TO:		National Conference of Editorial Writers
FROM:	Linda Seebach, Valley Times, P.O. Box 607, Pleasanton CA 94566
SUBJECT:	Conference comments

I had an extremely tedious three-plane journey home from San Antonio, and I improved the dull hours by filling out the convention evaluation form — except that I did it as a narrative, because the form itself was in my luggage. So here it is.
Attending conferences is my hobby and I indulged myself by signing up for the San Antonio meeting as soon as I could after I joined the organization. This is the first NCEW convention I've attended and I certainly hope it will not be the last. Probably I won't be able to join you in Baltimore next year because a fully midweek conference eats up too many vacation days.
I was particularly impressed with the effort taken to ensure that first-timers like me were accepted and welcomed, formally with the blue dots on our name tags and the "minders" assigned to look out for us and informally because everybody paid attention to the blue dots.
I was also impressed by the stature of the speakers; Jim Lehrer, Dick Armey, John Seigenthaler, Aukofer and Lawrence, the three (well, 2½) service secretaries.
A stimulating and invigorating few days, and it was fun, too, although I tend to overdose on late night sing-alongs.
Now, I hope I've made it sufficiently clear that I had a wonderful time and hope to return. Because the reverse side of the coin is that it seems to me there ought to be a lot less unanimity among the nation's editorial writers, and that the conference ought to make certain that the panels and presentations didn't reinforce the notion that everybody in attendance would be of the same mind about everything.
To me, who tends to be of a different mind than your prevailing one about almost everything, that was, as I said, invigorating. But not everybody enjoys plunging into icy intellectual waters just for the hell of it. I would think that a newcomer of conventionally liberal opinions would find the atmosphere at the conference soothing and supportive, with little to challenge the assumptions he brought with him. Anybody else would find it oppressively devoted to perpetuating assumptions that ought to be challenged.
So maybe the reason almost everybody there is politically liberal is that people who aren't tend disproportionately not to come back.
Because of airline complications I arrived midway through the first panel discussion, on civic journalism. The idea that newspapers should make news and then go out and cover it is fiercely debated among professionals, but no one would have known it from this session on how to lead the cheers.
"Where were the critics?" Caroline Brewer asked from the audience, and a panelist answered dismissively that there was no need for them, there would be plenty in the audience.
Actually there weren't, at least none who spoke up, as Brewer herself seemed to be a supporter with certain reservations rather than a critic.
There must be at least one passionate opponent of civic journalism among NCEW members. And if there isn't, which is a pretty scary idea in itself, didn't it occur to anybody to go look for one?
Next I sat in on the day's critique sessions, and let me step out of my dissident's role for a moment to make some purely procedural comments. As a new NCEW member, I didn't know how extensive the critiques would be or how they were organized. I signed up late to attend the conference, and in fact didn't realize that the deadline for critique sessions was already past until I filled out the registration form.
For me that turned out not to be so bad. I went to the morning part of a regular critique and shifted to a writing critique after lunch, and I'm glad I had a chance to sample both formats. But it might be worthwhile to highlight this part of NCEW's activities by sending new members a detailed description of how the critiques are done so they know to sign up early. (Maybe you already do that and I missed it, and if so I apologize.)
Carol Richards of Newsday led the regular critique session and the part of the session I heard was devoted to her close critique of the Tom Barton's Savannah Morning News edit page.
She exemplified the kind of narrow-minded person who is never more certain than when she doesn't know what she is talking about.
A non-political example was an edit based on the report by the American Federation of Teachers on high-school graduation standards. Barton quoted a question from the French exam, and Richards said, "this is so far from anything most Americans can do."
Actually it's a grouping problem which is part of the standard American seventh-grade pre-algebra course. 
Affirmative action was a principal focus of the critique, and Richards took issue with a rather mild-mannered but extremely well-argued editorial that analyzed some of the many reasons a wide variety of Americans oppose it, reasons that Richards was apparently unfamiliar with and unprepared to consider.
There was a story in his own paper proving the benefits of minority set-asides, she told him, "And I don't see there's anybody being hurt by this."
People can't see when they're blinded by stereotypes, and Richards has a lot of them.
"A much better paper than I expected," she said, "I thought it would just be traditional Southern conservatism."
But it was still too conservative for her, apparently.
"I got the impression of a bunch of right-wing crazies" she said. "Even your black guy is conservative."
Nobody would mind that she disagreed with Barton. Anyone who writes editorials learns to deal with disagreement, and conservatives, who are commonly isolated, if not reviled, in their own newsrooms, have to learn it more painfully and thoroughly.
The problem is that she phrased her disagreement in terms suggesting that she assumed, tacitly or unconsciously, that no one within hearing or worth counting could possibly hold opinions other than her own.
Academics call that tactic to silence dissent "marginalization."
All the sensitivity training sessions, all those diversity seminars we've been dragged through in recent years, are supposed to teach us not to marginalize others who are different from us.
I understand that NCEW can't be blamed if someone who participates in a critique group is arrogantly condescending toward the work presented, but I think it should take responsibility for briefing session leaders so they don't behave that way.
Barton said later that he was amused, not intimidated, by the experience. He particularly relished the comment of another reader who said he didn't agree with Barton's edit but that it was much better argued than the pro-affirmative action pieces.
