Dissent Against America's War on Terrorism: Too Much or Too Little Media Attention?

Transcript

MR. STEPHEN HESS: Good morning and welcome to the 12th session of the Brookings/Harvard Forum on the role of information and the media in the war on terrorism. I'm Stephen Hess of Brookings the co-host of the series with Marvin Kalb on my extreme left who is the Executive Director of the Washington office of the Shorenstein Center of the Kennedy School of the Harvard University. How about that?

MR. MARVIN KALB: You can keep on going. (Laughter)

MR. HESS: Marvin and I are really very pleased about this particular program and the panel. For those of you who have been regulars with us you will have noticed that there are certain commonality of characteristics of our panelists. We've had, for example, two panels of war correspondents. We started the program in October with lessons of past wars with a group of very famous correspondents, Peter Arnett, Ted Koppel, Daniel Schorr and Stanley Karnow talking about their experiences. Last time we had five correspondents who have just returned from Afghanistan with extremely fascinating and troublesome experiences.

We've been very, very concerned about the role of government and the media, how the media affect the decisionmaking process in government. How government responds to the media, and so we have had one panel with former presidential press secretaries. Other times we've had former Secretary of State Larry Eagleburger. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey. Former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick. That kind of theme.

This program our subject is dissent, and we haven't chosen this panel for a commonality of interests. We've chosen this panel because we think they are five very interesting people who will have interesting things to say about this theme when we start a discussion. We didn't choose five dissenters. We didn't chose five journalists who cover dissent. We chose five people who we would like to have a conversation with about this subject. It's not crossfire, it's a conversation.

So we will do it as we always do. We start with Marvin throwing out a question and then we go from there for about an hour, then we hopefully have another half-hour where the audience participates with us in this conversation.

The panel is, moving along, Peter Hart—How would you describe yourself?

MR. PETER D. HART: A pollster.

MR. HESS: I would describe you as a survey research scientist. How's that?

MR. HART: I would say, Marvin, more of an introduction for you. Because if I'm going to be a survey research scientist, I mean you deserve more titles than that. (Laughter) But I thank you.

MR. HESS: Next to Peter is Alex Arriaga who is the Director of Governmental Relations for Amnesty International USA.

Next to her is Mark Jurkowitz who is the media correspondent for The Boston Globe and a former ombudsman of The Boston Globe.

Next to him is another former ombudsman—we're big on former ombudsmen today—Geneva Overholser who was the ombudsman for The Washington Post. Of course she has also been the editor of The Des Moines Register and now is a chair in journalism at the University of Missouri.

Next to her is Robert Siegel, who we end each day with on "All Things Considered" as our senior host on National Public Radio.

Marvin, our panel. Start some questions.

MR. KALB: Okay. Thank you very much, Steve.

I would like to start with Peter Hart, and in order to establish a kind of basis for our discussion, do the American people based on what it is that you are polling these days, do you know whether the American people are content with the amount of information about dissent on this war against terrorism that they're now getting? Is there a feeling amongst the American people that there is something out there that they're not getting that they ought to know about?

MR. HESS: Let me drop back a half a step before I sort of plunge right into the middle of that question to give you a sense of sort of where America's at and what America's going through.

I'd really start off by saying that if we'd been together a year ago and I said to you look, there are only two things that I know are going to happen over the next 12 months. The first thing is this country's going to go into an economic decline. We've gone from this very positive mood now to a very negative or an economic decline of a certain nature. The second thing I can tell you is that two of the, the two largest buildings in New York and in America are going to be bombed and brought to the ground by terrorism and we are going to be in the middle of a war on terrorism, tell me what you think the country will feel about whether we're headed in the right direction or seriously off on the wrong track? The number would be over 60 percent saying we're headed in the right direction.

You say well how can this be? How can we go from this?

My answer is really that the country has sort of looked at itself and we like the way in which we've responded since this attack and the way in which we've reacted as a country and as people.

And in part what we've really been saying is this is a country that, we're honoring firemen, we're honoring safety people, all of these things make us feel better about ourselves. And within that context the direction and the support obviously for the Administration and for the war effort are great.

Now having said that, because I think it's important to understand that we've been talking about the Greatest Generation, the Greatest Generation being the generation of World War II. Suddenly we feel pretty good about ourselves.

But we look at the media, and we're not negative about the media. We think the media's done a pretty good job. So our feelings about the media have risen about 20 points over the course of this war and what is going on and the media is better thought of.

Given that, how do we feel about dissent? I don't think our view on dissent has changed all that much. The Pew Foundation and Andy Kohut have done some great work in this area.

One of the questions he asked, and we have some period of time, some people think that by criticizing leaders news organizations keep political leaders from doing their jobs. Others think that such criticism is worthwhile and it keeps political leaders from doing things that should not be done.

Even at this stage of the game in the war, which was the November period, by a margin of 54 to 32 the American public says criticism keeps leaders from doing things that shouldn't be done. And if you go back to sort of 1994, it was about 66 percent. So it's come down but it's still support.

And the second thing is, does dissent weaken the defense of the nation or keep us prepared? While the numbers are not as robust as they were back in 1986 and 1985 when about 57 percent said it keeps the nation prepared, today it's 49 percent.

So what I would tell you is even with the events of the last two weeks, I don't think that we've moved away or gotten away from our fundamentals which are sort of criticism and a full expose of what's going on. The American public wants to know and that does not get in the way of feeling good about the country or the nationalism that's going on.

MR. KALB: Forgive me but I'm still not sure I understand what the American people feel about levels of dissent as presented in the American media. I gather from what you're saying that there's a level of contentment with it. That they don't feel that they're getting, that there's not enough or too much?

MR. HESS: I'm not sure that I have the answer to that, that we have enough or don't have. At least I haven't seen the data in that area.

But in terms of the vigorousness and the importance of that kind of a debate it's still very much there and the public welcomes it. I guess that's the way I would put it.

MR. KALB: Mark Jurkowitz, you have spent a lot of time researching this in your own reporting and done some wonderful pieces on this. What is your feeling about, on two levels, the American public and journalism as an institution, the editors, the publishers, on this issue of dissent? Is there too much? Is it a frightening concept at a time of general patriotic feeling?

MR. MARK JURKOWITZ: It is a frightening concept I think to a lot of people. I'm not quite as sanguine as Peter.

I think there's one other interesting survey that the Pew Research Center did early on which asks the question, which is always asked in war time, who should basically decide what news is fit to print? Should it be the Pentagon or should it be the press?

Now a healthy, normal society would like to believe it would be the press that makes those decisions, and by almost a two-to-one margin at the beginning of this war the answer was we want the Pentagon to control the flow of information. That's not atypical. That's very much what it was like in the beginning of the Gulf War and very much what happens at the beginning of military engagements unless and until things go wrong.

But I think the sense is that it created tremendous pressure on American journalists who are cognizant, A, of public opinion and public support for this war; and B, frankly, worried about economic issues at their own institutions, and worried about to some extent being popular. I'll give you just a couple of pieces of anecdotal evidence.

On September 28th USA Today broke a story about American troops already being on the ground in Afghanistan even before the bombing campaign started. We later learned that Knight Ridder, another news organization, actually had the story earlier but held it sort of at the request of the Pentagon.

I don't know how the story got out. I think anybody here would be hard pressed to suggest it changed the course of the war. But even as someone who wrote about that story and the ideology of that story, I got angry calls from people saying how dare you put our boys at risk? These people did a horrible thing by writing this story. You shouldn't even be writing about it.

