Well before scandal swept the White House and the press came under fire for its coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review in early December held a forum rather presciently titled "Confronting the Crisis." What the 250 invited journalists, media executives, and other opinion leaders gathered to hear, of course, was a debate over much longer-running crises -- the rise of the tabloid and the trivial on our pages and screens, and the increasing pressure to conform to the values of our corporate owners.

A panel of five top journalists was moderated by Howard Kurtz, media reporter and columnist for The Washington Post, whose most recent book, Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time, has been praised as the definitive work on the talk show explosion.

The panel members:

* Carol Marin recently joined CBS's Channel 2 News in Chicago as a reporter after quitting as an anchor at NBC's WMAQ following a dispute with management, which had wanted to make talk-show host Jerry Springer a commentator on her newscast (cjr, July/August 1997). Marin three times was named "Best Reporter" in the Chicago market. She has won fourteen Emmy Awards.

* Tom Rosenstiel is director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts. He is also a media critic for MSNBC. He has been chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek, and a Washington correspondent and a writer on politics, finance, and media for the Los Angeles Times. He is author of Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, 1992.

* Danny Schechter is a co-founder and the executive producer of Global Vision Inc., for which he created the award-winning series, South Africa Now, and was co-creator of another series, Rights and Wrongs:Human Rights Television, anchored by Charlayne Hunter-Gault. He spent eight years in the 1980s as an investigative reporter and segment producer with ABC News, winning two national Emmy awards. His most recent book is The More You Watch, the Less You Know.

* Brent Staples writes on politics and culture for the New York Times editorial page. He has been an assistant metropolitan editor of the Times and an editor of its Book Review. He holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and is the author of the award-winning book, Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White.

* Mike Wallace, a veteran of fifty-nine years in radio and television, has been a co-editor of 60 Minutes for thirty years, taking on powerful targets as varied as the tobacco industry and the Mexican drug cartels.

The forum was underwritten by AT&T.

Here are excerpts:

Howard Kurtz: There really is a crisis in journalism and it has three essential elements.

First, a crisis of confidence. Journalists no longer see this as the business they got into. They are worried about the erosion of fundamental values.

Second, a crisis of credibility. More and more people don't believe journalists, don't trust journalists, think we put our own spin on the news.

Third, a crisis of tabloidism. The whole business has channel-surfed lately, from Marv Albert to Diana to the nanny trial to O.J. and back again. We are complicit, in varying degrees, in the paparazzi phenomenon.

A related crisis, in the view of many, is the increasingly corporate nature of journalism. A couple of weeks ago, the Seymour Hersh book on JFK, published by a Time Warner publishing house, made the cover of Time. That may have been a legitimate decision, maybe not. But it's harder and harder to grapple with these cross-ownership questions.

 What, if anything, can be done? The problem is that this is a chaotic and fiercely competitive business. So that if The New York Times and U.S. News & World Report, say, agreed on some lofty set of journalistic standards, that would not necessarily include MSNBC, Fox News, Inside Edition, Dateline, Slate, TheAmerican Spectator, Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, and the Drudge Report.

 Still, many people are convinced that some effort in this direction is vital to change the culture of journalism.

Carol Marin: Many of us for too long now have been meek and mild and mediocre. There are two words I have come to despise: marketing and demographics. As journalists, we have stopped trusting our own instincts. Rather than do that, we convene a focus group. Rather than make a command decision about what we consider news, we call a consultant. And replacing the belief that a good story, well told, will appeal to and inform a broad range of people, we ask ourselves, what is our target audience? When you start trying to shape news for the people your advertisers want to attract, you've already perverted the process. You've stopped talking about what is information for all of us; you've started asking, "What does a woman aged 18 to 49 really want?" Newspapers engage in the same dumbing down.

 Tabloid TV as bad as it is, can be a whole lot more honest than other forms of TV journalism, which I condemn much more heartily. They include viewer-sensitive news and civic journalism. They are designed to be public relations tools.

Our job is to tell people the things they don't know. Our job is to tell people the things they can't ask for in a survey. Who ever would have asked for Watergate? They didn't know what it was until it was.

