MALE SPEAKER: Which one?

MR. SHAPIRO: And the same person who is peddling it came back and called me yesterday to say, "Oh, did you notice how that's getting around? It was on X talk show." And all of this transmission belt stuff is part of the story. And I think it's very important that if we're going to use this stuff, that we should refer to its origin.

MR. JONES: I think that's a very good point. How many of you are -- let me, if I may ask, how many of you accept information anonymously and do not identify it, use it and don't identify it as coming from opposition campaigns? I mean, that's not standard practice, I think. Who got the -- over here?

MS. LYNCH: Basically -- is this on? Dotty Lynch, CBS political analyst. Basically, television doesn't abide by the same rules, mainly for the purpose of the amount of time you have in a story to define it. We don't name sources, not because we have any reason to hide them in a lot of cases, but because the public doesn't know who Mark McKinnon is.

So the television rules are very different from print rules. You've got to, hopefully, as an editor, I try to vet all of these types of stories and make sure that the sources either were willing to be named or were credible sources. But I think that some of it is time, and some of it is sloppiness, and some of it, oh gosh, you know, the competitive pressure. We've got this story and we're going to run with it. And somebody made a phone call and verified that it was actually true if they got that far.

Whether it should be done is a question, but no doubt it's done all the time.

MR. JONES: Yes?

MS. SWEET: Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun Times. I just want to point out here that when we talk about it, that there's not a one size fits all in what you're talking about, Alex. And if it's a matter of bringing up things that you may know anyway, may know and had forgotten, may know and would know again once you went to Nexus, part of that is what's out there.

Someone reminding them that Alex Jones said this today, and he said that two years ago when he was in the state capitol in Albany. And that, I think, is far different than an original finding, and that's when I think you have a much tougher journalistic decision to make. That, I think, is something that --
MR. JONES: Well, talk about that, Lynn. MS. SWEET: Well, an original finding would be -- whoever dug up the -- I forgot; who broke the story on the $400 haircut? Okay. If, let's say, they had done that because they were looking at disbursements, okay. If they got it because a birdie called, then it's another situation.

And then when you look at disbursements, let's say it wasn't obvious. Let's say you had to really do a lot of research. It didn't say, "Beauty salon: $400." Let's just say it was a listing for, you know, widgets with Widget Services in Los Angeles and somebody really had to figure out what that meant.

You know, so there's different levels of what the work is.

MR. JONES: Why isn't it a good story to go find out where that $400 haircut story did come from?

MS. SWEET: No, I'm not saying that. That is another question, and others could do it. I just wanted, for the sake of this conversation, to put out there that there are different kinds of situations, some that are fairly minor and some that are fairly major in the decision-making that a journalist has to do. I'm not commenting on -- well, I do think it's a story if someone wants to choose to go out, to how stories get made.

MR. KRANISH: Yes. Michael Kranish from The Boston Globe.

I think the question really is: Are you independently verifying information? So to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, you should distrust and then doubly verify this kind of information. I mean, I've got information from all sorts of places, from walking down the street to someone may call up.

To use some specific examples, in 2004 campaigns would call up and say, "You might want to look at such and such." And there was a story where I looked into it and it was different than what the campaign was saying. It was actually a much better story, as it turned out, about some other candidate, and it was a story that's completely independently reported.

Certainly, it would be a low standard if you were dumping in information verbatim that's anonymous from some other campaign. That's an extremely low

standard that I don't think many of was want to be. It's a much higher standard if someone may be giving you an idea and you fully independently reported, with on-the-record sources fully verified, and a story that you think is fair.

If you can meet those standards, then you'll actually have campaigns do what also happened in 2004, which is come to you and say, "We know there's a story that someone's going to write. You could actually write this about our campaign and look into it just as you might." And that also happens to reporters because campaigns know that things are coming out and there may be reporters that they think are going to do an objective, fair job in looking at an issue.

MR. JONES: Sarah?

MS. FRITZ: I think Michael said pretty much what I was going to say. I mean, this is not new.

MS. SHAHEEN: Sara, can you introduce yourself?

MS. FRITZ: I'm Sara Fritz, and I'm now with the Center for Public Integrity. This is not new. I don't think I've ever gotten a good story that didn't come from a tip of some kind, and yet I've also never used one without checking it out for sometimes days and weeks. And if I spend three or four weeks checking out a story, I'm not going to say where the tip came from.

MR. JONES: I can understand that point in one sense, but it also seems to me that from the perspective of someone who is consuming this information that the fact that one candidate's campaign is the primary source of very damaging information against another one is a part of the whole question of who these people and what the character questions are.

I mean, there certainly seem to be any number of other character questions that are legitimate. So why isn't this one?

MS. FRITZ: Well, have you ever known any campaign that wouldn't do that? That wouldn't give you information if --
MR. JONES: I think they --
MS. FRITZ: -- they found something good?

MR. JONES: I think there's a difference between information and something that is calculated to be damaging that you basically use on the condition that you can't say where it came from. I think that is a very tricky ethical line to draw, because I think otherwise you become basically a hit man for a campaign, and you're basically being manipulated to do something with great damage that they don't get the opportunity to do anything about.

MS. FRITZ: We've been doing that for --
MR. JONES: Well, maybe --
MS. FRITZ: -- hundreds of years.

MR. JONES: Well, maybe you have, Sara. I don't think everybody has. I think that there is a question about where you feel comfortable being in your relationships and where you don't. Yeah?

MR. ZREMSKI: Hi. Jerry Zremski from The Buffalo News. A couple of thoughts:

I think just to elaborate here, I think there is a big difference between having something handed to you on a silver platter that's ready to go, that you just have to confirm, and something that's a tip that says, "You really ought to look at this," and it's going to take a lot of your time to do.

I think you really do have to disclose if it's handed to you. Depending on how credible it is, you may not even want to do it. But if it's something where you do digging, you know, I think that's different.

