WOODEN PANELS IN WASHINGTON

“In 1989, these facilities were built for this very purpose, that we would attract the best minds around the country and the world to talk about issues that are important to the media,” he explained. “Today we have some of the best thinkers in journalism around this table. Thank you for being here. You’re not only thinkers, but you’re doers.”

These doers sure talked plenty. Many of them Forum full-timers, they have now graduated from the unsavory rigors of actual news-gathering, and are wise to what most practicing grunts will eventually come around to: Talking about covering events is infinitely preferable to covering them.

Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan denounced the “cliche that it’s our duty to disassociate our personal feelings” about the decision by the Washington Post to publish the 35,000-word manifesto. Radio and Television News Directors Association president David Bartlett called it “bad journalism as well as bad citizenship,” even as he worried that “we will fall into the role of being social engineers and not journalists, and not fulfilling our proper role.”

When the moderator asked fomer USA Today editor John Quinn, “Are people s ounding too high and mighty about this?” Quinn responded: “I’m not smart enough to take an ordinary news story and escalate it into two and a half months of an xiety.” If that was a heartfelt sentiment, Quinn clearly had no business here. From the Freedom Forum to the National Pr ess Club to the Annenberg Washington Program to the American University, we are living through the epidemic advent of the Washington Media Panel, where every media issue is the Big Issue of the Day and, consequently, warrants exhaustive and regular discussion.

The Media Panel’s legacy can be traced to a time well after the era when journalists selected their vocation for the reasons one chose to become a cab driver or mill-worker: i.e., to get out of the house and earn some extra scratch. The new breed came careening through celebrity’s dog door in the early 70s, when the college-educated Boys on the Bus roamed the earth alongside the very New Classist Woodward and Bernstein. As well-to-dos packed the kids off to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and the Columbia Journalism School, the occupation was lifted out of its blue-collar origins into a “legitimate” profession and, in some cases, high priesthood. A new generation of journalists was hatched, reporters whose desire to write or broadcast stories was mixed with the idea that they were also analysts, students of the form, tiefenders of the faith. In addition, the controversies in which the media became embroiled — liberal bias, Janet Cookery, the excesses of above, whose purpose is theoretically to examine journalistic problems but practically speaking, to exonerate American journalistic institutions from accusations of bias and misbehavior.

Thus was born the Media Panel, which consists, as one C-SPAN executive suggests, of “journalists talking to journalists about journalism” — or to put it less charitably, a well4it, over-air-conditioned masturbatory exercise.

The Media Panelist is not present for monetary reasons, since recompense is often limited to lukewarm coffee and a mini-danish. For him, it is the love of the sport, a way to mark his rightful place in the debate, to forge friendships with other journalists, and, most important, to trot the id out for a full jaunt-and-spin down the catwalk of the cerebral.

This, as any C-SPAN watcher knows, does not make for snappy dialogue. And if Oscar Wilde was correct in observing that “dullness is the coming of age of seriousness,” it is instructive to note that most panelists are seasoned, solemn people, which gives these symposia an eery scenic uniformity: gray eminences suffering from blandular diseases, chairs pulled snugly around the snoregasbord with Bisquick jowls flailing over Windsor spread collars, never pausing except to sip from beaded water pitchers, convinced that any idea, no matter how small the nub, is worth exploring ad infinitum.

“They’re really boring, but [these people get off on this crap, they love to sit around and talk,” says Andrew Rosenthal, Washington editor of the New York Times, who generally detests panel discussions but is recently returned from a “Race and the Media” panel himself. “I’m absolutely amazed that people come to see these things. I mean, what I have to say is in a newspaper you can read any day of the week.”

The panels may aspire to grandeur, but usually the conversation turns back to every journalist’s favored subject: himself. “There’s always brow-beating, the beating of the chest,” says Jonathan Salant, who as past president of the Society of Professional Journalists has put on his share of panels. “It’s a chance for us to do some self-criticism, which is technically a bad term because it’s reminiscent of the Communists.”

Indeed, denizens of Mao’s China had to write letters of self-criticism-but they were usually in prison and could refuse to do so only under penalty of death. Washington panelists do it for fun, and quite publicly, taking full advantage of any opportunity to erect goppy, verbal diarrhetic monuments to the ransacking of their own profession.

Entire panels have been devoted to these endeavors, such as American University’s May program, “Why Does Everyone Hate Us: The Backlash Against the Media.” Moderator Sandy Ungar, in a tone as lulling as a dehumidifier or a monologue on NPR (where it was simulcast) offered this view: “It seems now that reporters are regarded about on par with used car salesmen, the media has become so unpopular. . . . Maybe reporters have always been roundly disliked, maybe that’s why our mothers didn’t want us to become one.”

James Warren, the sad sack who often serves as Washington’s Conscience for hi s chronic criticism of speaking fees and other insider practices in his Chica go Tribune column even though he now holds a chair on CNN’s Capital Gang, concurred. “A lot of people do view us as hypocritical, privacy-invading, emoti onally and practically remote, paternalistic, prone to frequent error,” Warren said, “and ! think there’s ample evidence to support each one of those beliefs. ” NBC’s Gwen Ifill joined the moaning: “Your reputation is the only thing you’v e got going for you, and as you know, everyone hates us, so you don’t have much of that.” Much like the Mexican Penitentes, wh o scourge themselves with mock crucifixions, self-flagellation is a genre staple, part of the worship service — self-loathing as an excuse for navel- gazing. “There’s a real climate of apology right now,” Rosenthal explains. ” It’s very fashionable to attack the press, and so if you’re in the press, it’s fashionable to admit that you deserve to be attacked.” Which is why another hallmark of the media panel is to bring in ringers to play the role of Torquemada. Their job is to take the media to the woodshed and apply a good pasting, and if they have no credentials to do so, so what?