Len Downie, the editor of The Washington Post was up in Boston yesterday at the other end of the Shorenstein food chain talking about what the patriotic pressures mean for journalists even now. And now that we are starting to see, for example, accountability stories as he calls them, stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan caused by the United States, he's saying we're getting angry e-mails for doing that kind of reporting even months after the fact.

So I think in an atmosphere in which it's clear that the public overwhelmingly supports the President, overwhelmingly supports the war effort, I think journalists and editors were keenly aware of that sentiment, and I think it manifested itself to some degree in what they covered. And also, and I'll just add this quickly, in some of the behavior.

There were a lot of apologies for what we might in normal times call journalistic objectivity. There was a news cable channel in Long Island where the edict came down from management that on-air staff was not to wear an American flag lapel pin. They could have it at their desks, they could do whatever they want privately, certainly the American flag would be shown as part of the news coverage, but that their actual on-air personalities would not be able to wear them. There was so much anger vented at this station that they later issued a statement in which they basically said we're good Americans, we swear to God. A very weird—

David Westin, President of ABC News, perhaps awkwardly answering a question at Columbia University when asked whether or not the Pentagon might have been a legitimate military target basically tried to make the point that as a journalist I need to be so objective that I can't really answer that question. I have personal feelings about it but as a journalist my job is to report what happened, not to allow my views to get in the way. Several days later there was a hasty, very contrite apology in which he said under any circumstances that was a criminal act.

So I think we're seeing a lot of behaviors that we wouldn't have seen in normal times as a result of that pressure.

MR. KALB: And also Robert Siegel, a question for both of you.

Let us say for a moment, following very much on what it is that Mark has just outlined, that 98 percent of the American people according to the latest Peter Hart polls believe that the government is doing exactly the right thing in pursuit of this war against terrorism. But there is that two percent out there that we're not sure about.

What is the responsibility of journalism here, you're sitting and making news decisions. What is the responsibility of journalism in the way in which it handles the two percent? Does it get any play at all? Do you simply dismiss it? Or do you feel some sense of obligation that a distinctly minority view ought also to be heard?

Geneva?

MS. GENEVA OVERHOLSER: Absolutely you feel that sense of responsibility, Marvin. We never edit newspapers by holding our finger to the wind and thinking about okay, now what percentage of people are for this candidate? We ought to give 60 percent of the coverage to this candidate.

It's more difficult in times of war certainly than it is on the political question. It's more difficult partly because just as you were pointing out, Mark, journalists always struggle I think with being citizens and also with being journalists. But in this time when we were attacked here at home and when journalists in fact were victims of anthrax, there has been even greater hesitations on the part of journalists.

But I think Peter Hart's most interesting statistic is the degree to which the popularity of the media has been unusually high and I think that's precisely because we have been uncustomarily unquestioning right from the start, with the U.S. Patriot Act. I think the coverage of that act was way different than it would have been. I mean it's obvious if we had not been in a time of war we wouldn't have had the act, but you think about the kinds of things that that act did with restrictions on the FOI Act and with wiretapping, with e-mail, tapping into private e-mails. There would have been far more questioning coverage. It's not just a matter of okay if 98 percent think this and two percent think this, be sure the voices of dissent are heard. That is one. And in fact I think perhaps we haven't done a great job of that.

But even more important, do you ask the kinds of questions which you may know the public doesn't really want to see you asking and may be uncomfortable with, but which we owe it to the public to ask.

So really, all the way from the Patriot Act to the detainment of people in this country who's names we haven't known, to the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, to the degree of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, to the biggest increase in the military budget proposed in a generation. Are we asking as many questions in our coverage and allowing as many voices of dissent into the newspapers as we normally would? And it seems to me the answer is clear that we aren't.

It's changing now. And what strikes me, I guess I'm just inveterately a child of the '60s, it's always true, right? Everything has its season. Somehow we as humans inevitably respond this way when our nation is attacked and somehow it takes a certain period of time before we can ask the questions. Now we're asking them.

MR. KALB: Robert Siegel, supposing the statistics were a bit more problematic—55 to 45, rather than 98-2. How do you at NPR for example figure out the handling of dissent when it comes to the number of stories that you would do, the letters to the editor, the selection, etc. Be as specific as you can.

MR. ROBERT SIEGEL: There are entirely different sets of decisions made about should a reporter go do a story about rallies being held or about meetings being held or interview people and next, should we have a commentary from somebody who advocates that particular point of view. And lastly, which is I think the lowest threshold of all, should we read a letter from somebody who is complaining about our coverage and voicing that point of view. The answer to that is letters are from everyone and the more vituperative the better.

I think the first number you threw out, 98-2, while I agree with you in spirit, is actually tough. Because there are streams in American life of white racists, of flat earthers, of all sorts of people who might reach two percent who we will routinely ignore. There is some level of dissident view in whatever situation that seems to be, that I think would strike people sitting around a table discussing what we want to devote time to today as being there but insignificant. That exists. I can't say that it doesn't.

On the other hand there are very real issues that we've experienced—the interviews with the detainees describing their experiences—who probably account for the barest fraction of the American population, the target of people who are going to be detained in the fall is a very small group of predominantly Middle Eastern men.

I can recall interviewing four of them and setting their stories out, getting remarkably angry e-mail in response. Some of it I thought extraordinary in that as someone who's done a lot of stories about people in jail and prison, I thought that characterizing two weeks in the segregation unit of the jail as an inconvenience, as an inconvenience in exchange for my security, for our security, I felt was a bit extreme. And I was struck by the impatience of our listeners for hearing the arguments against what they might support.

What they support is their business, but I think we're entitled to present people with experiences and stories that might run contrary to the expectations of the majority.

45-55, whatever that means, that's life. I think most things that we report on divide, the country is somewhat divided on it.

MR. KALB: Is it like when you're at war, and I think Geneva's point, that so many things have changed as a result of the fact that the American people perceive that they are at war against terrorism. They have been hurt and either they want to strike back or they need more information about this issue?

Alex Arriaga, from the point of view of somebody who might be presenting a contrary point of view here, do you feel that the media has been in fact "responsible" in the way in which it has presented dissent? Do you feel for example that contrary points of view other than what is the generally accepted view, are being presented in the media in some fair manner?

MS. ALEX ARRIAGA: I guess I would begin by saying that does the media have a very difficult task? No question. In the immediate aftermath of the attack of September 11th there was no question that the devastation was huge and that people looked to the media where there was no other form of communication. It was the media that provided information, solidarity, and some level of comfort to folks. So that was a very unique role and that was something that the media did that nobody else could really do at the time.

The question became what happens next. And with the country united in clear solidarity for the victims as it would need to be, those were horrendous human rights violations that took place. When, very quickly we had to look to see how the Administration would respond. I think that it's true, that at the very beginning there may have been some confusion. At the very beginning the Administration set out on a course that really would have put very significant restrictions on civil liberties in the United States. The very first legislation that the Administration put forward was very broad in scope and it was a group of 150 organizations that varied from Amnesty International to at one point the National Rifle Association, to you name it, the gamut of organizations was huge out of concern.

I think that at that point the media was looking to see what was going to happen but wasn't exactly sure how to handle that particular initiative.

We went forward from there to the widespread detentions that took place and there I think there was excellent coverage from the media. It was extremely difficult to get information. There was an atmosphere of secrecy. Who was being detained, why are they being detained? What are the criteria for detention? Where are they? Do they have access to counsel? And I believe the media was asking those questions under very difficult circumstances, once again, because the immediate reaction was take everybody in. And yet the responsibility that the United States has as a leader in the world is great. And in that sense I think that what we have found in our work is that we, as a human rights organization, have had to be very, probably more measured than we would otherwise be but also in a sense of responsibility in the current context.

