THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509170035
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
In the past week, I heard three powerful messages about journalists and their communities.
One came from a former aide to President Jimmy Carter. One came from a former Cabinet secretary for President Gerald Ford. One came from 63 staff members of The Virginian-Pilot.
Hodding Carter III, a former editor and publisher of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss., is perhaps better known as President Carter's State Department spokesman during the Iran hostage crisis.
On Wednesday, Carter spoke to nearly 150 journalists and foundation leaders who had gathered in Washington to pay homage to the late James K. Batten, the Holland native who was chief executive of the giant news company Knight-Ridder Inc.
Carter recounted how his newspaper crusaded for equal rights for blacks and whites at a time when that was not the prevailing sentiment in Mississippi. Despite this unpopular stance, the newspaper was still purchased regularly by a larger percentage of the community than any other paper in the state.
Carter said the citizens of Greenville knew the paper cared deeply about the community, even as it condemned segregation. Any journalist who thinks he or she cannot both aggressively cover the ills of society and love the community, Carter declared, ``should get out of the business.''
On Thursday, David Mathews, President Ford's secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, visited The Virginian-Pilot. He spoke to a small roundtable of staff members and to a larger meeting of staff and leaders of such community groups as the League of Women Voters, Civic, Hope House Foundation, the Community Networking Association and Hampton's Neighborhood College.
Mathews, former president of the University of Alabama, has deep Virginia roots. His ancestors include a royal governor and the namesake of Mathews County. He now heads the Kettering Foundation, which studies ways to keep communities and politics vital.
Mathews said Americans are making choices. Some are choosing to help make communities better places. Some are choosing to blow up or divide their communities. Others are choosing to withdraw, searching for safe enclaves to escape much contact with those they don't like.
He praised a consortium of 35 to 40 community groups in Grand Rapids, Mich., that have learned how to work together and develop habits of mind about how to tackle community problems.
Mathews said Kettering researchers never have encountered apathy in citizens, only anger and alienation because many feel that governments, media and other institutions no longer make room for them.
And he dismissed the notion that citizens individually or collectively possess wisdom that has escaped leaders and institutions. The reason citizens are vital to decision-making is that they can enrich deliberations by sharing their experiences, can wrangle with hard choices and can commit to actions to which no leader or institution can commit them.
He urged journalists and citizen groups to work toward a common goal of building communities' capacity to work through conflicting values and tough choices in order to make these commitments.
For journalists, he said, that requires raising the public's awareness of issues, listening for the knowledge that citizens have to contribute and covering the deliberations of citizens.
On Friday, 63 Pilot staff members sat down for lunch and a discussion of how the paper has covered crimes involving whites and blacks, as reported earlier in this notebook and a Metro News column by Charlise Lyles.
Some expressed anger over how they feel they have been portrayed in the continuing conversations about decisions they made or questions they raised. Some defended the coverage based on journalism's conventions of news judgment. Some attacked those conventions.
But the heart of the discussion came down to candid, caring, eloquent statements by individual staff members about their obligations to each other and to the communities we serve. Folks acknowledged that we experience the world differently and therefore see it differently. The challenge is not simply to tolerate each other or try to imagine the world as others experience it, but to build on our different experiences and views to broaden and deepen the work we share.
The three messages of the past week shared a focus. The strength in a community, and in a staff, is in the differences - and in the ways we use those differences toward a common end - and in the respect we accord each other, even as we disagree. by CNB