James Carey: One frequently gets the impression talking to journalists that the way we used to do it ten years ago was the way it was done in the 17th, 18th and 19th century. Its always been the same. This is a trick of memory. What we think of as journalism is really only about 100 years old. It took 60 years in the 19th century to break journalists free of political parties and partisanship. For the most of the history of this country, journalists had been front benches and back benches to the dominant and recessive political parties. In the middle of the century they became independent republican and democrats, but still aligned ideologically in terms of fundamental outlooks with the political system and the parties which dominated it.

Journalists and the agencies for which they worked declared their independence late in the 19th century, and they became objective and non-partisan. The reasons for this are partly economic and partly professional, but there was also an enormously sound political reason. The era of politics following the civil war was dominated by images of race and the inclusion of black Americans. The stereotypes developed in the partisan conflicts in the American press concerning black Americans was one of the unfortunate legacies of that era. Republicans, reliant upon black votes for their positions, cultivated images of black America. Democrats denigrated them. Journalists were the agencies by which some of the most disturbing and powerful racial images entered the culture. By 1896, the press declared its dependence from those forms of partisan warfare, too late to be of much help to black Americans. Unfortunately, the mainstream press was largely segregated.

So the mainstream declared its independence, but it was a declaration of independence from political parties in order to join the progressive movement. The mainstream press came to stand for honesty, truth, objectivity, independence, enlightenment, civic virtue and good government. They were against the state or whomever who was in power at a given time, dishonesty and deception, concentrated power, patronage, graft, and machine politics. They became the advocates of an adversary culture in the name of progress and the common good. This tradition of American newspaper and magazines later took up residence in radio and television, not because these entertainment media were congenial to it, but because they were required to do it under the Federal communications act of 1934. This, along with certain practices of writing, reporting, storytelling and design reached its apogee in the early 60s to mid 60s and 70s with the unquestioned triumphs of the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the reporting on the Vietnam war.

Unfortunately, that moment was like Minerva's owl taking flight at twilight, because it was also the moment that change began. Journalism was challenged by a whole series of new trends, such as the new journalism, which questioned the very practices of writing; the Civil rights movement itself; various reform efforts down to today, such as public journalism by the Committee of Concerned Journalism or the Project for Excellence in Journalism, started here in Cambridge 18 months ago; and above all others, the decline and disappearance of the audience for journalism.

Newspapers are still very profitable, but throughout the western world, their readership is declining. The increasing distance between the traditional media and their readers have affected the basis of credibility and trust. Finally, to at last to get to the subject, Newspapers have been changed by technology, or at least destabalized. The emergence of the Net and the Web presents both a threat and an opportunity. A threat to certain established practices and opportunities for new forms of doing business. That is the subject that we have here before us today.