MR. KALB: You mean you held back to an extent because of your views about what most Americans are thinking about the war?

MS. ARRIAGA: Not that we've held back but we've been extremely careful in how we present it. We've tried to identify very carefully what the issues are and to be specific. So that when we were looking at the detentions, for example, Amnesty International joined several other organizations, once again, in a Freedom of Information Act to get information. When it came to the Geneva Conventions and the treatment of those in Guantanamo.

Why is it important? It's important because when the President of the United States says this is the way we're going to treat individuals, it sets an example for other countries and that will be how Americans are also treated. We want to hold other countries accountable to our own standards.

The military order that was issued in November, extremely problematic. The order in and of itself. If you read it carefully it is broad in scope, the order as written, not as the way it will be implemented, but as written, would allow for closed trials, would allow for trials in which with a simple majority you could sentence somebody to death, and that individual would have no right to appeal in the United States, in a foreign government or in any international forum. Not that that's the way it would be implemented. I certainly would not like to see that happen. But any dictator around the world can hold that up and say I'm going to apply the George Bush military order.

MR. HESS: You're being kind and gentle to the media. Obviously the media covers opposition where there is opposition, and it may well be that there's been less opposition in this case or going back to the question if a President has an 82 percent rating will the opposition party take him on, and if the answer is no, there's going to be less of a story to cover.

But you're the one person on the panel who has in part been in opposition and I'm reading from an article called "See No Evil" from the current issue of Extra. And it says that you issued a press release on October 26th that demanded an immediate and full investigation in what may have been violations of international and humanitarian law such as direct attacks on civilians, indiscriminate attacks by U.S. military, and it received no attention at all on ABC, CBS, or NBC.

Now you say you get coverage when it's about the Geneva Convention. If that is correct, give me some fine tuning on what actually you found in the course of issuing press releases. At what point did the media suddenly become interested, and on what issues. And on what issues were they avoiding, apparently according to this, such as direct attacks on civilians?

MS. ARRIAGA: It's been a mixed picture. I think it's in part because it is such a difficult time. And because also the information coming out of the Administration has been very slow in coming out.

But I think that part of the distinction, if we had to make a distinction, would be in some instances the actions that have taken place in the United States, whether it's the detention of as many as a thousand or so individuals and the five thousand that have been requested for voluntary questioning, there we have gotten quite a few journalists that have called to try to get information about the detainees, to try to find out what the situation is in the United States.

Where it is, once again, the—The Geneva Conventions, we did get some coverage there, but it was quite confusing. What the Administration was saying was really splitting hairs. So there I think part of the problem may have been a little bit of journalists trying to get a story very quickly and an analysis very quickly, and there I think the burden is partly on us to educate what the facts are.

The Administration was saying we will acknowledge the Geneva Conventions but we will not actually apply them. That's splitting hairs.

Another difficulty has been, especially where we are holding U.S. troops accountable. There is a real sense that we do not want to question what American soldiers do or what our military leaders request. I think there that's probably where the issue of patriotism comes strongest. You can also see that in the reaction you're seeing in the Congress right now. No one is really questioning whether or not we ought to have military commissions, they're just discussing how they ought to be conducted.

MR. KALB: That's a very good point about this fine tuning of differences of opinion.

Robert, you wanted to come in on that.

MR. SIEGEL: I just wanted to add that one difference, and perhaps you touched on this in the panel with the correspondents who had been in Afghanistan. One difference about this war and claims of attacks on civilians is that in this case journalism is not providing the first draft of history. The Pentagon is providing the first draft. We get to do a second draft after the reporters come through the places that we have already heard accounts about, and they then get to see what happened.

In most instances when we've spoken with reporters who got to Mazar-e-Sharif after the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif or got to Kabul after the Taliban evacuated Kabul, what we find is that claims of accuracy of bombing have generally been born out. Nearly every reporter I've heard from has said this is quite unlike other battlefields we've seen. These weapons are extraordinarily accurate. They tend to hit the targets that they're aimed at, where we're in a new era of war.

They also uncover incidents where the U.S. weapons have hit things they shouldn't have hit. That tends to happen a month after the event, but it happens. Reporters have been reduced to rewriting what was originally reported out of various Pentagon briefings.

MR. JURKOWITZ: It's interesting. Obviously we're starting for the first time to get some kind of sort of empirical accounts of what's going on. But having said that, I was listening to my local NPR affiliate one day fairly early on in the course of the conflict and I heard a BBC report which was an interview with a fellow, a man from Kandahar, from the Kandahar area, who had basically had his home accidentally hit, or at least was making that claim, making claims that some of his friends were killed. It was a fairly wrenching report.

It just dawned on me that I hadn't heard anything like that on the American media. Now that shouldn't dominate coverage because it needs to be proportional, it's not the whole story of the war. But it struck me how nowhere in the mainstream of American media had I even seen a report like that. As a matter of fact I remember watching CNN one morning when the anchor talking about Taliban-reported casualties simply passed it off to a reporter by saying well, we don't know but we sure do know that they are, whatever the Taliban says they're notorious liars.

You know what, she might be right but that's not journalism.

The other point I'd make is, and not to blame CNN solely because I think there are a lot of other network that have problems, and more problems than CNN, but let's not forget that this is also a network that sent out a memo to its staffers saying basically when you're getting reports of U.S. generated casualties from the Taliban, every time we report on that, and we have to be careful, we need to have a sentence in there basically that says let's not forget the Taliban are harboring the terrorists who killed 3,000, 5,000 Americans.

Now context in the story is crucial. When you're hit with a programmable key that comes up every time you mention casualties seems to me to be an extraordinary development.

MS. OVERHOLSER: It seems to me there are so many reasons then, and we're getting at some of them, why the press reports may have been less comprehensive than they would otherwise have been. One important one I think, Robert, is the degree to which this Administration has been remarkably effective in containing information. Obviously for some good reasons. But they have been way better than most Administrations have been.

I heard Seymour Hearsh the other day talking about if you go back and look at one of those early transcripts from a Rumsfeld press conference, just look at the transcript. It goes question, answer, laughter. Question, answer, laughter. As Hearsh said, he's our new Woody Allen. He has been phenomenally effective.

The war has been a difficult one for us to get information from. As your good panel last week noted, we now can go into these villages and get the casualty information, but also we were less likely to give any credence, I think, than were members of the press from other countries. But another one is, you do always have some human response. I mean the British press has been particularly interested in accusing of us having been covering this like the home team sort of, but the British press during the Falklands War was like the home team.

So the degree of dissent has been very low. As you said, Stephen, we cover dissent where it is. Hearsh made another wonderful remark about there is no one more cowardly in America today than a prospective Democratic candidate. So there are many different reasons, I think.

MR. KALB: And there are probably many different definitions as well.

For me, often when I think of the word dissent I think of something large and philosophical and deeply personal, very important. I believe, for example, one might say that the prosecution of this war towards this end is wrong. Philosophically, we came upon that during the Vietnam war quite often. It's not a matter as we've been talking up to this point about differences in how you report a story, 55-45, that sort of thing.

Is there anywhere in this country, and I ask this in total ignorance. Is there anyone out there any organization, that says the prosecution of this war against terrorism is against my religious beliefs, my philosophical beliefs, and it must be stopped? Within that context of dissent, one, does it exist? Two, is there any reporting of it? Three, should there be any?

