[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
[April 13, 2000]
[Pages 691-699]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session With the American Society of
Newspaper Editors
April 13, 2000
The President. Thank you very much, Chris. And thank you for asking me again--I think. [Laughter] I
want to say I am delighted to be here. And I'm glad you said it was the
sixth time. I knew I had been here more than half the time, but we were
talking on the way in about how when you live a busy life, how memory
fades. And I've enjoyed these six occasions, or at least the previous
five, and I think I'll enjoy this one.
I was asking myself on the way over here, why am I doing this? I'm
not running for anything. [Laughter] And I read the Vice
President's speech to you and the jokes
that he made, the joke he made about Chris and the Orange County Register. I was so delighted to
carry Orange County, I didn't care whether the newspaper was for us or
not. [Laughter] And surprised.
But I am delighted to be here. And I want to talk primarily today
about the present debate over the budget and tax proposals on Capitol
Hill. But I would like to say one thing very briefly at the outset about
the census and to ask for your help.
Because the census is, at its core, information about who we are as
a democracy, I would imagine everyone in this room is particularly
interested in it. The information especially from the long form helps
hometowns do everything from design mass transit systems to provide 911
emergency services. The census helps us to calculate cost-of-living
increases for Social Security, military retirement, veterans' pensions.
It serves as a foundation for a variety of economic surveys, including
the monthly jobs reports, and it's important in the calculation of the
Consumer Price Index.
So far, about three of five census forms have been returned. That
means about 40 percent have not. We want everyone to count, and we hope
that you will help us to reach them. So I would just say, anything you
can do to help encourage the people who read your papers to fill out
their census forms, every one of them, would be very much appreciated.
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More than 35 years ago, President Johnson spoke before the American
Society of Newspaper Editors, at a time superficially not so unlike this
time. Unemployment was low; inflation was low; growth was high. The
economy was humming in the middle of what was then the longest--to prove
to be the longest economic expansion in our history. It lasted from 1961
to 1969.
President Johnson spoke of our obligation to look beyond the moment,
to think of America as what he called ``a continuing community,'' to see
how decisions affect not only today's citizens but their children and
their children's children, ``to build for tomorrow,'' he said, ``in the
immediacy of today.'' I think that's a good way of capturing what it is
I believe we should be doing today: building for tomorrow in the
immediacy of today.
It was very different 7 years and 3 months ago when I came to
office. The economy was in trouble; the society was divided; the
politics appeared to be paralyzed here. I had a vision of 21st century
America and a roadmap I thought would help get us there. I saw an
America where the American dream of opportunity was alive for every
person responsible enough to work for it; an America strong, of strong
communities with safe streets, good schools, a clean environment; and a
national community, which not only respected but celebrated our
diversity and found even greater hope in our common humanity. And I saw
an America still leading the world toward peace and freedom and
prosperity.
We had a strategy to achieve that vision, one rooted in opportunity,
responsibility, and community. The roadmap included economic reforms,
education reforms, welfare reforms, health care reforms, reforms in
criminal justice, reforms in environmental policy; greater efforts to
strengthen the combined roles of work and family in the modern world;
efforts to support our American community through community service; and
initiatives in foreign policy against wars rooted in racial and ethnic
conflicts, against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and for
peace processes all across the world; efforts to build new partnerships
in Asia and Latin America, to advance the cause of world health, and to
relieve the debts of the poorest countries in the world.
We also had an idea to reform the role of the Federal Government, to
make it smaller but more empowering and more aggressive in creating the
conditions and the tools within which people could make the most of
their own lives.
Strengthening the economy, of course, was key to realizing our
vision. Doing that made all the rest of this possible. Our strategy was
quite simple: We wanted to pursue a course of fiscal discipline, the
greatest possible investment in education and technology, science, and
other things that would advance our objectives, and to expand trade in
American products and services around the world.
Now, we are in the midst of the longest, strongest economic
expansion in history, with 21 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate
in 20 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest
welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40
years, the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates on
record, the highest homeownership in history. We also have the lowest
crime rate in 25 years. Gun crime is down 35 percent since I took
office. We have cleaner air, cleaner water, fewer toxic waste dumps,
greater land preservation in the lower 48 States than in any other
period, except the Presidencies of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt.