Marion Barry’s attorney, the late Kenneth Mundy, assayed the part once on a panel called “Sensationalizing the Sensational.” “I get the impression,” Mundy said, “that often the news people are right out of Goebbels’s school of Propaganda because they were creating things, sensationalizing things, that didn’t exist.” This from the man who was relieved when jurors thought his client’s crack pipe contained baking soda.

But even in a defensive crouch, and with an infusion of natural conflict, it’s still a snooze-inducing affair. “They sit around, they chew the fat,” says the Media Research Center’s Steve Kaminski. “It’s all conventional wisdom said how many different ways.” Or one piece of wisdom, repeated endlessly. Take Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who used a National Press Club panel in September to try out his neologistic description of the new media age. “The politics of moral annihilation,” he called it, retreading a phrase that didn’t catch when he first tried it out in “94.

After repeating it two or three more times in the afternoon’s course, Dionne succeeded in creating a new cliche. A Newsweek reporter picked it up. “I was rather struck by E.J.’s politics of moral annihilation,” said Karen Breslau. “If people haven’t had enough, will we somehow police ourselves?” A visiting fellow from the Joan Shorenstein Center asked, “We’re now in the period where there’s an edge [in the tone of press coverage] to the point of moral annihilation.” You know they took the phrase home and showed it to all their friends. Kennedy biographer Richard Reeves gave it a workout yet a few days later in his national column: “‘The politics of moral annihilation” was the phrase E.J. Dionne . . . used to characterize the new political dialogue.”

Which is not to single out the estimable Dionne for abuse, for it was a fine tag line, a ripping little zipper.

But forget that — it’s the cliched ideas that spur the deafening echolalia. If you missed James Warren’s Dionne-like lament at the Media self-loathers panel — “Exacerbating [the public’s] reflexive disenchantment is deep and woeful ignorance . . . of our role in a democracy” — maybe you heard it four months prior at a Freedom Forum panel. There, Jane Kirtley, executive director of the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, put it this way: “We have a problem in American society and that is most people don’t understand the role of the press and democracy.” This was no doubt fleshed out at another Freedom Forum panel called “The Media and Democracy” — which had E.J. Dionne as a panelist.

This rampant repetition tends to be the norm, for the only thing the media love better than a media panel is another media panel on the exact same subject. If you missed “Is the Press Out of Control: Can Any White House Survive the Press Today?” (featuring the out-of-control Wolf Blitzer, Helen Thomas, and David Broder) perhaps you could catch the Joan Shorenstein Center’s “Clinton’s Battles with the Press,” featuring — yes! — E.J. Dionne as a panelist.

If you had to stay home to watch Must-See TV and so missed the Twentieth Century Fund’s “President Clinton’s First Year with the Media,” not to worry! American University had “Coverage of Clinton One Year Later” to offer. And if you couldn’t make “Bosnia and the Bobbitts: The Blurring Line Between Tabloid Journalism and the Mainstream Press,” then thank Dame Fortune for “Checkbook Journalism: What Price News?” where Kitty Kelley squared off with Paul Erickson, attorney for castrato John Bobbitt.

Not to be forgotten of course was the American University’s November “94 panel on “Newt and the News: Covering Gingrich’s Washington,” which was surely nothing like the Center for Media and Public Affairs panel on “Editorial Coverage of the 104th Congress” — which itself happened to share absolutely nothing with AU’s “Media Coverage of the 104th Congress,” featuring — yes!$ N — E.J. Dionne as a panelist.

Dionne does not own the media-panel franchise. That honor goes to the Kalb fa mily, which just might have the whole game rigged. During one recent lucky stre tch, I watched Bernard Kalb host his regular televised panel on CNN’s Reliabl e Sources on a Sunday, only to see him show up as a Unabomber panelist on a W ednesday. On Thursday I attended brother Marvin’s “Presidency and the Press” pa nel (not to be confused with t he Freedom Forum’s “Press and the Presidency” panel) with a cameo appearance by none other than Bernard, which was also attended by three additional Kalb spawn: Deborah, Madeleine, and Phyllis, relatives all and no doubt in on the fix.

Like the institution of the presidency and John Wayne Bobbitt’s member, O.J. Simpson has inspired his share of dialogue. There was the Center for Equal Opportunity’s “After .J.” panel, not to be confused with AU’s “After the O.J. Trial and the March,” which most certainly differed from AU’s ” Sensationalizing the Sensational: Lessons from O.J. Simpson.” (These lessons were drawn, mind you, in September 1994, two weeks before jury selection even began.)

But who could wait? The problem, as Tribune Media bureau chief Cissy Baker put it in the elevator after the Unabomber panel, is that “they don’t care.” ” They” refers to the vulgar herd — known as “readers” to some. “We’re sitting here dissecting this and they’re onto the next thing. They don’t care about anything but O.J. right now — nothing. The government’s about to shut down but so what? [They’ve] got to sleep and wake up and eat breakfast and dinner. ”

And Cissy’s right, too. Those sad, slope-foreheaded proles. After the nine- hour shift, the bus ride home, the Hamburger Helper, the three hours in front of the big-screen before passing out on the couch with the empty Funyuns bag astride their torso, those poor sucks are lucky they have “us,” the Uber- Gatekeepers, Democracy’s Colander, the finest minds from the finest institutions airing it out, stimulating discourse, stimulating ourselves at three-hour midday luncheons.

Who better to lead them than Carl Rowan, from whom pearls of conventional wisdom drop like the waters of the St. Lawrence River over the Niagara? “Great panel, Carl,” one fellow journalist told the aged Rowan after his disquisition on the Unabomer.

“Whew,” Rowan said. “I could’ve gone all day.” Of that, there’s little doubt.

By Matt Labash