MR. HESS: That's very interesting. What we've generally been talking about and have reached some degree of unanimity is that the press will take on some strategic opposition, questions of opposition. Are they taking on any policy opposition?

Now strangely enough if you look at the Americans who are most in policy dissent, people like Norm Chomsky, Ed Herman and so forth, and you go to the world press you see that they're all over the place. You can barely pick up a European paper or even an Asian paper without a small group of Americans, Ed Said and so forth, who are having OpEd pieces that you haven't seen, I don't think, in the American press. Have I got it wrong? Particularly Robert Siegel, you're in National Public Radio. You're—

MR. SIEGEL: I don't personify and stand for the entirety of National Public Radio. (Laughter)

MR. HESS: But you're the voice of, right?

MR. SIEGEL: No. I do think there are voices of American dissent, perennial voices of American dissent that get more circulation abroad than they do in the United States. I think in part that may represent a sense of what they represent in the United States, whether they speak for any large body of opinion or whether they in some cases have been saying the same thing. Even so, I think those voices appear in various mass media.

I just wanted to share with you my roots from the '60s here. When Marvin mentions Vietnam War opposition, I got into radio and journalism as a student at Columbia in the '60s where there was real protest and where there was real dissent. I never felt its growth had anything to do with how the mass media was covering it, ignoring it, or mischaracterizing it.

The political movement, this is an unfashionable belief because we tend to attribute everything to the oxygen of media exposure. I think there really is a culture in the country, including its politics, and it grows and it happens, and people come together around certain ideas, and it's not because it was on 60 Minutes or on NPR or in the New York Times. So I don't feel that media as a whole cause or are accountable for whether movements have legs.

In this case, unlike the Gulf War when I used to get a lot of e-mail from people saying why aren't you covering our quilt, why aren't you covering our march, why aren't you doing this? Then we'd do some coverage of them. Or certainly Central America years before that when there was an intense desire for coverage in things people were doing, saying, writing. I don't hear it in this. And I don't think that it's my job as a journalist or the institution's job to create it. I just don't think that's what people in America of any sizeable numbers are doing.

MR. KALB: Not to create it, but to reflect whether it be that two percent or the 45 percent. Somewhere in there, is there—Is it your perception on the basis of your reporting or your letters to the editor, your e-mails, that everybody out there is quite content with the way in which the war is being prosecuted?

MR. SIEGEL: No. I think everybody's a false concept. We don't question you, we don't count up and see how many people are dissatisfied or say they're dissatisfied with U.S. policies and design. But you look around and you say are there things happening on campuses? If there are, let's do a story about it. Are there demonstrations? Are there interesting writings about that? Let's interview the author of that article that is highly critical of what's happened.

But if that's barely happening then I think at a certain point we don't say well, let's make sure that we've set aside a block of air time to a phenomenon that we can imagine taking place, but it's not happening.

MR. KALB: Let it be noted that at the end of February of the year 2002 there was not enough dissent in the United States of America for major journalists to believe that the issue ought to be covered.

MS. OVERHOLSER: But I don't agree with that.

MR. SIEGEL: I'm not saying it shouldn't be covered.

MS. OVERHOLSER: You have to kind of scratch around to find it, which of course may go to your point, but it does exist. I certainly have heard it in letters when I was still writing a column.

I looked, for example, online yesterday and I found a site that, I think it's peace911.org which contends that it has some 500,000 signatures. There are a number of lawsuits, obviously, from various organizations which seek to protect the rights of detained—

MR. KALB: About detention.

MS. OVERHOLSER: Of prisoners, yes. But okay, but one thing I think is noteworthy is that where there has been some sign of dissent there is a very powerful clashing of it. Note this academic organization that looked at what academics had said. And we may say oh well, that's an extreme right wing organization. It was founded by the Vice President's wife. That's not very extreme in our current political climate. And it was very—It was speaking out, political statements. I mean statements by professors and sort of doing a McCarthy number on them. I think that's significant. And there have been isolated incidents, campus demonstrations, which have of course elicited a great deal of anger because there is this anxiety in the country.

MR. KALB: Peter Hart, you've been working on this problem of what the American people feel for decades.

MR. HESS: Decades upon decades.

MR. KALB: Is this an unprecedented moment then?

MR. HESS: It's a fascinating moment. And I don't know if everybody in the audience is having as good a time as I am because I think it's a juicy discussion. What makes it so delicious I think is the way in which we try and interpret the American public opinion.

On the one hand, what is the pressure that an anchor on Channel 12 on Long Island feels that they must put an American flag on their lapel? Clearly there is something there. You can say, there are millions of things that they could be putting on their lapel. And I think you have to differentiate between what we would call support for the war effort and the ability to understand dissent.

I think there's a difference. It's not the same as the Vietnam War where we looked at the overall cause and said why are we there and what are we doing and it doesn't make sense, to the situation where various elements of what is going on here do not deserve airing.

I don't think the American public has lost its way. I think that the media may have lost its way, but I think the American public is still pretty well rooted. On the war we're very pro-American, we've very patriotic, but that does not mean that we're not unhappy with what goes on in the office of whatever it's called, public—

MR. KALB: Strategic initiative.

MR. HESS: Yeah, strategic initiative.

But let me finish one point. And I want to pick up on a point where I think Geneva's absolutely right and that is part of the reason that this has been so successful and dissent has been stifled is because I think Secretary Rumsfeld has been a master communicator to the American public. What he has not done, unlike previous efforts, is to either over-hype something which is a victory or a good turn of events for the American forces, nor has he taken something that is bad and gotten caught up in that.

So I think in part he has been a very important filter and has changed the dynamics of the coverage because of the way in which he's done it, and people are not reading transcripts, they're getting a sense of communication.

MR. HESS: Let me ask you this. Among your hats you are perhaps the most noted pollster for Democratic candidates and the Democratic party. Okay. A candidate, whether it would have been a Wayne Morse or a Senator Gruening comes to you and says Peter, you've done all of the research and I'm telling you I am against this thing philosophically. We're not saying strategically. What do you tell him to do? Shut up? Get out front? In other words, now we're talking about defense.

MR. HESS: I say be very quiet. No. (Laughter)

If you're asking me the political effect on this, that's where the 82 percent number for the President and the American public opinion on the—

MR. HESS: —reports.

MR. HESS: That's right. On the defense budget you cannot get enough of a discussion going where you can get support even from the base Democratic vote saying we need to really look at the defense budget because that's seen as Part A which is support of the war effort. And I think you can look at various initiatives and deal with that.

MR. HESS: Follow this one step into the future. The question now is what should be American policy, particularly in the question of a second front in Iraq. That's what we're going to be talking about. That's the question, we opened this question, a policy question. What do you tell—

MR. HESS: I think at that stage of the game you've gone from an 85-15 to a 55-45. It changes the dynamics. And I think there is—But still there's a lot of support.

MR. JURKOWITZ: I just want to make the case, though, on the sort of issue of how do you cover dissent in this country, there's something the media doesn't do well which is complexity and shades of gray. When I was writing my magazine piece looking for dissent in America, basically, I went to the usual suspects —The American Friends Service Committee, organizations that are committed pacifist organizations. They said look, these are changed circumstances. I don't know anybody who isn't angry and doesn't think we have to do something.

So what are the issues? Well, they're more nuanced. Is it a military situation or is it a criminal action? Should we bomb or should we take it to the Hague?