Most of Friday was devoted to Kelly Air Force Base and the report on military and media cooperation, and since support of the military is generally thought to be a conservative position, I suppose those programs might be viewed as a counterbalance to the rest of the agenda.
But I'd still want to know, where were the critics? It's a coup to get all the service secretaries to come and I agree you wouldn't have wanted to cut into their time by having a panelist who was anti-military, as some of the audience questions were.
Afterward I heard a lot of discussions in the courtyard and the hallways about whether all this cooperation could turn into co-optation. That would have made a good panel too, or maybe one of the chat room sessions on Saturday.
Catherine Ford, in the "whereases" to her resolution, noted that NCEW does not take political positions. I assume that means it does not take partisan position, because Friday's award to Shelby Coffey for his efforts on behalf of "diversity" clearly disproves any claim to impartiality NCEW might be pleased to make.
Affirmative action is the ultimate political issue in America right now, and Coffey's record at the L.A. Times embodies all that is abhorrent about racial preferences, as the statistics cited in the award demonstrate.
His determination to make racial discrimination official Times policy has balkanized the newsroom, damaged the integrity of news coverage, and made the paper's stylebook an object of ridicule and the icon of politically correct journalism.
The views I have just stated are scarcely represented on the nation's editorial pages and presumably therefore not in the NCEW either. But they are widely held among the general population and one need look no further for the roots of readers' distrust of what their newspapers tell them.
Saturday's panel on the Alinsky group was fascinating but likewise one-sided. The Alinsky principles of non-violent organizing are themselves neutral, and can be used with equal effectiveness by opposing forces. Black boycotts of Korean groceries in Brooklyn are an example.
Instead of having three cheerleaders, couldn't we have had one person to ask what happens when bad guys organize? It's naive to assume that the poor and powerless have a monopoly on wisdom and virtue.
After the 1992 riots the power structure in Los Angeles fell all over itself propitiating the looters and their supporters, who were mostly Latino and black. They did next to nothing, at the time or since, to help the Asian merchants who were the principal victims.
So where were the Alinsky people? Is it Asians they don't believe in helping, or merchants?
I must confess to enjoying the squirming discomfiture of the Moses guy, Ernesto Cortes, trying to maintain that Alinksy's Iron Rule of self-help didn't apply to what the Republicans are trying to do in Washington, when patently it's exactly what Alinsky meant.
Saturday's lunchtime chat rooms were a terrific idea (I was in the "Ivory Tower" one.) Perhaps it would have worked a little better if the seating had been arranged so we were closer to each other.
For the 2 p.m. breakout session I picked Fred Blevins' discussion of his survey on teaching opinion writing. It was interesting, but too lightweight for the amount of time allotted to it. Boiled down to about 20 minutes, the typical time for presentation of papers at academic conferences, it would have been fine. One point Blevins made was that it would be a good idea to have more interaction between academics and professionals. That could be accomplished with a session containing four 20-minute papers. People with a special interest in one of the topics can stalk the author afterwards.
The 3:30 breakout session posed a more difficult choice, but I'm glad I heard the ethics panel on the proper boundary between news and opinion. Keith Woods, who presented the Times-Picayune's coverage of the David Duke-Edwin Edwards governor's race as a case study, raised so many difficult and intriguing issues that I wish we could have continued the discussion longer.
But that's the point. There was something to discuss, because the panelists disagreed with each other. Furthermore, members of the audience, as few of us as there were, likewise advanced a pleasing variety of perspectives.
I really can't remember anything banquet speaker Jim Lehrer said, except for his gratuitous cheap shot at "Billy Bob" Armey. One can disagree with Armey's flat-tax proposal, but its originator has a Ph.D. in economics. He's not an ignorant redneck, and even if he were, that would have no bearing on the merits of his idea.
I was glad someone else challenged Lehrer, because I was growing a little weary of setting fires merely out of a sense of obligation.
Obviously NCEW can't be held responsible for mean-spirited and ill-considered comments by an invited speaker, and after all, he did apologize. But why would Lehrer be oblivious to the possibility that someone in the audience would find his remark pointlessly offensive?
Armey was the target, too, of the parody "Battle Hymn of the Regressive" contributed to the songfest, I don't know by whom.
The verses are labored, but parody is hard to do, and the chorus is funny:
	I can't figure my own taxes
	So we're getting out the axes.
	The world is slipping off its axis,
	But we will set it Right.
But the refrain line is not funny: "Our Putsch goes marching on." Armey may be an ideologue, although he doesn't seem that way to me. If he is, though, he is clearly an anti-collectivist one, while both communism and fascism are left-wing ideologies. 
Unlike communists, who believed the state should own the means of production outright, the national socialists maintained only that the state had a right to commandeer private output for its own purposes, and also to regulate such details of private commerce as the racial identity of members of an employer's workforce. So do liberal Democrats, though with better intentions.
How does this affect someone who doesn't know you all very well and happens to think Armey is right? Are you calling him a Nazi, too?
None of this would be a big deal if it didn't come across as so one-sided. Are there so few conservatives (or anyway, non-liberals) in NCEW that the people planning programs never think about making sure opposing views are represented?
The organization evidently takes great pains to foster diversity in its ranks. Apparently it's heresy to say that the only diversity that should matter to editorial writers is diversity of opinion.