Where it all began

Even as the war with Iraq has led much of the world to analyze how the media gathers news, hundreds of journalists found occasion themselves to examine the changing role of their profession.

More than 500 alumni of the Yale Daily News -- hundreds of them now working journalists -- returned last week to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the country’s oldest daily college newspaper. The evening was a time for reminiscing, to be sure, but also an opportunity for critical self-evaluation among some of the most powerful journalists and spin-artists in the country, and for the young journalists who aspire to follow in their footsteps.

Washington, D.C., lawyer Lanny Davis, a Yale editor in the ‘60s who was a ubiquitous presence on television during the white-hot scandals of the Bill Clinton White House, lashed out at the media in one panel for its appetite for scandal. Meanwhile, White House correspondent Dana Milbank of the Washington Post portrayed the Washington press corps these days in stark contrast as a bunch of lazy, well-paid, generally happy stenographers -- what he referred to as the Prozac newsroom.

“I think we were in the Lanny Davis world until Sept. 11, and now we are in the Dana Milbank world,” said David Gergen, the former editor of U.S. News & World Report and advisor to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. “There is a sense now among the media that we’re all in this together.”

“It seems to me the press corps absolutely exhausted itself on Bill Clinton and is now a sitting duck for whatever tranquilizers the White House is handing out,” said Robert Semple, associate editor of the New York Times editorial page, who headed the Yale Daily News in the late 1950s.

“Times have changed very quickly in the past two years,” Milbank said. “I would say we’re in the neighborhood of about 40% of the Washington Post newsroom that is now taking some form of antidepressant.” Traditionally cranky and misanthropic by nature, journalists have been lulled into a sense of comfort that makes them less effective, Millbank said.

To compound that, the current White House administration is very disciplined, and very adept at keeping the press corps in line, he said. “What the White House has figured out is that if it’s able to keep everybody inside very quiet, it can provide just a little kernel of news and it’s immediately walked out to the White House lawn and broadcast,” Milbank said. “Then if that’s not what my story looks like, my editors want to know what happened.”

True to its history, the weekend-long celebration of the Yale Daily News was a little bit “Great Gatsby,” a little bit “Meet the Press.” There were presidential advisor Gergen and Clinton lawyer Davis, and legions of younger journalists trying to impress them.

There was Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power, a 1992 graduate and former Yale Daily News sports reporter, who managed to make genocide sound like a sexy topic during a panel discussion on foreign reporting. And there was William F. Buckley Jr. of the class of 1950, aging founder of the conservative National Review, a Yale man of the kind they don’t make anymore, whose tuxedo-cloaked arm wound its way confidently around the body of a younger female reporter even before she had turned to introduce herself.

There were throngs of reporters and editors from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, representing generations of newsies, as they’re called at Yale, who had returned to pay their respects to the newspaper that got them all started.

With about 100 reporters and 20-some editors, the Yale Daily News prints 7,500 copies a day and has an online version, which means “we now have tens of thousands of readers around the world, and I know exactly what people in South Korea, for example, think about my editorials every single day,” said Rebecca Dana, the paper’s current editor in chief.

All of which has cranked up the pressure on young editors considerably, and turned the tiny campus newspaper into a living laboratory for the 1st Amendment, journalistic ethics and campus politics.

The paper’s online version sparked high-profile controversy this year for its practice -- discontinued just last week -- of running spontaneous and anonymous discussion forums about its articles, with no oversight or editing. One professor’s antiwar column last fall generated vitriolic online attacks on her character. She threatened to sue the newspaper for allowing the personal attacks to appear.

And in February, the Yale Daily News editorialized against the invitation of controversial poet Amiri Baraka to speak at Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center. (Baraka drew furious criticism for a recent poem claiming that Israeli workers knew the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were coming and stayed away from the towers.)

When the issue was mentioned on the Web site of neoconservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, the Yale Daily News forum was deluged with opinions, including a flurry of both anti-black and anti-Jewish invectives.

Student feelings are still raw over the issue, and editor Dana pulled the plug on the forum discussions until a more specific editorial policy and stricter supervision of the postings can be established.

“It’s had a remarkable run,” said professor Tom Goldstein of the newspaper he helped edit in the late 1960s and which first published in 1878. Since his days at Yale, Goldstein has served as dean of the journalism schools at Columbia University and UC Berkeley. The recent controversies are one more opportunity for tomorrow’s journalists to hone their sensibilities, he said. Becoming an editor at the Yale Daily News is “a highly competitive and highly sought-after position, and that’s not necessarily the experience at all college newspapers,” Goldstein said.

Karen Alexander is a former editorial page editor of the Yale Daily News. She graduated in 1993.