I also think it's important that if you have a good professional relationship with all the different campaigns, you're going to be getting this from all of them and there's this sort of stuff. And so there's going to be a certain amount of balance that comes from the fact that all these campaigns are going to deal with you in about the same way.

MR. JONES: Linda?

MS. DOUGLASS: I just wanted to follow up on what Walter said, because I noticed that -- I think it's The New York Times and the Washington Post are both routinely saying this information came from a rival campaign. They don't say it came from the Clinton campaign, necessarily, if it's about Obama, but you say, "From a rival campaign." What's wrong with that?

MR. JONES: I don't see anything wrong with it.

I think that's --
MS. DOUGLASS: I mean, are campaigns demanding that you can't even say, "A rival campaign"? I don't think there's anything wrong with disclosing that.

MR. JONES: Just leave those mics on, yeah. MR. NAGOURNEY: I mean, the campaigns are all about getting information out, right? So like if you push them and say, "I'll do this but, you know, I want to make sure it's a rival campaign and intend to say it." What I think they're losing sight of here is that what we're about is getting information out to the public, okay?

And the haircut might not be a good example, but there's been other stories where campaigns might have come up with the information that was helpful for the public in valuating candidates. And I don't want to get too hung --
MR. JONES: And I don't disagree.

MR. NAGOURNEY: Okay. And we've always done this rival campaign thing as much as possible, and tried to identify where it's coming from so people don't think, you know, I'm such a great reporter who managed to find that whatever in the financial report.

MR. JONES: But we are also -- I would remind you, also -- and this is something I would really like to get a response to -- we're also in an environment where what Sara described strikes me as increasingly unlikely simply because there are so blogs out there and there are so many sources out there that will go with something instantaneously, virtually.

And then, what do you do? Margaret?

MS. WARNER: I'm just picking up what --Margaret Warner from the The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. I think the key is, are you regarding this source of information as a tipster or a source? I don't think we should regard them as an actual source.

I mean, if they tip you off to a story, that's one thing. But I think it's particularly important, and what David Corn was talking about, when there are these quotes that come out, I always insist -- at least if I'm writing something for the news summary at The News Hour -that I have to have the research then. I have to see the original transcript.

And I think that really you have to make sure the light in which it was presented is really the light in which it should be viewed, and often it is not. But I also agree with what Adam and Walter are saying about saying rival campaign. I think that's a great way to do

it. But as Dotty was saying, you know, if you're doing an evening news program and something breaks at

3:00 in the afternoon on the wires, we don't do this but we strive hard not to do this, which is to simply take not only the quote, but the take on it from the wires. You just have to do your own research, even if you don't get the story.

MR. JONES: Where's Jack? Yes?

MR. SCHAFER: Jack Schafer. I write about the press for Slade. I've got a brilliant workaround for this. If I can get three journalists anonymously to tell me what the source of the lead was that one of their rivals went with, I'll publish it. I will throw the disinfectant of light, lye, lysergic acid diethylamide upon this issue, and we can probably adjourn this meeting.

MR. JONES: I'd invite you to get in touch with Jack with all of your sources. MR. SCHAFER: Jack dot Schafer at Slade dot com. MS. SCHWARTZ: I'm Marilee Schwartz from The

Washington Post, and I was the political editor during the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, and I want to pick up on something that Alex brought up about information that is coming over the blogs and various websites that were not a challenge in 2000, but in 2004 became an enormous challenge, and I suspect in '08 will be even a greater challenge.

People are so politically attuned to these websites, whether it's Drudge or Daily Kos, and they start reading these things and they don't understand why they're not in the newspaper. And the calls start pouring in, "Why aren't you doing this?" And often, the cable shows will pick them up, not as news but as points of discussion.

It's a real -- I mean, my initial reaction as an editor was, well, you know, this is just gossip on the webs. But then I faced it in a much more important and direct way. I got a call early one morning before I'd gone in to work from the news aide on National that Matt Drudge was reporting -- reporting, I say loosely -- that the Washington Post, ABC News, and Time Magazine were about to publish a story that John Kerry had had an affair with an intern. And, you know, I'm sitting there thinking, "I'm the political editor. Wouldn't I know if my newspaper were doing this?" Then I thought, "Well, could the style staff be doing it?" You know, it was just -- you start -it was confounding. And I go into work and we were immediately told that any calls -- but this is what's so -- it was so curious.

Obviously, people started calling in all the time, "Is The Post doing the story? Is The Post doing the story?" And the questions were referred to Len Downey, the executive editor, who then refused to answer because he neither wanted to say we weren't, which we weren't, but he didn't want to say -- I mean, he wasn't going to say we were when we weren't, but he wasn't going to say we weren't just in case we decided we were.

But the worst moment came when I had to go to Jim VandeHei, who was the Kerry reporter, and tell him he had to call the campaign and ask. He could have heard the screaming at the Willard from the Washington Post newsroom. "I'm not doing that. It's sleazy. It's disgusting. I'm not doing that."

But so we did do it, and they denied it. And we put absolutely nothing in the paper the next day. But that night, on CNN, they decided to have a roundtable about, "There's this terrible gossip going around," and what is the dilemma for reporters?

So you're sort of backed into it. You never deal with the reality of it, but you back into it so then it becomes more of the public discourse. It's now been on CNN, and to everybody's relief, because he made it so much easier for us. John Kerry went on Imus and denied it, so then we could write a story.

But I feel like stuff like this is going to happen more and more. There's going to be stuff put out there and what -- as mainstream, responsible journalists, how do you respond to that?

MR. JONES: Well, this is a group, for the most part, that represents mainstream journalism, traditional journalism. One of the first things that both campaigns said when they were talking about what they would like is this very question.

They would like for you, the mainstream press, not to take blogging and what appears in blogs as

confirmation, as a valid source of information that you give the authenticity of your own brand to without checking it out.