Now that doesn't represent a movement. There's no simple we're against this, we think but's wrong. But I do think, and somebody told me this from a group out in Los Angeles. There's been none of the sort of shades of gray reflected to me. I think there are a lot of people in this country who may have had some qualms about the level of bombing but were thrilled, as this woman said, when the burkhas fell off. I think there are a lot of people in this country who are willing to stand in line forever in an airport and felt queasy about military tribunals. But you never saw coverage that sort of dealt with this kind of layered, more nuanced response to what was going on because it was completely encapsulated in the broader, we're angry and we have to do something, and there were a lot of people making individual nuanced judgments about how to react that didn't get covered. And I don't think that's just peace groups. I think that's a lot of people.

MS. OVERHOLSER: Can I just give an example, and I know Robert is next. A perfect example of what you're saying, Mark, I remember a headline in the New York Times. Do you all remember when there were several thousand people demonstrating here on the mall, it must have been early October. And what they were chanting and what they were saying was bring the criminals to trial. Bring the terrorists to trial. Bring them to this country to trial instead of going to war. The headline in the New York Times the next day said "Protestors ask to make peace with terrorists". That's a perfect example. There was no nuance.

MR. KALB: That was in the New York Times.

MR. SIEGEL: I would still put our behavior and Secretary Rumsfeld's expertise in briefings, I would really want to return that to some context.

On September 11th I think this unanimity, near unanimity about the war in Afghanistan, and I believe that's a totally separate issue from what happens next, or will be, I assume with public opinion, would seem to by the remarkable decision to attack both the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, I honestly believe that if Osama bin Laden's people had decided to only hit the Pentagon but not the World Trade Center Towers, or only hit the World Trade Center Towers but not the Pentagon, various subcultures in American life would feel unaffected by this, they would think it was the other America that they were really getting at and not us. Something happened that united people in a sense of vulnerability and they had been attacked. I think the response of the country, the absence of the kind of opposition that you're talking about isn't the result of any—it's not a very complicated problem. The country felt a sense of what they'd heard about happened at Pearl Harbor, only this wasn't an island way offshore from California. This was in two places that represented different centers of American power, culture, society.

So we have covered, I think, every dissenting issue, every problematic issue I've heard raised here I think we've done stories and interviews about on NPR. When you ask the basic question have we been covering a dissent, what I think of as dissent—dissent from the policy that the U.S. should have gone in and attacked al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and taken military action, yes, there was an issue about should it be prosecuted, but I think essentially the near unanimity that we have reported in this has been the near unanimity of the country.

MR. KALB: Alex?

MS. ARRIAGA: I just wanted to say two things. One is that, the other thing, and this comes back once again to the atmosphere here. And just a reminder once again of John Ashcroft. We've been talking about Secretary Rumsfeld, but the Attorney General as well, and his famous words about phantoms of lost liberty and fearmongers and to those who scare peace-loving Americans, you're tactics aid the terrorists.

Those kinds of messages also from the Administration fell into this whole atmosphere of secrecy, do not question, and made it much more difficult to raise the question.

I do think the media there did once again speak up very loudly in all of the major press saying this was not the way to go.

But I do want to return to one bigger issue which is the one that you were talking about which is the bigger policy question. Because what we have found is that where we do dissent we have to explain very clearly why we dissent and what the consequences are.

MR. KALB: And this is something different from the way you'd have handled it on another issue ten years ago.

MS. ARRIAGA: We may not have had to have done that in other circumstances, simply to state the case. But now I think it's incumbent upon us to explain the consequences as to what the ramifications are of certain actions. And there, one area that has been a concern of ours and I think of other organizations in the conduct of the war is what are the long term consequences? And I'm not sure that that has really gotten the coverage that it deserves. What are the long term consequences of the types of alliances that we're currently forming, of the types of non-commentary about the serious human rights violations that are committed in some of these countries. And what are the consequences for long term peace if that is in fact what we're trying to seek.

So I'd just like to throw that out as well.

There's another issue that falls into the dissent category about the conduct of the war that really I think deserves some more attention.

MR. KALB: I just wanted to raise this kind of an issue. I remember back in 1965, '66 that when the Vietnam War began to seem problematic, when it was not just a matter of responding to an immediate crisis, somebody killed X number of Americans, you go in and try to attack them at their base. You began to move into Danang and that sort of thing.

At that time people on Capitol Hill—not the press. The press was very much for the war. But people on Capitol Hill, individuals like Senator Fulbright, began to have hearings. The hearings then made respectable the very idea that what President Johnson was doing might not be in the best interest of the United States long term. That had to do with hearings on China, then it had to do with hearings on Vietnam. Then other people including James Reston of the New York Times and others of major newspapers and journalistic institutions began to raise questions about whether the President was doing the right thing.

So Peter Hart, as you look in your crystal ball a year or two ahead, what is it that has to happen. Two questions, really. What is it that has to happen before the political tenor of discussion about what is after all officially described as a war—we're not engaged in a game, this is a war against terrorism, that the American people begin to think about the consequences of war, the sacrifices involved in the prosecution of war. What has to happen? That's sort of my first question. I'm not here asking for you know, a thousand people have to be killed or something to rally us again. We've had that already.

Is there a likelihood that this can turn around? I'm not even saying it should turn around. But do we go down a war path without a discussion? Do journalists sit back and say we've done a great job, we've reflected public opinion, and we've done that very well and that's enough? I'm only asking the question. What do you think?

MR. HESS: I think there are two things here. First of all when you talk about the dissent of '65 or '66 or '67, remember that three year period, and we're five months into this and we're assuming that American public opinion is going to remain stable. Events will change and obviously if you start to go into Iraq or you start new incursions elsewhere I think that's going to change public opinion. But there's one other major difference between the '60s and this war. It was our brothers and sisters. It was our neighbors who were fighting. There's no sacrifice in this war. Sacrifice are soldiers who essentially in our volunteer army are there. The sense in the community is very different from where it was. So I don't think you have the same kinds of grass roots feelings that went on back then. I think those are two things that make it very different.

MR. HESS: You have something else going on now that you didn't have then, and that's the homeland security issue. It may not be that our brothers and husbands and so forth are being killed in Vietnam, but at the same time there is this worry that somebody may kill our neighbor when he gets on a plane and goes to San Francisco.

MR. HESS: And let me make the point that over 70 percent of the American public still believes that's a very real threat and essentially that also stifles the element of dissent. At that stage of the game you're willing to say, and interestingly enough, the support for John Ashcroft, which was very divided in the first several months of the Administration, suddenly went higher—

MR. KALB: Seventy-five percent approval.

MR. HESS: Above Don Rumsfeld. So throw your factor in and that's all part of it.

MR. HESS: And another factor, just one other thing. We touched on this partly talking about the brilliance of Rumsfeld as a spokesman or an icon for this Administration, but a lot of other things they have done have really in retrospect been quite brilliant. The idea of turning it into a woman's issue and virtually neutralizing the normal opposition. That was a strategic decision. It didn't happen by accident. It happened when Sarah Hughes set up a team at the White House.

So that is a factor.

MR. SIEGEL: Sarah Hughes led the team in—

MR. HESS: Oh, I got Karen Hughes.

MR. SIEGEL: Sarah Gold.

Let me say first of all, Marvin, I don't believe that I'm in the position of reflecting public opinion, number one, but I do think we're in the business of describing the country and that's what I'm saying.

But the next point, there's an assumption here that if the war against terrorism becomes burdensome to the public that it will become unpopular. Your old colleague and my present colleague, Dan Schorr, pointed out very astutely after the State of the Union address, that President Bush in that speech called upon people to make a volunteer effort to the country as a response to what happened. And what Dan I thought got right was that the President recognized that he'd gotten it wrong in September when he suggested that people should all go out and go shopping, and that the response of September 11th was to act normal and spend your money so the economy doesn't take a hit. That wasn't what people wanted to do. They didn't feel after the country's been attacked that I should now go to the theater in New York. That's the way that I respond to the "war effort".

