Ed's Notes

It was gratifying to see Democrats and Republicans sitting next to each other during President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night (January 26). And it was even more gratifying that no boos or jeers marred this year’s speech. But I am under no illusions that this marks the beginning of a new era of good feeling or bipartisanship. Still, it’s a start, and Obama seemed to be reaching out to Republicans offering to meet them more than halfway.

The truth is the state of our union could be improved immensely by a return of cooperation and compromise—in a word, civility—among our elected officials. And it wouldn’t really be all that hard.

Partisan wrangling and in-fighting are not new. They’ve been with us since the nation was founded, but there seems to be a new intransigence that threatens the union itself.

Susan Alexander, features editor of the Knoxville News Sentinel, summed up the way a lot of us feel about the current situation in an open letter to Senators Alexander and Corker and Congressman Duncan titled “Time to man up, Congress,”  published December 6:

What I heard voters clearly say last month [November] is that we’re tired of Washington gridlock. We’re tired of listening to the endless blame game on both sides of the aisle. We’re tired of watching you all care more about the next election cycle than actually getting anything accomplished.

And we are all terribly sick and tired of hot air. …

So I’m asking you Congress folks to put on your big-boy pants, to listen to people, including each other. To tell some uncomfortable truths. And occasionally to shut the hell up.

When I went to Washington in 1967 as newly elected Senator Howard Baker’s press secretary, the nation was already sharply divided over the Vietnam War, race relations and a myriad of other issues. We had gone through the trauma of the assassination of President Kennedy and in a short time would have the double tragedy of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Those were turbulent times that tore at the very fabric of our national identity.

But as divided as the Congress was, there was civility and a spirit of doing what was best for the country that seemed to override in critical moments those partisan concerns.

Senator Baker, even though a freshman senator from a Southern state, quickly became a master at bringing diverse elements together in compromise to get needed legislation passed.

The best example of Baker’s expertise in bringing together opposing sides that I participated in was on the bill that became the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Republicans, led by then Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who also happened to be Baker’s father-in-law, had successfully blocked Democratic efforts to pass an open housing bill in the previous Congress, and it looked as if it would be DOA in the 90th Congress. Baker, with the aid of his legislative assistant, Lamar Alexander, who is now Tennessee’s senior senator, worked tirelessly to bring the parties together, going through draft after draft of a bill that would address the concerns of liberals and conservatives alike. The final version of the bill was put together one afternoon in the minority leader’s office, with Baker, Senators Dirksen, Hugh Scott and Jacob Javits, Lamar, myself, and other staffers sitting on the floor taking typed up substitute paragraphs, cutting out old paragraphs and pasting the new ones into the bill.

The bill passed both houses and was signed into law by President Johnson. It was a victory for the American people, particularly minorities.

We need that kind of cooperation today if we are going to accomplish even half of the ambitious and optimistic goals President Obama set on Tuesday night. Sadly it seems that my friend Lamar did not take to heart the lessons he learned with Baker for today he seems to pander to the most partisan of Republicans to secure his leadership post in the Senate minority.

Baker is a partisan Republican and he firmly believes in the American two-party system, but first and foremost he is a true patriot and he always put the interests of the nation above those of narrow party concerns.

I would join Susan Alexander in urging Senators Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker and other legislators to listen to the American people and end the gridlock in Washington before it’s too late. All they have to do is to stop talking long enough to listen—to their colleagues and to the people.

Until I started my own blog, I had only passing interest in the debate on whether bloggers should be considered journalists. Since my own credentials as a journalist should withstand any scrutiny, it’s not really a problem for me personally. And, I don’t plan to make this a news blog. It will be mainly opinion. But what about other bloggers who haven’t spent more than a half century in the daily journalist trenches and who try to put their version of news events on their blogs? Do they qualify for the “journalist” moniker?

To decide that, I think we first have to come up with a suitable definition of journalist. For a lot of my career I have eschewed the label, preferring at various times in my checkered career reporter, newspaperman, newsman, editor or even news executive. But now that I am retired, I find the term comes in handy because none of the other terms sums up my career quite as well.

Webster’s New World College Dictionary (fourth edition) says a journalist is “a person whose occupation is journalism; reporter, news editor etc.” It defines journalism as “the work of gathering, writing, editing and publishing or disseminating news, as through newspapers and magazines or by radio or television.” I was disappointed that Webster’s didn’t include wire services or the Internet in that definition. Perhaps the dictionary’s editors aren’t aware of the important role wire services, and more recently the Internet, play in gathering, writing, editing and disseminating news.

Otherwise, Webster’s New World College Dictionary definition was the best I have seen because it also would include free lancers.

So, with this definition in mind, are bloggers journalists?

The key word in the definitions, I believe, is news (a term subject to various interpretations also, but I’ll try to deal with that in a later post).

If the blogger goes out and gathers the news, checks the facts with reliable sources, writes it in a way to make it understandable to other people and disseminates it to the blogger’s Internet audience, then certainly the blogger should be considered a journalist.

If on the other hand, the blogger is just giving a personal opinion without checking the facts or is just passing along somebody else’s opinions without citing sources or making an effort to check facts and present a more than one side of an issue, I don’t think the blogger is a journalist.

Should bloggers be given press credentials? I think that bloggers who have demonstrated that they are trying to practice journalism in a professional manner should indeed be given press credentials. That said, in my more than 50 years in the business, I have rarely needed a press credential to cover the news. You need a special press pass to get into some events (a presidential visit comes to mind) or to sit in the press gallery at the U.S. House or Senate, and these are handed out on a case-by-case basis. But most of the events we cover are public and you don’t need a press credential to cover a public event. So whether a blogger has a press badge isn’t really a big issue, in my opinion. (The best press badge I ever had was a beautiful thing with PRESS in large gold embossed letters on a maroon background. Underneath in smaller type it said, “your pants while you wait. XYZ Dry Cleaning.”)

Some countries license journalists. They claim it is a way to maintain professional standards in the press. The truth is it’s a way of controlling the press. If you don’t play along with the government, you could lose your license. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen in this country. In the past, anybody who could afford a press could publish a newspaper and he and those who worked for him were by definition journalists. Now, thanks to modern technology, anyone who can afford a computer and an Internet connection—and that seems to just about everybody can be a blogger. So just about anybody can be a journalist. Newspapers range from supermarket tabloid scandal sheets to serious journals like the New York Times and the Washington Post. I’m sure it will be the same in the blogosphere, but it will still be journalism—just a different kind.