That was number one on their list. Now, the reality that you're living in -- what is that?

MR. ADAIR: I think the reality is -- oh, I'm sorry. Bill Adair from The Saint Petersburg Times. I think the reality of the news marketplace is the way that the mainstream media proves its worth to our leaders is that we have to be, I think, the independent filter that rises above all this and rises above the blogs.

So I accept the challenge from the campaigns. I think we do need to vet those things before we put them on the air and put them in our publications and on our websites.

MR. JONES: Mark?

MR. SILVA: Hi, I'm Mark Silva with The Chicago Tribune. And what you suggested is a perfect segue to what I wanted to offer, which is that we run a very active news blog in our Washington bureau. It's up a lot and people campaigns this year have gravitated towards it as a vehicle, a way for them to get stuff out there.

We had a proposal from a top tier campaign recently that wanted to tell us something about another top tier campaign, and they wanted to see it out there on a blog as fast as they could because it would get picked up by everyone else.

Well, it didn't take a lot of reporting to figure out that it wasn't a very good story, which maybe is why they came to the blog instead of The New York Times, I don't know.

But nevertheless, you do serve the purpose as a filter of untruth and half-truth, but in this age that we're living in with the cycles, it's beyond 24/7. I mean, it's into a fifth dimension of time now in which blogs, reliable blogs, mainstream newspaper blogs, are as much a part of the medium as everything else.

And campaigns, if they've perfected or accelerated their opposition research efforts to the level that they think they have -- and I think to some extent they really have perfected the art -- they know that they're in this new game in which it doesn't take much to get something in the public venue.

MR. JONES: But to get something in a blog and

to get something on The Chicago Tribune site, those are two different things. I mean, it really --
MR. SILVA: Well, we'd like to think so.

MR. JONES: Yeah, so you --
MR. SILVA: I mean, we're upholding some journalistic standards, we hope.

MR. JONES: But in fact, these newspaper websites are often run on a different standard. I mean, they're not exactly the same standard as the one for the newspaper. At least, that's my perception.

MS. SWEET: Now, Alex, what do you mean by --what? Because I do a blog, too, for The Sun Times.

MR. JONES: I mean that for instance, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Adam. For instance, The New York Times. You can read things on The New York Times blog at 2:00 in the afternoon that are, I would say, one-third reported.

MS. SHAHEEN: Are you saying blog or website?

MR. JONES: I mean the website. I mean the website. Within the website. All I'm saying is that these things -- yes, Jeanne?

MS. SHAHEEN: As someone who's been on the

campaign side --
 MR. JONES: Would you identify yourself, please?

MS. SHAHEEN: Oh, yes. I'm Jeanne Shaheen with the Institute of Politics. As someone who's been on the campaign side of all this, do you think that if you identified where the information was coming from, not just to say the rival campaign, but to say, "The Obama campaign said this," or, "The McCain campaign said that," that that would cut down on the amount of those stories that you get? And if that's the case, wouldn't that be nice?

MR. JONES: Mark.

MR. SILVA: Well, no. I'd suggest that the answer is no. You'd just be cut off the list, because there's plenty of -- as Bill suggested, if there's a story out there, they'll shop it. And if somebody doesn't buy it, somebody else will. And if you start to get into the business of identifying the sources of competing campaigns, you just cut yourself off the list.

MR. JONES: David.

MR. CORN: David Corn. I'm not crying tears

for the campaigns when they say, "Please have better standards. Don't take things off the blog." I mean, I'm counting on the -- remember the George Bush campaign in South Carolina? They did that with faxes, but if they had blogs in those days, they would have used blogs to demolish John McCain.

In some ways, you know what my attitude is? I don't care what the campaigns think. They should worry about their guys publicly telling the truth, which in our job is to vet the information that comes out of --they're worrying about bloggers when you could point out at least 20 misstatements that any candidate made last night. But --
MR. JONES: Okay well, let me -- let me ask you this.

MR. SILVA: Okay.

MR. JONES: What is a best practice for dealing with this? For dealing with the fact that this stuff is coming over the transom. For dealing with the fact that the Drudge report and others are going to have things in it and you're going to be hammered by people who are saying, "Why won't you put this in the paper? Why are you protecting them?"

Again, our purpose here is to find a way to do it better, so it makes more sense, so it's something that serves the public interest. What's the best practice?

MR. CORN: I thought Marilyn's example was a good case in point. It caused inconvenience and some screaming, but there was all this stuff on the blogs, and we all react in the same way. Oh, my God, a major story may affect our lives and we have to actually do some work today on this.

But you vet it and you take a deep breath. But if John McCain's campaign came to me and said, "Go look at the arrest records in this township in Massachusetts from 1963, and you'll find something about another candidate." And it's a drunk driving charge against Rick Romley, I would say, "Thank you," and I'd make sure it's true, and to me that's the important thing.

MR. JONES: Well, all I'm saying is --
MR. CORN: But you'd have to --
MR. JONES: -- is the best practice that you don't put it on your site, either in a blog form? You don't give it the legitimization of your brand name? Do you wait, in other words, until you can authenticate the information?

MR. CORN: Yeah.

MR. JONES: Or is that not really the practice?

Yes? Yeah?

MR. GILBERT: Craig Gilbert with The Milwaukee Journal. Just a postscript of the story about Kerry and the alleged affair. That was during the Wisconsin primary and we had Kerry scheduled to do an interview with our editorial board over the telephone that day.

Kerry wasn't making any public comments that day about the story, but it was that morning that it came out. So naturally, we asked him about it. We asked him two or three questions about the rumor, which he denied, but we had him on the record denying the story. And then we were presented with the dilemma of whether to use that denial as the basis for running a story about the rumor.

And then we had the further kind of judgment call involved of whether this was going to become a story that was going to be forced into the public domain by other outlets.

Ultimately, we're sort of scrambling to make an independent decision about the newsworthiness of it, and I also found myself kind of scrambling around trying to figure out whether other newspapers were going with this and whether we'd look idiotic by not writing about it.