Twenty-one million people have received the benefits of the family and
medical leave law; 150,000 young Americans have earned money for college
by serving in AmeriCorps; 2 million children, with 2 million more on the
way, have been given health insurance under the Children's Health
Insurance Program. Ninety percent of our children are immunized against
serious childhood diseases for the first time in our history. In our
schools, test scores are up; college-going is up. And America has been a
source of support for peace and freedom in the Middle East, Northern
Ireland, the Balkans. We have done it with the smallest Federal
Government in 40 years.
In the course of all this, the nature of the economic debate has
changed radically. If I had come here the first time I spoke with you
and said, ``Give me a few years and we will eliminate the deficit, run
three surpluses in a row for the first time in half a century, double
our investment in education, and we'll have tax relief for middle class
and lower income working people, including the earned-income tax credit,
the HOPE scholarship tax cut, the child tax credit, and we'll actually
lower the tax burden on average American families''--and according to
the
[[Page 693]]
Treasury Department, income taxes for a typical family of four are the
lowest percentage of income they have been since 1965. If I had said
that, and I had said, ``Now, give me a few years and the main question
we will be debating is, what are we going to do with our surplus?'' you
would have been forced to write editorials complaining that the new
President was slightly deranged, but he seemed like a pretty nice
fellow. [Laughter]
Now, nonetheless, that is now the subject of debate in Washington:
What do we do with the surplus? The question really, I think, is a
larger one: What do we make of this moment? Do we believe, as President
Johnson believed when he came here in the early sixties, that we should
plan for tomorrow in the immediacy of today? To me, the answer to that
question is clear. We should be looking at our long-term challenges and
opportunities, the ones I outlined in the last State of the Union
Address.
The challenge of the aging of America--the number of people over 65
will double in the next 30 years. There will be only two people working
for every one person drawing Social Security at present rates of
Americans maturing and immigration and retirement. We can extend the
life of Social Security beyond the expectancy of the baby boom
generation, and we can extend the life of Medicare and add a
prescription drug benefit so that baby boomers, when they retire, are
not a burden to our children and their ability to raise our
grandchildren.
We have the challenge of expanding opportunity for all the children
of America, the most racially and ethnically and religiously and
linguistically diverse group of children ever in our schools. We can
give every child a world-class education, and now, unlike 15 years or so
ago, when we started the education reform movement of the late 20th
century, we actually know how to do it. And we know that all children
can learn; we know what strategies work; and we have evidence, abundant
evidence all across the country.
We have the challenge of securing the long-term health of America. I
believe to do it, we ought to continue to pay down the national debt and
make America debt-free for the first time since 1835. And I believe we
have a challenge to extend economic opportunity to people and places
that have not been part of this recovery even yet, which is the heart of
my new markets initiative.
We have the challenge of continuing to help people balance work and
family, and eliminating what is still a scourge of child poverty in the
United States. We have a challenge of proving that we can meet our
environmental challenges, including global warming, and still grow the
economy; a challenge of making our country the safest big country in the
world; a challenge of accelerating our leadership in science and
technology and spreading the benefits of it not only across America but
to every corner of the Earth; the challenge of continuing to lead the
world toward peace and freedom and continuing to build one America here
at home. Now, I think that's what we ought to do with this magic moment
of possibility.
In large measure, the decision about what to do and whether we
continue on that course is what the budget debate in Congress is all
about and what the election of 2000 is all about. There are those who
say, ``Well, even if the tax burden as a percentage of income is the
lowest it's been in 35 years for most Americans, we still ought to give
some of this money back to the American people.'' We can do that, but I
believe the tax cuts should be responsible and targeted, to help working
families raise their children, provide for long-term care for their
parents, tax deductibility for college tuition, and better child care.
I think there should be incentives to wealthier Americans to solve
our common problems, for example, to invest in new technologies, to help
us combat global warming and promote environmental protection, and to
invest in our global vaccine initiative to help eradicate AIDS, TB, and
malaria from the world, and especially to invest in the poor areas of
America which have not yet fully benefited from our recovery.