MR. SIEGEL: So I think the idea that the American public is not going to respond favorably to a prolonged war effort, which as Peter points out is a war effort that will be fought by a small group of Americans who are professionals at it, I think it's quite possible that we could see a policy of the United States that involves military actions in a variety of places that we can't pronounce or spell, that go on for a number of years, and that never generate a broad movement. It's quite possible that it won't.

I find it hard enough to get what's already happened right on the air rather than try to report the future, but I think it's very possible that there will not be a great political division over this policy.

MR. KALB: As we say at NPR, it is possible.

MR. SIEGEL: It is possible.

MR. KALB: Only time will tell.

Mark, you go, and then for those of you who have questions, just raise your hands.

MR. JURKOWITZ: If you think about what's down the road, and I think the most recent polls, maybe there are newer ones, have shown that 75 percent of Americans are willing to now use ground troops to dislodge Saddam Hussein based on the Afghanistan experience. I think the one place where the media will never sort of lose, or regains its classic adversarial role in government is in the horse race aspects of this crisis.

So let's not forget that it wasn't all that long ago before the Taliban left Kabul that we did have a spate of coverage that suggested we might be just briefly, headed for another Vietnam-like quagmire. And we couldn't dislodge these people, we weren't using the right combination of forces. Well, if the Taliban were in Kabul today then that drumbeat would have gotten much louder, the President's numbers would have gone down, I'm convinced, and coverage would have been a lot more unpleasant, and what we would consider to be dissent or adversarially oriented. So also when we talk about the factors that have led to coverage including no real debate in this country, the fact that the war was prosecuted so successfully, so quickly, is another key element.

MR. KALB: Absolutely.

Questions?

Q: I think Mark's point about—

MR. HESS: Introduce yourself.

Q: I'm Lou Wolfson from American University.

I think Mark's point about nuances is very important. As we know, the press is terrible on nuances. So with apologies to Peter who is a brilliant man, understands our pollsters, and much of this panel has been based on poll figures, I'm wearing an American flag in my lapel. What does that say about me? What do you conclude about me right away? Does this mean that I can't be an objective journalist or preach objectivity, which I've done, objectivity which we know has a lot of weaknesses. What does it say about me as a person and my political views? Am I in this 98 percent or the two percent? Am I in the 55 or 45 percent, whichever it is? What does it say about us as citizens, about the country, about Americans' role in thinking this through, which is what this panel is about.

That's just a general question for the panel.

MR. KALB: I think I could give a quick answer and then we'll get to the next question. I think that flag in your lapel suggests that you are a patriotic American who supports the Administration's policy of fighting terrorism. Am I correct?

MR. HESS: The question, Lou, was not whether you wear a flag in your lapel. It's whether you go on television as a professional journalist, as the anchor on KGB wearing an American flag in your lapel.

MR. WOLFSON: Right.

MR. HESS: Right, which is not the question you raised at all. You got up and said I wear a flag and we say fine. You like flags and somebody else doesn't.

MR. WOLFSON: If I went on television as a journalist and wore my flag—

MR. HESS: What are you saying? Would you do that?

MR. WOLFSON: Yes. I could. I hadn't thought about it. I haven't had the opportunity. I've been on television and that sort of thing but I haven't had—

MS. OVERHOLSER: I think the quick answer, I mean we could go on for an hour about this and everybody has. I think the quick answer is you've just proven what's wrong with going on the tube and wearing a flag. The whole conversation is about what does it mean? You shouldn't be having on that flag because people need to be paying attention to what you're saying rather than to what is the symbolism of the flag.

MR. WOLFSON: I understand it puts the focus on the flag. But you as journalists—

MR. SIEGEL: In radio you can wear whatever you want to or not. (Laughter)

The issue that still is very, very powerful is us'ing and them'ing in describing the war. That is, and people are forever being reminded that it's not what—It's what U.S. forces did in Afghanistan. It's not what we did in Afghanistan. For whatever it's worth that distance is maintained in the discourse of journalism.

To the extent that the flag pin says all right, you know what my sentiments are, to that extent it shouldn't be there. But as they say in radio, who cares?

MR. HESS: Robert, it's also as you know, Hess' media law number one which is it doesn't make any difference what you wear on radio or what you say on television. (Laughter)

Q: I'm Louis Cabot, I'm a trustee of Brookings.

Steve brought up a subject which is very controversial which this panel has ducked, and I think you've ducked it because you're afraid of being dissentive. That is to discuss openly, carefully, thoughtfully, what do we do next about Iraq?

Now from my reading of what people are thinking about very seriously in this city is we're going to go after Iraq soon. We ought to be talking about that. We ought to be thinking about it. We ought to realize that that's a serious difference than going after the Taliban. And yet I don't think there's very much education coming from the media about what that issue is because you're scared to death that you might be disloyal when the President decides to move, and I think that's a serious problem.

MR. KALB: Would any of the journalist like to take on Louis Cabot?

MS. OVERHOLSER: I would say one thing and that is you may be right. Maybe we're not doing it because we're scared to death. But in fact I'm a little more sanguine about that particular issue because I would argue that after the President's axis of evil speech which I think opened the door to the prospect that you rightly raise as a troubling one, there was in fact more discussion than there had been and that that axis of evil speech got going a great deal of discussion in the land, and as Robert says, that happened quite without the media. But also that that discussion rose up into the media. So it seems to me that is taking place That doesn't mean we're doing all we should be doing to say what would happen if we went into Iraq, but I'm more hopeful that discussion is taking place than previously.

MR. SIEGEL: And I think certainly the axis of evil, as I remember the interviews with people that we did, reacting to the grouping together of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as potential adversaries, and I remember the interviews with senators early on as to whether they had just approved an open-ended war against every country that's identified with terrorism.

I think it's been there, but let me remind you something. I happened to be in our New York bureau on September 11th where I was struck by the fact that our reporters had covered the embassy bombing trial endlessly. Before that they had covered the landmarks trial, landmarks bombing trials. Before that they'd covered the World Trade Center bombing trial. Our New York bureau had done so much work on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden throughout the 1990s, (inaudible) we could do a content analysis and find who was the number one subject.

If we'd asked anyone in the audience where does the subject of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, where does it rank on your radar screen, I think it would have been rather low. I think somehow the subject never really penetrated the American public. But it for sure wasn't for lack of reporting and discussion on our network, and I think we were in there in the pack with a number of other very good national news organizations. We were reporting about Osama bin Laden all throughout the 1990s. But we can't—You can't hold the media accountable for that last step of whether some penny drops in the public mind that engages the American public in some issue. In this case it will be the discussion of Iraq.

Q: Hi, my name is Isa. I work for Islam On-Line.

I wanted to ask about specifically coverage of dissent activities. A lot of the people who are part of anti-war organizations feel that, they have very strong words to say about what kind of coverage they get in mainstream media.

If you remember, September 29th there was the first major anti-war demonstration, anti a lot of other things too, in Washington, D.C. There were thousands of people out there. I'm not good at estimating numbers so I don't know exactly how many, but I saw reports the next day as low as 500 and there were far more than 500 people out there.

Recently the anti-world economic forum protests that were going on, I talked to some of the protestors who were planning on going out there. There was a coalition that was formed after September 11th and they were making a presence there. The guy that I spoke to was very adamant that, he's like we don't expect good coverage of this. They portray us as throwbacks to the '60s, and that's one thing we've been talking about. And indeed, that is something that I saw in reports of the protests outside the forum, that they were a bunch of hippies, it was like Woodstock. I saw that terminology being used.