We ultimately decided not to write the story, and I was shocked, actually, the next day when I discovered that virtually the entire mainstream media had kind of held off on the story until the following day he went on Imus and put it up there.

MR. JONES: Can you characterize the pressure you're feeling to adopt the standard of the blogosphere rather than the standard of the news organizations, which were far slower and had more time?

I mean, you're now working not just for a newspaper or a news report at a particular time; you're working for, as someone said, fifth-dimensional space here, kind of. There's several people who want to speak.

You, you, you, we'll get you all. Yes?

MS. BELLANTONI: Christina Bellantoni again with The Washington Times. I will just say that when John Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards made their announcement about her cancer returned and Politico.com had one source reporting that the campaign would be cancelled.

Our newsroom was, "Hey, we need to make sure this is true and get it up on the website." And there was a big discussion about, "Wait a minute. None of our sources are telling us this. They're about to some speak."

I think that pretty much everybody here, I would imagine, is very responsible and will make sure to vet something and not just print something. If it's an unnamed one-source fact like that.

MR. JONES: Is that the reality? What do you say?

MR. LEUBSDORF: Carl Leubsdorf of The Dallas Morning News. The reality is that I think the pressure has gradually increased over every campaign cycle, and the real pressure is it's out there. This was true in 1992 when the Gennifer Flowers story broke, and it was out there.

It was true when, if you remember, in the summer of 1992, Mary Tillotson of CNN asked President Bush about his alleged affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, of which there was no real tangible evidence ever of the sort that was of the Gennifer Flowers, and it was now out there.

And some papers, unfortunately including ours, ran the story about Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald because it was out there. And the pressure gets even greater with this multiplicity of sources. Cable television is a big player in this because it looks from time to time that they'll put anything on there.

MR. JONES: Are they the easiest way to get into the legitimate MSN news cycle?

MR. LEUBSDORF: I think they probably are because what was the story of -- there was an Obama story about the -- what was the --
MR. JONES: The Madrasa.

MR. LEUBSDORF: The Madrasa story. And they put it out there just as if -- without any reporting at all, and then it was out there and you're under enormous pressure because it's out there.

MR. JONES: So is CNN the tripwire now? I've

got some people who have been trying to talk and aren't getting to.

MR. FARRELL: Yeah, Jack Farrell from The Denver Post. I have a tremendous amount of New York Times stock from my days at The Boston Globe, and it has tanked completely three or four years, but I'm holding onto it.

Because I believe that at some point ten years from now The New York Times website is going to be that one place you can go to on the web when you're in a bar and you're arguing about what the score was in the Super Bowl in 1984 and get an authoritative, unbiased, rock-solid answer.

And if we give up that now, at this sort of crucial moment when we're under this pressure to be competitive with guys who do nothing but get up in the morning in their pajamas and be glib and witty, we're really giving away the store.

I think, financially, we all should think about making sure that the franchise is kept intact as we go through this difficult transition time.

MR. JONES: Michael.

MR. TOMASKY: Mike Tomaskey from The Guardian, and I guess this is a sort of a skunk at the picnic kind of comment.

MR. JONES: Go ahead.

MR. TOMASKEY: Well, I think there are blogs and there are blogs, and there are actually a lot of responsible blogs that don't traffic in rumor. Matt Drudge isn't one. Matt Drudge reports rumors and I think he's what we were kind of talking about in the earlier part of the conversation.

But there are a lot of blogs, and then, of course, there are people who are sitting in their pajamas in Saginaw who will write anything, but they don't have much of an audience. But to me, many, many of the blogs are pretty responsible and actually serve a function that newspapers sometimes don't serve, and it's this:

Newspapers often, not always but often, have to wait for the opposition or the other side to say something before it's news. We saw this a lot in 2002 and 2003 with regard to the war, and a lot of reporter friends of mine said, "Well, if the Democrats aren't standing up in opposition, it's not our job. It's their job." You will see this. You saw it with John Kerry waiting for 15 days to react to the swift boat attacks, and there wasn't that much. There was some, to be sure, but there wasn't that much mainstream media reporting on who John O'Neal and all these people were in those 15 days.

There was tons of it on blogs, and so it actually served a purpose in that case.

MR. JONES: Was most of it oppositional research from the Kerry campaign?

MR. TOMASKEY: I don't think so, because the Kerry campaign was trying to have nothing to do with it and trying to make it go away.

MS. SCHWARTZ: I was going to actually raise a point about competition that had nothing to do with the blogs, but actually had to do with breaking news, and it's not even a political story. But it's, again, the pressures we're all facing.

When the Virginia Tech killings happened, obviously this was all on our metro staff, but the web was very anxious to be competitive, our website, and to

have every little tidbit that came out, as were the networks.

We'd be sitting there watching TV and there'd be these facts about Cho or other facts, and they weren't on -- "Why aren't they on our website? Why aren't they on the website?" And the website took a lot of hits. And what the editor of the website told me was we had made a decision not to go with everything we saw on TV until it was confirmed by reporters on the metro staff.

Sometimes that took an hour, sometimes that took two hours. And that's, again, these sort of decisions -- now, this isn't blogs. This is sort of legitimate breaking news. How fast do you have to be on the website to -- are you going to risk losing your competitive edge to put on the details, whether it's political or whether it's about a massacre, or are you going to wait for your own staff to confirm it?

Again, these are huge challenges facing news organizations.

MS. SWEET: I want to address your best practice question.

MR. JONES: Uh-huh?

MS. SWEET: It's Lynn Sweet, from The Chicago Sun Times. Because I think there is a lot of stuff going on here at different levels. So for people, and since most everybody here is mainstream outlets, whether on the web or whatever, I think we do have some best practices we would agree with.

