NEWS ANALYSIS : Reporters Putting Their Own Spin on News Events : Media: Many papers offer interpretation along with facts. But will subjectivity anger already suspicious public?

When they were young, most journalists in America were taught to keep their personal feelings out of their reporting.

Play it straight; write what you know, not what you think; give all sides a chance to be heard: This was the catechism of fearsome city editors who haunted young reporters with big dreams. News columns could include analysis or commentary, as the Washington Post ethics code states, only “when plainly labeled.”

Today, subtly, without any clear consensus, the idea of straight reporting is giving way to something else. Many of the nation’s newspapers are shifting uneasily toward a new era of subjectivity.

More and more stories strive to interpret the meaning of events, to stake out clear points of view and even to predict the future. In other forms the new subjectivity is a style of writing, the use of literary story-telling techniques to compel audiences to keep reading.

Some papers, such as the Portland Press Herald in Maine, have moved beyond their traditional “watchdog” role and begun advocating reforms at the end of their lengthy investigative stories. A few news organizations are even experimenting with “activism,” organizing community groups and becoming makers rather than reporters of news.

The shift is adding to the tension inside a world of written journalism that is already uncertain about its future.

To some of the most respected minds in the news business, providing clarifying context and interpretation could keep newspapers from sinking in the rising sea of 24-hour radio and television news. It also may be more honest than “false objectivity,” pretending to be neutral, when even choosing subject matter requires personal judgments.

“People have a lot of facts in their head when they turn to the morning newspaper, and it is only logical that they look for perspective, interpretation and serious thinking,” said Joseph Lelyveld, managing editor of the New York Times. “I think we carry the same burdens of fairness that we always carried, but there is a higher priority on saying what is really going on here.”

But many critics fear the new subjectivity will only further anger a public already suspicious that the press has a secret agenda or covers the wrong thing.

It is folly, other journalists argue, to think reporters can add meaningful perspective within hours of an event. The media’s rushed judgments are often so negative that they breed public cynicism and make it harder for elected officials to govern.

“Most of this high-flying interpretive reporting . . . is generally impulsive, often silly and mostly wrong,” said Bob Woodward, the Washington Post’s renowned investigative reporter.

“A lot of what we do is what I call souffle journalism,” containing little real information, said Los Angeles Times White House correspondent John M. Broder.

Perhaps both sides have a point. The print press may need to rethink traditional objectivity to remain relevant in the age of 24-hour news. But much of the interpretation it now offers is trivial, and it is diminishing the press’ most important function, hard reporting.

All this is far from saying that most of what you find in your daily newspaper is analysis or interpretation. A two-month study of front-page stories in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Washington Post reveals the contemporary newspaper style:

* Slightly more than half the 1,332 stories that ran during that period could be classified as straight news.

* About 5% of the front-page stories were features.

* Another 5% were special projects.

* Nearly 40% (like the story you are reading now) were analytical, interpretive treatments of news or trends. And nearly 80% of these had no label identifying them as analysis, interpretation or opinion.

None of this is entirely new. Stephen Crane, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, Ernie Pyle and many others wrote for newspapers with clear literary points of view. The tradition of objectivity in American journalism did not gain widespread momentum until the 1920s when newspaper publishers, seeking broader audiences, began to abandon their ideological crusades.

The concept was never well defined. In some quarters, objectivity implied that journalists could separate facts from values and information from opinion: that there was such a thing as neutral information.

To other journalists, objectivity meant fairness: gathering and representing all points of view on a particular subject.

The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists embraces both approaches: “News reports should be free of opinion or bias and represent all sides of an issue.”

Journalists also found that objectivity could be a gimmick, a means of attributing a reporter’s point of view to sympathetic experts.

Ellen Hume, a former journalist now teaching at the Annenberg Center in Washington, argues that the old standard of objectivity rewards the unconscious biases of the journalist, discourages the discussion of policy ideas and invites reporters to duck responsibility for their influence.

These days, said Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, no topic is discussed more in academic journalism circles than whether objectivity “needs to be dropped, re-examined or altered.”