We're more and more uncomfortable with challenging power. We're afraid of being unpopular, we are afraid of shrinking markets. We have forgotten to say the words "public trust." And the worst corruption of all is the creeping commercialism.

So what do we do? Quitting is rarely the answer. Try not to quit, but fight on the inside. I think it is a glorious fight.

 Tom Rosenstiel: What is going on in the so-called serious press is a crisis of conviction, a philosophical collapse in the belief in the purpose of journalism and the meaning of news.

 When supposedly responsible news organizations stop pursuit of the best obtainable version of the truth and reproduce rumor and gossip, they are shedding long-standing principles. The same is true when they fill space with sensational celebrity news to the exclusion of significant matters as when the networks covered an information-free, second-day feature about Ennis Cosby's murder over the first-ever censure of the Speaker of the House.

Amid all the recent changes, we journalists have been traumatized because we were never really very clear about what we were doing in the first place. We even gloried in avoiding a kind of serious or rigorous discussion about what journalism was, what our responsibilities were. We talked about journalism in mystical terms, instinctive terms. A good story was something we could smell or sense, and we insisted on being left alone to pursue it.

The problem with that is we often fall into a trap of confusing the techniques of journalism and the conventions of journalism with the principles and real responsibilities. The inverted pyramid is not a core principle. It's a device, and if it doesn't work, we ought to drop it. That kind of fuzziness has left us defenseless against the technology of minute-by-minute ratings and focus groups and little devices that you can put on the readers' eyes to see what part of the newspaper they're looking at.

We were confident about journalism when we controlled who published, but now that anybody with a Web site and fifty bucks can be a communicator, we don't know how to distinguish ourselves from our new, pseudo competitors. Instead, all too often we sadly try to imitate them.

 Actually, the sense of anger and despair among journalists is the germ of something positive. When we again believe in the meaning and the power of news, we can figure a way out of the crisis. It means even risking a serious conversation among ourselves not about a code of conduct but about what it is that journalism is in the first place and what our minimum obligations are.

 Danny Schechter: Poll after poll shows journalists ranking lower than political dog meat. This is the year we lost that reporter who called himself a poet, the Lower East Side's prophetic Mr. Allen Ginsberg. So, with my apologies, Allen, may I say that I see the best minds in my profession regurgitating legal minutia in back-to-back newsy soap opera trials and spectacles as O.J. begat JonBenet, giving way to the Tim McVeigh show with a pause for the Cunanan update as Terry Nichols fights the Unabomber for face time, and thank heavens for Princess Di. Dan Rather says we're no longer watchdogs but lapdogs. So where does that leave him, or the millions watching lesbian-nun-style sweeps stories on local news? PBS told me that human rights is not a sufficient organizing principle for a television series, but cooking is. African animals have no trouble getting on television, but African people do. That continent virtually does not exist on most of the radar screens of American television. And it should because there are a lot of ople of African descent here, and many other people who are interested in Africa.

And why is Mel Karmazin, that ex-radio ad-space salesman, who gave us Howard Stern, now running CBS, whose New York City affiliate has boasted without shame "More news in less time"? How can Rupert Murdoch get away with that world-in-a-minute capsule on the New York City affiliate of Fox, the one with the little clock on the side, and ten seconds devoted to each of the many crises around the world in a bewildering series of images? Why has news of the world disappeared like some subversive priest in Argentina? And thank you, Saddam, for provoking a crisis during sweeps. Should we worry more now about weapons of mass destruction or mass distraction?

Was America kept in the dark when the broadcast spectrum was given away, free, to the folks who misused it for years? You didn't see the merger mania exposed on 20/20, or the merger of the news business and show business either.

Why all the business news and so little labor news? Why does the range of viewpoints go only from A to B? And who purged the words "context," "background," and "public interest" from the vocabulary of our post-journalism era? And my last questions: When will the great American dumbdown end? Is the mission just winning market share? What will we do?

Brent Staples: My father had a third-grade education and was a truck driver and a Teamster. I'm very proud of my family's union roots.

We took three newspapers: The Philadelphia Bulletin, the Inquirer and the Chester Times. All three of those papers were different. My father read them and discussed them with us, and he argued with one and sided with another. That world is gone now. The Inquirer is still there, but the Bulletin is gone and the Chester Times has moved outward into the county, to follow bigger money.