No matter how you get out some information --on your blog, your website, or your print story -- no matter how you get information, one, you do verify it independently. I mean, that's the simple best practice, but that we're even discussing whether we should do that, Alex, seems that maybe we should state what seems to me the obvious. Verify first, no matter what.

Then if you, as a best practice, don't grant blanket accord, the all-time pass to, "Whatever you tell me, I'll never reveal where it comes from," but every time, be a nudge. Can I use this? Sometimes people might say yes. Can I say this? Don't give that blanket pass where you're just the intake valve.

But even if you are, I think the third best practice is a recognition that in the 2008 campaign, we are in new territory and that things happen faster, and that even reporters who write for more cerebral forums are having to file stuff fast.

But that only means that you either work faster or verify faster. I don't think it is a crisis in the business to let what seems to be an industry standard, which is to first verify. And then if you hear something, my fourth point, and then I'll let others add for best practices, if a tip -- you know, a tip's a tip.

If it checks out, and it's worthy to put on there, and the news overwhelms how you found out, especially if it's something that had -- you know, the first thing that I talked about earlier. It's something that's out there. A fact that we knew but had forgotten.

Then I think it's just more important to get the story out and then maybe clean up afterwards subsequent stories another day of how stuff is coming out. So those are some suggested best practices.

MR. KRANISH: This is Michael Kranish with The Boston Globe.

My father, who was an old wire service reporter for years, used to tell me that their slogan was, "Get it first, but first get it right." And that's the best advice that I ever heard in journalism, and it still very much applies now.

The mainstream media is sometimes a phrase that's used as a pejorative, but we really -- all the people in this room, as far as I know -- are responsible media. If I write something that you think is wrong, you have the right to call me up, call my editor up, seek a correction. And if that happens in a blog, you're lucky if you can even identify who wrote it, much less get them to pay attention to it.

So we have to maintain. As someone said, as Jack said, that's our currency, evermore important. And I heard someone say that there was a concern about will they be able to afford to do the scrub on a candidate or just use wire copy and so forth.

I think one of the best things we can do in political reporting is not get so caught up in the latest 15 minutes on the internet but to really devote your time, use the wire service for the obvious stuff and so forth if need be, but devote your time resources to doing the fullest scrub possible.

I know at the Globe, we were inspired by what the Washington Post did some years earlier. I think it was on George Bush, doing a huge series of stories in 2000, I think it was, on George Bush. And so my editors at the Globe said, you know, "Let's spend six months."

Jack was one of the editors at the time, as well, in the Bureau, to look at John Kerry. And we wrote a series of 14 pages, and that appeared a year and a half before the first primary.

And that's really our best -- in that case there wasn't -- I can't think of a single word that I wrote that was based on what some other campaign said because, frankly, those campaigns didn't even exist when we did that.

MR. JONES: Mike, do you have a comment?

MIKE DORNING: I'm Mike Dorning, Chicago Tribune. I think this whole notion of the blogs or website for the Tribune, and I think a lot of other newspapers, as being any less accurate is kind of a false notion.

I think certainly at the Tribune, we had that whole Dewey defeats Truman incident, so we're very sensitive about getting things right. And I would think at most other papers, you keep that same accuracy screen. What happens on the website is there's a little bit less analysis and perspective on the immediate version you get out on the website or the blog, than the stuff that you do for the print edition.

I often find myself now, if I'm on the campaign trail or something, you have to file right away for the website, and it almost kind of reads more like a wire story and it's not until you do the print edition that you start pulling out, talking to other people.

So you don't have that same -- not so much accuracy check, but substance and analytical check that you were used to having as print writers.

MR. JONES: Let me change gears here, because we've got some other things I want to at least touch on.

One of the things that was mentioned by the campaigns is that they wish that you would not always assume you know why they are doing what they're doing and simply take what they say at face value and basically report it that way instead of calculating all of the ways that this is going to help so-and-so or hurt so-and-so and so forth.

Jack, is that legit? MR. SCHAFER: I've got to side with my friend, David Corn, here. The campaigns are not the clients. The readers are the clients. We're not covering the campaigns. We're not in the business of pleasing the campaigns.

Beyond that, I would say that not that long ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago, the professional media was a sort of cartel and we could establish standards and we could tamper down gossip. Every now and then, gossip would jump out of its basket.

I remember a famous, maybe one-paragraph story in the Washington Post that had three bylines on it: Gwen Eiffel, Ann Devroy, and I can't remember what the third one was. And the lead was: Jennifer Fitzgerald, who has served under President Bush in a variety of positions, dot, dot, dot. So let's keep that in mind when we talk about the high standards.

What I just wanted to finish with is that in the old days, the cartel could sort of establish these best practices, decide when to hold their nose and not chase a story. But today, that's gone. And I think that part of the job of professional journalists is to run down and eradicate rumors that are baseless because we're in the business to satisfy our readers, to find out the truth for readers.

MR. JONES: The argument that they made was that this does not serve the voters because it is so knee-jerk, and it is so sort of a constant, that instead of actually having an opportunity for a candidate to say something, they are constantly being undermined and psychoanalyzed or second-guessed by a kind of effort to penetrate the veil.

This sort of casts everything in a suspicious and negative light which, in fact, depresses people from being interested in politics. It's journalistic in a sense because it was -- its objective is to penetrate that veil.

At the same time, if you do nothing but penetrate the veil, are you actually doing something that is a disservice to both the candidates and to people who simply have the opportunity to hear what the candidates say?

LINDA DOUGLASS: Linda Douglass from the

Shorenstein Center. Well, if you're talking about analyzing every statement that a candidate makes in terms of that candidate's self interest, so that he's only talking about ethanol because he's in Iowa, and he only wants to support ethanol subsidies because he only cares about Iowa votes, that's one thing.

But if you're talking about campaigns claiming to give you information because they are agents of good government, I mean, I think that none of us journalists should ever believe that for one second.