Polls by the Times Mirror Center for People and the Press reveal that the public increasingly believes that the press slants the news, harbors biases and fails to give straightforward accounts of events.

And some, including Woodward, argue that the move toward interpretation has been accelerated by television and radio talk shows on which reporters are rewarded for staking out provocative positions. Reporters who offer their opinions on television may be more likely to render judgments in the news pages. “This is the McLaughlin Group,” said Woodward, “come to the front page of newspapers.”

Nonetheless, some of the more recent popular changes in journalism are those that implicitly acknowledge a journalist’s point of view.

One is the widespread use of “truth boxes” to police the rhetoric in political advertising in the 1990 and the 1992 election campaigns. Journalists labeled the ads’ claims as true or false, fair or unfair--judgments that went beyond simply describing them.

Some of these innovations, too, have occurred at smaller and medium-sized papers. At the Minneapolis Star Tribune, national editor Roger Buoen has had reporters experiment with new approaches to the news. Some stories staked out explicit conclusions--that the threat of AIDS is exaggerated, that the Canadian health care system is more successful than press accounts suggest--and were written in a clear, pointed way. And in September the paper launched a new page three days a week reserved for such interpretive reporting.

At the Press Herald in Portland, Me., executive editor Lou Ureneck has developed a model for what he calls “expert” or “judgmental” reporting. Certain writers are given four or five months to master a particular local problem--workers’ compensation laws, for example, or waterfront development--and to write multi-part series dissecting the issues and proposing reforms.

The reporter writes in an authoritative voice, makes clear judgments and advocates specific reforms. The series have had substantial impact, changing the debate on these issues and often changing the laws.

At Knight Ridder, the experimentation away from traditional objectivity has taken on another form, in part, says news vice president Clark Hoyt, to demonstrate that the papers are concerned with helping the community.

In what one of the chain’s editors calls “public journalism,” its Detroit, Wichita, Kan., and Akron, Ohio, papers have followed up stories in the paper by acting as clearinghouses for organizing community groups to act. The Detroit Free Press has helped increase volunteerism in schools by 33%. The Akron paper has hired facilitators to help community groups talk about race.

Most often, however, including at the largest and most influential newspapers, the new subjectivity is the result of surprisingly little organized thinking. Rather, it is more a matter of osmosis, of a few prominent writers distinguishing themselves with unique personal voices and editors and writers around the country imitating them.

At the New York Times, one of the most talented and influential writers is Maureen Dowd, whose special eye and sweet prose gained most attention when it was focused on President George Bush: “He talks funny. He keeps secrets. He enjoys sports that require Abercrombie & Fitch style rugged wear. His second serve is as weak as a falling leaf.”

Dowd’s reportorial point of view is idiosyncratic, not ideological. It emphasizes sensibilities and style more than policies and issues.

Although one of the paper’s rising stars said that “no editor at this newspaper has ever broached the subject of point-of-view journalism with me,” the New York Times has hired several magazine-style writers like Dowd for its news pages.

“If I write a story with more attitude, more edge, it will end up on Page 1,” one of the newspaper’s most prominent correspondents acknowledged. “If I write it without that, it will tend to end up inside.”

Dowd also has influenced journalists outside her newspaper. But too often, many journalists argue, her imitators’ stories offer “attitude” or “opinion” or “edge” in place of news.

When President Clinton vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard in August, the Washington Post White House correspondent described him playing golf by using imaginary quotations: “Today he is wearing an all-lavender get-up so doofy looking, so White Guy, that you just know Chelsea took one disgusted teen-age glance and rolled her eyes, ‘Oh Daddy, you’re not wearing that.’ ”

Kovach of the Nieman Foundation argues that Dowd’s influence points the industry away from serious national problems and in a direction that is essentially superficial. “The purpose in this kind of writing is to entertain,” he said. “The conclusions drawn get you to react emotionally, not intellectually.”

Editors at the Washington Post, a paper whose critics have long said that they suspect a liberal agenda, said they have mixed feelings about the era of subjectivity. While journalists need to “help the reader get beyond the factual information of the old newspaper story,” said managing editor Robert Kaiser, “I think some of our competitors have gone too far.”