What has happened in the last twenty years is that the local world has begun to disappear. The most dramatic demonstration of that was the O.J. Simpson murder, when we cut from local programs just to watch that white Bronco for half an hour on the highway. There was, in fact, no news in that picture.

In my small town, we had high school graduations. We had the local gossip. We had Supreme Court decisions and Nixon at the top of the page, but we also had the texture and the feel of a place. Now, newspapers have put a gun to their heads by going away from good writing, from detailed examinations of events that mean things to people's lives.

You can go from town to town to town and pick up newspapers, and you can't tell where you are because there are the same stories, quested after by the same packs of journalists with the same photographs.

We've gone away from what we do best. Hemingway once said, if you want to be a writer, get the hell out of newspapers. I wonder what he would think today, when, in fact, the best writing no longer is in newspapers. Pick up a newspaper now, and in most of them you're missing a lot of local feel and identity. That, I think, is the crisis in the newspaper business.

Mike Wallace: A couple of years ago, I resurfaced a hardly new notion that a revival of a national news council might be a good idea. I heard more than a few hurrahs, but then the heavyweights came clattering down once again. The New York Times, Walter Cronkite--you know the crowd. They brayed that it was the first step down the slippery slope to government regulation, and that in any case you couldn't possibly put together an impartial news council. Let us police ourselves, they said.

I've come to the conclusion that a national news council is probably a bad idea--too unwieldy. Instead, state councils or city councils would be able to focus with more particularity and urgency on journalistic malpractice in a given community. A couple of cities in Florida are now raising support in their journalistic communities to do just that.

One further suggestion: There used to be a series on CBS called CBS Views the Press. The late Don Hollenbeck anchored it. It was feisty. It named names and kicked ass. The closest thing to it now is Reliable Sources on CNN.

But wouldn't it be useful, stimulating and fun to see something like CBS Views the Press back on the air, going after the excesses, the shortcomings, the obvious biases we read in our newspapers and see in our local television news? We are constantly peering down the throats of the politicians, the judges, the tycoons, the sports figures. I should love to see us peer down the throats of the press. But I shall not hold my breath.

Discussion:

Brent Staples: I take issue with this notion that there were golden old days in the news business. I've done a lot of reading about the Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert McCormick and the Hearst papers and yellow journalism. Those papers were used largely to titillate, to punish enemies and reward friends. The image of the old journalism as an upright institution is incorrect.

Mike Wallace:The New York Times decided twenty years ago that it was going to expand and do a Home section, a Science section, a Business section and so forth. Why did they do that? For the news? Hell, no! They did it because TheNew York Times was in financial trouble, and they wanted to get a certain kind of audience, and a certain kind of advertising.

Howard Kurtz: What distinguishes a journalist from other people in communications is that the journalist's first obligation is to the citizen and to the whole community. If you're in the business of basically being a transmission belt for a particular advertiser, then your first allegiance is to the advertiser.

Danny SchecHter: The talk about advertisers being the only corporations we have to worry about misses the fundamental transformation of our industry. The corporations that are controlling the news business today--Ben Bagdikian said there were fifty of them ten years ago, but he has just revised his book, The Media Monopoly, and says we'll be down to five or seven by the end of this century.

Brent Staples: Back to TV--there's no texture in TV writing. You can't smell it. You can't tell where you are. There's no sort of Hemingway in it.

Participant: When there is creeping commercialism in a news organization, what can the employees do? After all, they have families, and mortgages to pay.

Carol Marin:Did we go in thinking it was going to be a sinecure? I've been saying to journalism students for years now, be prepared to quit on principle, or be fired for the wrong reason because almost everybody I know in television gets fired some time. But you usually do want to stay in. There's something good about being loyal and fighting inside.

 Tom rosenstiel: The public often will be there to support us when we do the right thing. When Carol stood up at that television station in Chicago and drew the line, the people of Chicago supported her in an amazing way. It showed that our issues are not only our issues, but that people throughout the country sense them as well. They will support us as we attempt to reform and renew our profession.

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