What do you think as journalists of the kind of coverage protestors make peace with terrorists, something like that, do you think that is mostly what happens in the mainstream media? Or do you see any attempt to actually cover them seriously?

MR. JURKOWITZ: I think it's a broader problem in the mainstream media. There's this huge debate about liberal and conservative bias in the mainstream media that always goes on. If you're Bernard Goldberg you take the voting records of journalists in Washington and New York and you make the case that there's a liberal bias. If you're Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, you look at the fact that what voices aren't generally heard in mainstream discourse in this country. And to use a bad football analogy, the game is usually played between the 40 yard lines.

There are a lot of dis-empowered communities that do not get on the radar screen of the mainstream media for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is a homogeneous group of editors who have the same, and decisionmakers who have focused on the same kinds of issues and had the same kinds of experiences, and their circles may not overlap.

I got the same argument, frankly, when I did my dissent story that you were telling me. I had people saying why isn't the Boston Globe out covering our vigil every Tuesday night in Copley Square? The truth is, there isn't an obligation to cover every vigil ever Tuesday night at Copley Square. There is an obligation to let the public know it exists, frankly, roughly in proportion, and this gets back to the 98-2, roughly in proportion to the degree that it is a critical element of the American debate.

I go back to my point which is while I think we need to do more coverage of that, I think where the real problem has come is simply the glazing over of, again, the more layered response that a lot of different people have. But the communities that you're talking about, whether it's September 11th, whether it's issues regarding the environment, whether it's issues regarding globalization, are almost continually marginalized in the mainstream media.

Q: My name is Rebecca Gailey. I'm from Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which is actually an organization that opposes the war for philosophical reasons.

My question I guess I would like to direct towards Mark, but anyone could answer. You mentioned the homogenizing of decisionmaking bodies and I wondered to what extent the fact of large corporate media mergers affects that? The fact that ten corporations own most of the news agencies that provide information so that limits diversity.

I was just curious as to your response to that.

MR. JURKOWITZ: I'll make it quick. That could be a ten hour conversation, obviously.

It certainly does, and we saw a ruling down in this city last week that I think is going to have a huge impact. It does a couple of things. Not only does it eliminate, does it sort of constrict the diversity of views that you get in society, but it also creates a corporate culture. So what you have now are people ostensibly running major news organizations who see those news organizations as one line on the bottom of a ledger sheet that includes everything from making candy to making movies to making records to owning cable companies so that the journalism itself A is not as intrinsic a part of the enterprise and of the company as it used to be. And also that there are frankly a lot more concerns, economic concerns that sort of bind these companies to the mainstream view.

The best line I can use is what Larry Grossman told me when I did the piece. Larry Grossman is a former President of NBC News and PBS who said if you're running one of these companies now and you're in a big suite up in New York, you want to be popular. I think that's a problem.

Q: My name is Mary Mullen and I work with the [Women's] Support Committee.

I just wanted to talk about dissent in general in the United States. When George Bush said you either are for us or you're against us, that is what in my opinion as an American is what dissent is. You're either not dissenting or you have to be part of a group that dissents about many things, and there's sort of like a dissent culture there that you don't sort of have the freedom to dissent about some things but yet agree with there government on others. I just thought when President Bush said you're either for us or against us, I thought that was dictatorial, personally. I don't know if any of you have any comment about that.

MR. KALB: I think what the President was addressing, I'm pretty sure, because he has said it several times now, was the international audience. He was talking to nations and groups, nations that harbor groups within the context of a war against terrorism and he was making what seemed to me to be a fairly unusually flat out statement by a President that you're for us or against us.

There has been criticism of that. I think you're implying that as well, that you can't in a very complicated environment be that for or that against.

But on an issue like terrorism and after what happened on 9/11 it is not surprising in any case that a leader of the United States would proclaim that kind of policy and then be rewarded by 82 percent approval ratings. The American people want that.

MS. ARRIAGA: It does, once again, fit into the whole culture of the us and them. Bringing it back to your first point about the flag, I guess to me when I see the flag on people's lapels right now it brings up various emotions. One of them is recall of September 11 and the victims and the fact that the United States was attacked. The other one is fear. And the fact that it seems to me that many immigrants in the United States feel fear right now and therefore also wear the flag to make sure it's clear that they are pro-American. So that's part of the element of the us and them.

The other aspect of this is once again the policy issue which is the question of U.S. unilateralism and at the same time that we are building alliances our way and to have a very, what are the consequences once again as that kind of policy.

Q: Just in comment to your—My name is Iya, I'm a student at SAIS.

Just in comment to what the woman just mentioned about dissent in general, I think Ari Fleischer in the press conference did state pretty equivocally that you're either for us or against us. I don't remember in what context that was for, but he did mention that during a press conference.

And about the dissent in general, I was wondering what your opinion would be of Susan Sontag's article in The New Yorker right after September 11th that attracted a lot of opposition and controversy, as well as a comparison of September 11th with Pearl Harbor, which I think is a completely different case. I mean it evoked a sense of nationalism and patriotism, but these types of comparisons I think are dangerous to make in a certain sense because it gives people a rational sense of unity or war, even though Colin Powell and the Bush Administration would say this is not a war and that's why we don't abide by the Geneva Convention, and yet it is a war.

MR. KALB: I'm not aware that they've ever said that it's not a war, but—

MR. SIEGEL: First of all I thought the decision of The New Yorker to include the Sontag piece was a good one. I thought that, I wished early on that we'd had some contrary commentary and analytical commentary more prominent on NPR right off. I thought it was a very provocative piece that did generate a lot of discussion.

I frankly disagreed with what she said, but I disagree with a tremendous number of the people who do commentaries on NPR and that's not the test. Nor is it the test if everybody in the room disagrees with the commentary.

The other point, I would just say I think, when I said that people recalled Pearl Harbor and that people invoked that analogy, I don't think that was entirely irrational. I think that obviously it wasn't a national army with a large navy that had assaulted our cities, but in the terms of violence today it was an attack on the United States. And I don't think that, while I don't think—Ari Fleischer can say whatever he wants to about who's side you're on. It doesn't mean very much to me.

I don't think we should try to minimize what happened in the interest of a more sophisticated discussion of U.S. policy around the world. There was an attack on the U.S.

Q: (inaudible) prisoners of war, then you can't compare it with Japan where in that scenario it was an attack against the United States but it was considered a war and they treated Japanese as prisoners of war.

MR. SIEGEL: Yes, and I will say that one instance of the odd criticism that we get that I received was in revisiting the question of the Geneva Convention, the Marine commander of Camp Xray in Guantanamo told me explicitly we're trying to get copies of the Geneva Conventions in all the languages that they speak, because that's one of the terms of the Geneva Convention, at a time when the President and the Defense Secretary are saying we're thinking about whether to apply the convention. And I think NPR did a good job, Tom Gjelten did a nice job on the division within, between the military and the Administration over the Geneva Convention.

It's a valid story, but I don't think—I'll stop there.

MS. OVERHOLSER: Can I just make one point on your Ari Fleischer question. In fact there's some good news there. The statement he made that I think you're recalling is these are times when we really have to watch what we say, which of course is quite chilling. But then it was so responded to and reacted against that they actually took it out of the transcript of the press conference, thereby proving that these are times that he needed to watch what he said too. So it was a happier ending, I think.