A campaign is always acting in the interest of its candidate and that should always be explored at some length. And secondly, I think that the journalists in general don't do enough, actually, to explore the motivations of a campaign that's passing out information, because frequently, that should actually be the story.

The story should be: This campaign gave you this information. Where'd they get it? How'd they get it? Why'd they get it? Why are they giving it to you?

And for what purpose? And I think there is so much source protection and so much competitive hunger for tips that I think we err in the other direction. MR. JONES: Well, there's a lot of evidence, scholarly evidence, that the way we had been covering the campaigns discourages people from being interested in politics. I mean, that that's part of the package.

MS. SCHWARTZ: I think I'm interpreting their complaint a little differently than Linda did. I'm interpreting it as the opening clause that I always kill, which is seeking to establish stature or seeking to show that he's compassionate.

You know, the reader can figure that out, and that's what I think pisses off readers, and I think it pisses off campaigns when you take this position in one clause that you're explaining why a campaign is doing something, and in your own voice and not sort of letting them explain it or get others to explain it. That I completely agree with. And I have to say I was the third byline on that story.

MR. JONES: Sarah.

MS. FRITZ: Well, I think if you asked everybody in this room, "Is the standard wisdom always right?" people would tell you that the standard wisdom is probably more often wrong than right. And those phrases are based on the standard wisdom.

We all know that, but in the sense people put that in their story to kind of sell it to the editor or whatever, knowing that it's probably not true, but it seems like it's true. And it really is --
MR. JONES: Is that a best practice?

MS. FRITZ: No, it's horrible.

MR. JONES: What I mean is, is that a best practice that should be avoided?

MS. FRITZ: Yes, it is. It is definitely something that people should -- you know, now if somebody else wants to say he's trying to establish his stature, that's all good. Then, that would be a good third graph for something like that.

MR. CANNON: Carl Cannon with National Journal.

I was just thinking while you were talking, Alex, of a case I covered when Margaret Warner and I worked in San Diego together.

There was a double murder; it was a brutal murder of two boys who were killed. Pete Wilson was the mayor of San Diego at the time. He later became governor. And the stories about why Wilson -- and the guy who did the killing was named Robert Alton Harris and he was the first person executed in California in 20 years.

The stories all would say -- out-of-towner reporters who comment, "Pete Wilson is doing this to shore up support among conservative voters," or to do this or that, and it's a speculation of motives.

And I think what those campaigns are talking about are these reporters trying to assume motives and they tend to be -- I mean, I'll stick up for the campaigns here -- superficial and even in-cynical.

And, in fact, the reason, I think, Pete Wilson was so adamant to carry out this death sentence is because he was the mayor when it happened. He knew the families. He was deeply offended, and because -- and I got this in my stories -- his grandfather was a policeman in Saint Louis who had been killed when his mother was little. And he had a deep -- you know, he was liberal on a lot of things, but not on -- and one of the boys who was killed was a policeman's son.

Sometimes you just have to ask people why they do things and you get better answers than this stuff that we tend to do on deadlines. So I will just weigh in and say in that I think the campaigns have a point.

campaigns complain that journalists try to get inside their heads and ascribe motives to everything they pronounce as a policy position, figuring out how it affects them, how it benefits them, how it hurts somebody else, instead of simply taking and allowing them to have an opportunity to make a position, and believing that this is their position and that's the important thing.

MS. TONER: Robin Toner with the New York Times. I've heard this complaint for a long time and I think there is some merit to it. I think when in doubt, go tactical. It's easier to write.

If somebody gives a complicated speech, it's sometimes easier to write about the horserace implications of it or what they're trying to accomplish, what group they're aiming at, rather than deal with the substance or the merits of the speech.

MR. JONES: Is the horserace going -- I mean, the horserace and conflict are the two themes that seem to be the ones that are the perennials. And, of course, this has been complained about a long time.

We were having a conversation here at lunch about how does it really matter for a campaign to put out a policy paper. Does it really count for anything? Does it contribute? Does anybody read it? If you write a story about it, does it go anywhere?

The consensus was, on the one hand, it's a waste of time; on the other hand, it's a very good thing that they do it. Margaret, you were speaking to this.

MS. WARNER: I was sort of sticking up -- we were kind of mocking some of these policy positions, healthcare and whatever. It's all forgotten when he becomes the president, and there's also the point that often it would box him in if he were -- he or she were to become president.

But I spoke up for it, saying it at least forces the candidates to get beyond diagnosing the

problem and then vague platitudes about what should be this nirvana and how they would approach it. I think we actually learn something about either their values or their approach, even if it's not the specifics, even though that it's hard to get those stories on the front page.

MR. JONES: Robin Toner.

MS. TONER: Yeah. I guess I disagree with the notion that these things don't matter, because over the past 20 years I think there's a lot of examples you can say where -- first of all, party platforms. People say party platforms don't matter.

Party platforms, I think, matter a lot about what kind of president you're going to have and what kinds of things he's going to emphasize. And I think that position papers, I mean, it mattered that Clinton in 1992 had campaigned on universal health coverage.

We spent the next two years covering his effort to deliver on that. President Bush came in promising a big tax cut, injecting private market forces into Medicare, Social Security privatization, a lot of that stuff we spent the next six years dealing with it.

MR. JONES: Well, the New York Times and the News Hour are two things. But when you get policy proclamations and policy statements, do you consider them news? Do you file them somewhere? What do you do with them?

MS. BELL: Well, in one case, a lot of times, I travel across the country and voters will say, "Oh, the news is just so obsessed with covering the personalities and the horserace, and they don't ever get to policy. You don't even know the candidates have policy statements."

And I think that that's part of the problem, is a story about Joe Biden saying something that might be bad about Obama is going to make a front page story and dominate the news cycle. But actually, somebody's policy platform is way more important when they're going to be president or running for president.