At the Los Angeles Times, the new journalism is less in the style of Dowd and more toward the goal of interpreting the news. It falls more in the direction of trying to discern the meaning of the news, to spot trends and search for what some editors call “forward spin,” identifying the effect of today’s news on tomorrow’s events.

One example has been The Times’ largely skeptical coverage of Clinton’s economic plan. “A few simple statistics go a long way toward explaining why the (Clinton budget deficit plan) may not work, despite the best intentions of its authors,” one Times story declared.

Times Washington economic correspondent James Risen observed that “we definitely are willing to write what we think about this budget in a way we were not, say, in the budget package of 1990.”

Times Editor Shelby Coffey III explained that in the current media environment, “quality news organizations do have to be more analytical . . . to give order, clarity, perspective, to what can be a deluge of information and news.”

But Coffey cautioned that the traditional American standards of fairness and disinterestedness still apply. “It is important to separate analysis from opinion,” he said. “One is giving a way of looking at things. The other is advocating a particular viewpoint. One is a tool for understanding. The other a tool for persuasion.”

In practice, the desire to convey significance as well as facts remains vulnerable to three principal problems.

* Discerning the significance of events immediately after they occur is often impossible, and journalists can easily reach too far.

When Clinton offered his plan to resolve the crisis in Bosnia, for instance, Time magazine’s cover read: “Anguish Over Bosnia: Will it be Clinton’s Vietnam.” Behind the President was a black-and-white photo of an anguished Lyndon B. Johnson.

Reporters involved in writing that story thought the comparison, at best, premature. “Even the story didn’t support the cover,” a Time editor said.

When the fiery end came for the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Tex., Wall Street Journal editors labored for a fresh angle. Their lead story the next day suggested that Waco could be Clinton’s “Bay of Pigs,” a policy disaster that initially branded President John F. Kennedy’s new Administration incompetent.

“Wisdom is who can be first to cast a judgment on the most superficial level,” said Los Angeles Times political reporter Ronald Brownstein, who says that most of what he does is analysis, much of it unlabeled. “And the result is a careening back and forth. . . . It implies more motion than exists.”

And this rush to judgment, some argue, makes governing harder, as government officials divert energy responding to the media-accelerated crisis of the moment.

* Interpretive journalism imbues the writer with enormous influence and responsibility.

In a magazine story earlier this year, for instance, New York Times writer Michael Kelly declared that Frist Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed unable to understand her own ideas about the “politics of meaning,” calling her speech on the subject “rambling” and “hard to discern under the gauzy and gushing wrappings of New Age jargon that blanket it.”

Then Kelly himself sought to explain what Mrs. Clinton thought: “There actually is, as the mists of New Age mysticism slip away, a clear line to Mrs. Clinton’s message,” he wrote.

How many journalists are qualified to make these judgments?

“It used to be rare people who had the license” to write news analysis, Lelyveld at the New York Times said. “The license a few had 30 years ago is held now by a much broader group of reporters.”

* The new era of subjectivity implicitly assumes that information on some subjects has become so plentiful that there is little left for newspaper reporters to do than add context and interpretation.

“As the relative weight of this kind of (interpretive) journalism has increased,” said Kaiser of the Washington Post, “I do see a gradual and steady diminution of hard news.”

Even some critics of objectivity argue that American newspapers still need to provide straight-forward, disinterested accounts of important events. Without it, said Jay Rosen, a communications professor at New York University, society has no way to define certain issues and carry on debate. The real purpose of objectivity, in other words, is to frame problems in ways that enable society to talk about them.

And the way the press must change, Rosen argued, is by reporting with that larger social goal in mind. Its analysis, in short, should not be criticism for the sake of criticism, or score-card journalism that measures who is up and who is down.

“Journalists are losing their authority with the public,” Rosen argued, “because they are not talking about the news in a way that is useful to readers.”

The problem, most in the profession believe, is the way the press is going about that.

“Mostly,” said Kovach of the Nieman Foundation, “the debate over objectivity is occurring in a sea of confusion.”