MY RESIGNATION

BY JAY HARRIS

When I resigned as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News on March 19 I was not surprised that my act of protest and non-cooperation struck a positive chord in the Mercury News family and throughout Knight Ridder.

I was surprised, however, by the extent to which that chord resonated with journalists nationwide and members of the general public. By resigning on principle -- something Howard Kurtz described as simply not done anymore -- I found myself viewed by some as a modern day hero.

In the days immediately following my resignation I concluded that I owed it to those who supported me and those who shared the convictions that led to my resignation to explain more fully why I did what I did. I would seek to put the act in a larger and more useful context.

I tried to do so through three speeches.

The first was to the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 6. There I tried to highlight the issues and the stakes -- and make the case that without consistent and courageous leadership from senior editors the situation would continue to deteriorate.

The second was to this year's graduating class at the Columbia School of Journalism. I wanted to assure them -- and make the case to aspiring journalists elsewhere -- that good journalism is still being done, that the battle between profits and principles is not lost and need not be.

The final talk was to an assembly at Harvard University. There my primary argument was to and for the larger public. The point was that the largest stake in this matter is the public's -- for what is ultimately at stake is the ability of American journalists to serve the public's needs well and fully.

The journey of introspection and revelation required to write the speeches clearly was my own version of Dante's journey through Purgatory. When I resigned I knew intuitively that I had done what I had to do, that I had done what for me was the right thing. The speeches helped me understand and articulate why.

On the Saturday in mid-May after I returned from delivering the speeches at Columbia and Harvard, my friend Leo Chavez and I were sitting in his backyard with his two sons and my oldest daughter after a barbecue.

Leo is a historian and chancellor of two Silicon Valley community colleges. And he asked us a question he said he frequently asks his students, "What were the dates of the American Revolution?"

After a brief discussion, he told us most students answer with the dates of the American War for Independence. The correct answer, he said, was that the revolution had occurred before the war began. And unlikely as it may seem that is an apt insight from which to launch this story.

Even before I had finished writing the first speech I had started to recognize that the roots of my decision to resign went back a long way, several years in fact. As Leo Chavez had observed in a different context, the revolution occurred long before I declared my break from Knight Ridder.

I had actually included a phrase from the Declaration of Independence in my address to ASNE. I told that assembly I had witnessed "a long train of abuses against the traditions and core values of a great profession and a great company."

A key part of my message at ASNE was the need for leaders to confront, challenge and oppose in whatever ways are most appropriate for them that which they believe to be inconsistent with the highest principles and purposes of American journalism.

I explained my thinking with these words:

"Throughout my career I have surrounded myself with ideas and ideals, and have tried to live within and live up to the best of them. For many years my office walls have been adorned by quotes that inspire, that guide, that challenge and remind.

"When I finally faced squarely the tyranny of the market, and the threat it represents to the historic and noble mission of American journalism, I kept coming back to a quote from the nineteenth century journalist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass."

"'Let me give you a word on the philosophy of reform,' Douglass said. 'The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress.

"'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will be continued till they are resisted . . . . The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.'"

There was another quote I tried to work into each of three speeches but it never quite fit. But I share it now because it captured something that I've been feeling, something that I wanted others to feel as well.

On the night the Montgomery bus boycott began after Rosa Parks had been jailed for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the community. A key goal of his remarks was to place the black citizens' challenge to the system of legal segregation in a context all could understand and those participating would find inspiring. This is what Reverend King said:

"We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. But we come here tonight to be saved, to be saved from patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice."

"If we protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in the future, somebody will have to say, 'There lived a race of people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and civilization.'"

There is a parallel between that situation and the situation of journalists today. I thought the time had come that there was "no alternative but to protest" and that we needed to be "saved from patience that makes us patient with anything less than" that which is required to do journalism in the public interest well and consistently.

And I hoped that people might one day look back on our time and see journalists at all levels who through their insistence on what was right -- and their refusal to silently accept less -- "injected" a new vitality into American journalism.