And so I think that a lot of news organizations get away from that, and policy gets boiled down to two sentences instead of actually explaining what they would do and why. So the papers themselves aren't really the issue. It's a matter of shouldn't we be devoting a lot of resources. And I like what you said from the Boston Globe about how you should devote longer pieces later, take the time to do research on that and explain in six months what someone would actually do on healthcare.

MR. JONES: But we've got a newspaper industry that's so paranoid right now, and frantic to get attention, and focused on local news, and so forth and so on, that increasingly, those kinds of stories, if they get done at all, are going to be buried.

MR. KRANISH: No, no.

MR. JONES: No? Am I wrong?

MR. KRANISH: No. My point -- I can't speak for the newspaper industry and so forth, but I know at the Globe we have a spotlight team that does incredible work. When they give assignments to reporters, we still have -- you know, if the story is good enough, weeks or even months to work on them.

Again, I can only just speak for myself, but from what I see, there still is a lot of dedication to do the really important stories, really, really, really well. You know, we're all distressed about what's going on in the business, no question about it. But one answer is that a lot of what people come to us for is the deeper more investigative reporting. They don't necessarily need us to find in all the headlines.

I mean, I see enough of the headlines during the day that I don't necessarily need to read all of the incremental news stories. What I really want to see are some of the more in-depth stories, interpretative stories and the longer pieces for which I still think there's a great market.

I know when I write stories, it's usually the longer stories that a lot of time was spent on that gets the most reaction, because that's something I believe that they won't get elsewhere.

So yes, I mean, there is certainly a lot of emphasis on the local. But for the Globe, for example, the New Hampshire primary is a local story, you know? Ergo, we cover the national presidential campaign, thank goodness, which we would anyway, but even to a greater degree. You want to play to your strengths, but -- and I don't know what every other newspaper is doing, but --
MR. JONES: Walter and then Michael.

MR. SHAPIRO: This is Walter Shapiro from Salon again. One of the things, as somebody who debunked the idea of paying too much attention to the specifics about candidates' healthcare plans, because at the same conversation, the Bill Clinton 1992 campaign plan had almost nothing other than the word "universal" in it to do with what came out of the White House.

There is another end of this. Putting together a campaign plan is in many ways the closest thing of an issue plan, a healthcare plan is the closest thing many candidates will come during the entire campaign to something they will actually be doing as president.

And I think in looking at this -- and I have never done this but I'd like to try with this campaign, is to look more at the process. Does Obama listen to a variety of voices? Does he want to merely read reports?

Does he quiz you, showing he's read reports? Does he just say, "You guys work it out"?

Some ways, that process story, which in some way sounds like inside baseball, may tell you more about the difference between a Bill Clinton in the White House and, dare I say it, a George W. Bush.

And since time is short, like a candidate with the one-minute time limit, there is one other thing I wanted to say about the earlier thing about oppo research, which is, A: we haven't seen anything like what we're going to see when the stakes get high in the fall and January.

And number two, I really think, particularly for the major newspapers, maybe it's time to have more transparency and actually do a daily political section called News We Disapprove Of, in which they take the faults and unverified things going around and explain what is untrue and what cannot be verified.

MR. JONES: I think people would read it. Michael.

MR. TOMASKY: Mike Tomasky again. I think Walter's first point is a great one. And to pick up on what Michael Kranish was saying, there's a kind of story that's neither policy, here's the white paper or horserace, or Joe Biden having some eruption that's objectionable, that's kind of in the middle that is another sort of process story to complement maybe what Walter said.

The campaign that I covered most closely was Hillary Clinton's in 1999 and 2000. It was two years. Well, she would take these trips upstate and, of course, being Hillary Clinton, she hardly ever said anything remotely interesting.

So when we were on the bus at 5:30, Adam was off and on that bus, and the people from the dailies, from the tabloids, they'd be calling their desks trying to squeeze water out of this stone and figure out what was news.

And she said something vaguely new about dairy price support so, like, that was the lead. And then Rick Lazio said something else about dairy price supports and that was the story. And that's how it often went for days and days, but that wasn't really the story of what was happening when Hillary Clinton was making these trips upstate.

The story was that you could see people kind of changing their mind about her before your eyes. You really could see it. And that kind of thing -- I don't know. It's hard for newspapers to do, I guess. But that kind of thing just didn't get reported as much.

MR. CORN: Aren't we sort of dancing around the criticism about the tenure or campaign coverage that I've been familiar with, criticism-wise, for 30 years now, which is, do we cover politics more like sports?

You know, two sides: who's up, who's down. Is that sort of the basic drive of political coverage? Yeah, there's plenty of other things. You know there will be stories about policy ideas or what Mike just mentioned, you know, how people are relating with their possible constituents.

But I think this is one place where I might agree with the campaigns that they have a hard time. I think it's partly their problem, too. I think if John McCain called in reporters from the Post and the Times and CBS and said, "Let's talk for two hours about Iraq. Just two hours, I'll tell you what I think. You ask me any question you want about it and we'll have a little mini press conference on the subject matter."

That would be great for both sides. It should make great copy. And if he wants to fully explain his position, not in these 90-second sound bytes when he's being sniped at by other candidates, everybody would benefit. But we don't seem to sort of -- neither side really seems to sort of want that at the end of the day.

MR. JONES: As we're going to a close, I want to say at the last a final question. You are, most of you, veterans of campaigns. You've seen many campaigns.

Dotty, this is her tenth, ninth --
MS. LYNCH: Eleventh.

MR. JONES: Eleventh. A lot. And some of you in this room, this is your first. I suspect that there're more people with less experience out there this time around than in the past. And I suspect that may have something to do with this.

But my question really is, we've been talking about some of these things -- you have and we have and the campaigns have -- for quite a long time. The world is changing in a very rapid way in a technological sense.

Is there any serious prospect that campaigns will be more civil? That campaign coverage would be better? Would it be less willing to be as bloody and, as Walter was predicting, when it gets down into the trenches it's going to be very, very ugly?