MR. KALB: I didn't realize that they took it out, or that they could take it out.

MS. OVERHOLSER: Well, it was—

MR. KALB: Is the transcript at the White House subject to rewriting? (Laughter)

Voice: No more than the Congressional Record.

Q: Robert Asman, formerly of NBC News, now retired.

Robert, it was an attack on the United States and in that sense it was similar to Pearl Harbor, but it was an attack not by a nation state, and that's a big difference.

I think that brings us to Marvin's point about the general dissention that followed major war conflicts, and I think it's unfortunate that this situation is referred to constantly as a war. There should be another name for it because it is different. And this is the brilliance of Secretary Rumsfeld. In educating the press generally, at every news conference, folks this is something different. You can't follow the same pattern that you have in covering other wars because it's a different kind of thing. And by doing so, I think he sets himself up for a lot of non-information perhaps or a different approach to supplying information as the Pentagon chief. So I think Marvin's point was well taken when he said you can't sense a general dissention yet in this war. You may be right, that general dissention may come when this really becomes a war against states rather than individuals.

Q: John Wolfhartz with the Answer Institute for Homeland Security. Actually my question for the panel is not going to be related to September 11th, but rather the anthrax letters that were delivered in the weeks that followed.

Specifically several of these letters went to sources of the media including a prominent news anchor. My question for the panel becomes do you think this had some effect on the media's willingness to report dissent in the respect that they were now part of the story in some respects, and there was a tendency to sort of close ranks?

MR. SIEGEL: It was certainly brought home to every mail room. I think not just in the media but in many other institutions here, that you were vulnerable in a way that by the end of September 11th, a few days after that, I think most of us thought the attacks had stopped, that there was no recurring threat.

The puzzling thing about the anthrax is I never knew whether to even include it in the same portion of the program as the September 11th story because we just couldn't figure out what its providence was.

Anthrax probably did have the impact of making a tremendous number of people feel potentially directly victimized, conceivably by somebody completely unrelated to what had happened earlier. But you may be very right that it affected the mentality of a lot of American journalists included.

MR. HESS: And it could be expanded in the same way. That is a journalist, because he was an American, was kidnapped and executed in Pakistan. And that too reminds us that journalists, the degree to which journalists have become enwrapped in the story itself. And just as you say, maybe the anthrax question affected journalists at home. One has to ask what this means to foreign correspondents who go out, and especially Americans of course, will be in considerable danger in this situation.

MR. KALB: I just want to ask, before Steve wraps it up, if you all have any concluding comments bubbling up within you that if you walked away from here—(Laughter)

MR. HESS: I'm going to go to Mr. Cabot's question and if you're talking about dissent and the support of the American public, the American public is very divided on the question of Iraq, this is from our NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, and we simply asked the American public do you think that we should take military action against Iraq and Saddam Nussein, even if Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11th attack. Forty-seven percent of the American public said we should; and 42 percent said we should not, which is very different from going against terrorist cells in the Philippines or Somalia where 70 percent are in favor.

So there is dissent and there is something—there is a basis of sorts.

One other quick thing I wanted to make a point of. That is the American public, when you look at Democrats and Republicans on all the issues related to Bush and related to the war, there is about a 10 to 15 to 20 point spread between attitudes on anything that has to do with the war or international. When you move from anything international to anything domestic, his conduct of the economy, his handling of domestic affairs, there is a 40 point spread. So it's not to suggest that somehow Democratic voices are muted, but they are very muted —It's an Arthur Vandenberg world right now, at least in politics.

MS. ARRIAGA: Just a few quick things.

One is on the point on the war. There, I do think it's confusing because I think that there is an attempt by the Administration to have it both ways. It's a war on terrorism, it's a war against those who harbor terrorists, so therefore Afghanistan, although we didn't recognize the official government of Afghanistan for some time.

So I do think that there is some confusion about what kind of situation we're in.

The other issue is on the issues of public opinion and the climate for dissent more generally. As to an organization that is often found to be dissenting, I have to say that often the Congress has been our ally on many of the human rights issues. It's very different in a war time. So there too, it makes the voice much—There are fewer who are speaking and it doesn't have necessarily the amplification that it might have otherwise.

Finally, I guess my last point would be that this is something, that we are in a situation right now where we will be in a situation of crisis for quite some time. One of our main concerns is, as I said earlier, the consequences of the current actions. We are heading into a greater militarization of our policy and whether in the long term that is going to achieve our end for peace. In the short term certain we are in war, and in the short term we are creating alliances. What are the messages we're sending to the international community about where the United States stands?

MR. JURKOWITZ: I would just say one quick thing about the upcoming and what the media's role will be in the upcoming debate on Iraq. I think part of the problem right now may be that I'm not sure the Administration knows other than a "regime change", knows what its policy is so I think that's sort of disarmed debate over the story.

At minimum, as this thing gets closer, the one basic journalistic staple that I hope we see which doesn't call for any editorializing whatsoever, but just a little basic shoe leather reporting is some kind of comparison of the relative military prowess of the Taliban versus Saddam Hussein.

MS. OVERHOLSER: I would simply say that of course this is just one moment in time. I mean our discussion today really looks at just a snapshot, five months after September 11th and that it can change dramatically and I assume it will based on what happens in Iraq, based on the alliances we make. As you pointed out, Alex, based on whether a Fulbright of our time arises, whether, God forbid, we're attacked again. So many different elements can change that in five months we'll look back and say it's amazing what confidence we had that there is so little deterrent or that the media had behaved in a certain way.

MR. SIEGEL: I would just add in conclusion that I agree with what Geneva just said, and I think there's a distinction. We always start talking about what happens when Americans start dying in numbers in some future military action. A former military officer amended that in a conversation at our studio to say it's not just a matter of suffering losses, it's suffering setbacks. What happens when a military strategy starts to fail? The problem in Vietnam wasn't just that people were dying. It was that nobody could demonstrate that the country was achieving what it said it was achieving. When that happens I think that there will be possibly some dissent if the U.S. says it's achieving things through its use of military force that it is not. That we have to watch out for, that we have to cover, and I would imagine there could be more genuine dissent if there developed a true gap between the statement of we have defeated the regime in Afghanistan and the reality of whether we have actually done so.

MR. HESS: Marvin and I were quite right. We put together a panel of five very interesting people, saying very interesting, very useful things, produced a quite wonderful morning of conversation and a helpful one, and we're very grateful to them.

As far as next week, particularly to you out in the audience who we see week after week, take out your pencil and your paper because we have a change of both time and venue. But a rather important session, we're directing ourselves at that next question and the next phase, Iraq. So that on March 6th, that's Wednesday, it will be at the Foreign Press Center. It will be from 2:00 to 3:30. And it will be "NATO Split over Iraq?" and from the journalist perspective we are going to have four distinguished journalists, one from France, one from Germany, one from Italy and one from the United Kingdom and they will be reviewing this in terms of the media coverage and opinions in their own country. It is open, of course, to the public, you are all welcome. It will be broadcast around the world by the State Department television network—they call that public diplomacy. We're very grateful to the Foreign Press Center for joining with us in that effort.

Then Marvin and I have some other commitments out of the city so we will not be here for the next two Wednesdays. But on March 27th we will be back, same time, same station, right here. This relates very much to both what Peter has been saying and what Geneva has just said about a snap of time because in November we had Andy Kohut of Pew Research Center join us with new poll data and an analysis of that by a panel. We come back six months later and on March 27th we will talk again about public opinion, what's happened in those six months, and again, you are all most welcome to join us.

So for the panel and for Marvin and myself, thanks so much for being with us.