The second major address was to the graduating students at Columbia. Two weeks before delivering it I spent a day at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Something happened there which shaped what I had to say at Columbia.

After an on-stage interview by the school's dean Ken Bodie, a student and a member of the faculty stopped me in the hall.

This is how I told the story of what happened next to the students at Columbia, and what I said I thought it meant for them:

"The student asked, in effect, 'If things are so bad that you quit why should I go into journalism?' And the professor added words to the effect of, 'And why should I encourage my students to do so?'

"There are good and important answers to the questions they posed. The first is that good journalism, great journalism is still being done at newspapers and broadcast stations large and small around the country.

"The challenge before us, the threat if you want to call it that, is that market pressures are undermining support for such work. In more and more companies the steady and significant commitment required to do serious journalism is given less and less priority. What this means -- and the importance of this is not to be underestimated -- is that the best and most important journalism, that being journalism in the public interest, is on average being done less well, less frequently and less consistently than was once the case."

I told the students of a speech given last year by Peter C. Goldmark Jr., chairman and c.e.o. of the International Herald Tribune. Noting recent concerns about feared declines in the quality of journalism nationally, Goldmark had this observation:

"That contest of wills at the frontier of political and commercial power on one hand and independent journalism on the other never ends, it simply takes different forms in differing circumstances, and the centrality of that struggle to our system of self-government needs to be understood and celebrated and taught, because independence is easy to lose and heartbreakingly difficult to reclaim."

"What that says to me -- and I hope to you," I told the students, "are two things. First, the battle while long need not be lost -- as long as it is fought. And second that there is work for you and me on the front lines. The pendulum is pushed back and forth again and again -- with each interest at times in the advantage. And now it is our time to push to set the balance right, to return the pendulum to the midpoint of it arc."

The next day I spoke at Harvard where my remarks were focused primarily on the public interest.

I told those who attended I was there in hope of reaching a larger audience through them -- because the issues now being debated in the news industry are "matters that [should] be engaged not only by the public, but also by academic and political leaders who understand what is at stake and can provide the sustained and high profile leadership that the situation requires."

I told the assembly that when I resigned "my underlying argument was that a resource so essential to our national democracy that it is protected in our Constitution should not be managed with the primary goal of satisfying the demands of the market, the 'expectations' of Wall Street analysts, or the demands of major shareholders."

To make my argument at Harvard, I had "gone back to the earliest days of our nation and the clear-eyed view the Founders had of the necessity of a free press to our democracy.

"It was to them an obvious and powerful need when the country was younger; at a time when the issues facing our people while new and profound were nevertheless relatively simple to describe, if not to solve.

"And can it reasonably be argued that in our almost infinitely more complex world of today: driven at the speed of electrons by technology, complicated by an increasingly inter-connected global community and global economy, made raw by powerful competing interests, that the American people need to know less?

"I think not."

"[T]he issues that concern us today about press performance are not important issues because we are in bad times . . . ," I continued.

"On the surface the current debate seems to be an argument about what and how much to cut or spend on journalism. But that is not the really important argument. For that which we can quantify speaks only to the means of journalism and it speaks primarily to journalists. The argument fails to highlight the more important ends of journalism in which the public has a powerful interest and stake.

"The means of journalism are journalists, the information, news and opinion which they gather and create, and a method by which the work of the journalist is shared with the public. But the end of journalism, the goal of journalism, is an informed public -- and an informed public is the linchpin of American democracy."

I do not know the path I will take from this point. But I am committed to a continued journey down the path of public service which is the root of my life's passion for I have come to realize that pursuing anything less than your life's passion is at best an unfulfilling endeavor.

I will wait for the right path to present itself and the journey to begin, and then I will move on. I won't allow myself to become trapped forever in a single point in time, defined forever by a single act, engaged forever with a single challenge.

There is still much of life ahead for me, life after the Mercury News and Knight Ridder. I intend to approach it looking forward, to live it fully and to enjoy what Emerson described as the "peace" that comes from "the triumph of principles" which I've come to know and enjoy in the days since March 19.