Is that a complete fantasy and are we wasting our time to even have a conversation like this about best practices in trying to deal and verify and validate information? And if so, what does that say about what journalism is for? What this group of people representing high quality, prideful, standard bearing news organizations -- what does it say about us?

And that's a serious question. Does anyone want to chime in and make a speech? No.

MR. CORN: Don't confuse the journalists with the campaigns. I think you just kind of blurred everything together.

MR. JONES: I think the journalists and the campaigns are right in there together. I mean, I think that the journalists are not altogether responsible for the way the campaigns are conducted, but journalists do, it seems to me, have to take responsibility for what they do. And they're in an environment, and their news organizations have to take some responsibility.

MR. CORN: But they have --
MR. JONES: The environment that's even more competitive and even more, you know, sort of given to abuse than it ever has been, even in the past.

MR. CORN: You're right. And far be it from me to defend the MSN. My readers would be horrified to hear me do that sometimes. But at least with journalism, there is, if not the actual existence of standards, at least the conceit that there are standards.

Put-on campaigns is what Richard Ben Kramer wrote, "Whatever it takes." I mean, there are no -- they don't talk about objectivity and accuracy when it comes to what they do.

MR. JONES: No. I'm talking to journalists.

MR. CORN: Okay.

MR. JONES: This is a bunch of journalists I'm talking to.

MR. FARRELL: Jack Farrell from the Denver Post. One thing that came out of the earlier sessions at Harvard that was very interesting to me was the look of terror in their eyes when these campaign operatives talked about the fact that they cannot rely on television advertising anymore to more vast numbers of votes.

They are petrified that they don't have the kind of control they used to have, in part because of the democratization that the internet has brought about. And this, to me, just reinforces the idea that there's a place for one group of scribes and priests to try to be a little bit holy and be a place where voters can go to, because it's just a jungle out there.

MR. JONES: Well, one of the things they also talked about was how they are spending an awful lot of their time and mental energy figuring out ways to get around you guys altogether, by creating an ad and having it aired once and sending it directly to CNN or to YouTube, for finding ways to basically circumvent the mainstream media as any kind of a filter.

And, as you say, there was a sort of terror in their eyes about the idea of having to contend with this environment that is so unpredictable. But they also are working very hard to figure out a way to manipulate that environment as much as they possibly can, which is not surprising. Yes.

MR. WINSTON: I'm Chris Winston, and I think I may be the token political hack here today. So I'll speak just for a second from the other perspective.

And a lot of what I've heard today I totally agree with. I mean, I don't think there's any reason for reporters to try and spend their lives pleasing campaigns. That's not how it works.

And I would also have to say that I don't think there's anything wrong in the motivations of most of the campaigns. That's what their job is, is to promote their candidate. And for a lot of them, in their minds, they think what they're doing is good government, because if their guy gets elected, government will be better. I mean, there is a logic behind what they do.

The only point that I would try and make in terms of the coverage for coming up in '08, I think if you look at polling data today, you see a real frustration in people, voters out there, that they are tired of not getting real solutions, translated policies that sound like they're going to solve their problems, solutions that will work.

And you saw it in 2006, I think. The Republicans took it on the chin, in part because of an incompetence factor. And I think you may see it again in 2008.

And so, I think, from an operative's perspective, I think a lot of us would like to see more focus on policy, on real issues rather than process. I mean, I know the process is fun to write about and I love to read about it.

But for average people out there, there really seems to be a yearning for more substance, not in wonk language, but something that they can really get their hands on to say, "That woman or that man is going to do X, Y or Z."

And someone earlier said something about we need to remember that the readers are our clients. And I agree with that, not the campaigns. It's the readers that are the clients. And I think readers today, voters out there, want more substance rather than just process.

MR. JONES: Thank you. Chris, I think you've got a good point. Some of you may have been at our luncheon a couple of months ago, with Bob London from the faculty at Harvard, when he talked about what the American people -- how the American people actually frame the policy issues.

And they don't frame it as healthcare. They frame it as, "How am I going to pay my medical bills?" They don't frame it as the tax situation. They talk

about, "How am I going to pay for things? Things are so expensive."

I mean, it really is a different way of looking at these issues and a journalistic challenge, it seems to me, as much as a political one, of being able to speak to people in ways that they will really actually hear and find relevant. And as much as anything, it's how you frame the question, seems to me. Yes.

SUZANNE STRUGLINSKI: Suzanne Struglinski with the Deseret Morning News. I just want to get back to your point you made a little bit ago about how the campaigns are looking for ways to get around us.

I think what exists now that has -- there are ways to get around us. Through blogs, through throwing something up on YouTube. And one of the things that's different is the anonymity.

You can log into YouTube and post something, and I think it's logical to just assume this is some innocent bystander person who happens to see this and posted it where we don't know if it's coming from the other campaigns.

We don't know if something on a blog for -- youknow, someone who does a Mick Romney blog, you know, has something that's one of these unsubstantiated things. We don't know if it's coming from the other campaigns.

MR. JONES: They don't even have to bother to leak it to you.

SUZANNE STRUGLINSKI: Yeah. They can leak it to a blog and then the big brouhaha starts the next day because we all don't have the story that some blog had. So there are avenues for them to get around us.

And I think we have a responsibility to not let it get bigger than we are. We had a need to keep that third-party candidate out of it and make it still the mainstream media's responsibility to report facts.

MR. JONES: Well, if I had one thing to leave you with from my perspective, I hope that you will take as part of your challenges covering the campaign, covering this dimension of the campaign, covering the dimension of coverage of the campaign.

Because I think that is really a very interesting dimension of not only the way the campaign process works, but the way people are apprehending information, getting it, and it will help educate them, if nothing else, about the way the media -- or what the role the media has in this complicated dance.

Thank you all for coming. We loved having you with us. Thank you for participating so vigorously. And we're adjourned.

(1:54 p.m.)