We can do all that, and it will actually reinforce our efforts to
meet our long-term challenges. But I believe the budget now being
debated in Congress and put forward by the majority takes us in the
wrong direction and risks safeguarding this unique moment in our
history, primarily because the tax cuts that are proposed in the
aggregate would take us back to the policy that I have worked for over 7
years to reverse.
I vetoed their tax bill last year because it would have ended the
era of fiscal discipline that has served our economy so well. This year
Congress is working on last year's tax bill page by page, piece by
piece. In separate measures,
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it has already voted to spend in the aggregate nearly half a trillion
dollars, more than half the surplus. And we don't know how much is on
the way because their budget, unlike the projections I try to do, only
covers the next 5 years rather than 10 years.
Last year their tax cut cost about $150 billion over 5 years, but it
would have exploded to nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. This year, from
Capitol Hill to the campaign trail, we're hearing positive statements
about investing in health care and prescription drug coverage and
education. But after a $1 trillion tax cut--and I believe the one
they're running on this year is even bigger--there will be no room left
for these investments or for saving Social Security and Medicare, unless
we're prepared to go back to the bad old days of deficits.
Congress has a responsibility now to show us how all these separate
proposals add up, how the choices made today will affect our ability to
meet the challenges of tomorrow. Before we talk about massive tax cuts
that would derail our hard-won economic prosperity, I say again, we
should put first things first.
First, we should strengthen the solvency of Social Security and
Medicare. These two programs represent the bedrock of our commitment to
seniors and to millions of Americans with disabilities. Fiscal
responsibility has been the foundation to keep these programs strong.
When I came to office, Medicare was projected to go broke last year,
1999. We have taken action to put Medicare and Social Security on a
better path to the future. Just last month the Social Security trustees
announced that the economy has now added 3 years to the life of the
Social Security Trust Fund; it is now solvent until 2037. The Medicare
trustees announced that Medicare is now solvent until 2023, 24 years
beyond where it was projected to be in 1993. That's the strongest
Medicare has been in 25 years.
Now, to be fair, there is a consensus in Congress that we should use
all the Social Security surplus for debt reduction, and that is a good
thing. But my budget goes one step further. It's an easy step, I
believe, but one the congressional majority has not yet embraced. Debt
reduction produces interest savings. Rather than using those savings to
pay for an exploding tax cut or a spending increase, my budget locks
away the interest savings from the Social Security surplus to lengthen
the life of Social Security to at least 2054. This would cover all but
the most fortunate baby boomers. I'd have to live to be 108 to run out
the Social Security Trust Fund.
My proposal also lengthens the life of the Medicare Trust Fund to at
least 2030, by investing a significant portion of the surplus while also
making Medicare more competitive and efficient. For example, we'd allow
seniors to shop around for health plans that meet their needs. If they
find a plan that saves money, they'd pay a lower Medicare premium. This
would increase competition, give us better quality and lower costs. We
would also modernize Medicare by creating a voluntary prescription drug
benefit, something we plainly would provide if we were creating Medicare
in the first place today.
Medicare was created at a time when it was basically designed for
acute care, for hospital and doctor costs. Today, the average person who
lives to be 65 has a life expectancy of 83, and the crying need is for
chronic and preventive care. And today, unlike 35 years ago,
pharmaceuticals can very often dramatically increase not only the length
but the quality of life.
So one of my problems is that the budget pushed by the congressional
majority this year would not extend the life of Social Security or
Medicare by a single day. It is very important that everybody
understands it. It's one thing to say you're saving the Social Security
surplus and you're not spending it. That does not add a day to the life
of the Trust Fund. It does help you pay down the debt, and I like that.
And I'm glad we've got bipartisan, virtually, unanimous support for it.
But if you really want to solve the problem of the aging of America, you
have to take the interest savings that come from paying down the debt
from Social Security taxes, which all of you are paying in excess of
what we're paying out every month, and put it into the Trust Fund so we
can take Social Security out beyond the life of the baby boom
generation.
The second thing we ought to do, I believe, is to stay on course to
eliminate all of our publicly held debt by 2013. By the end of this year
alone, we will have repaid $300 billion in our national debt. This is
having a real impact.
For our economy, it's set in motion a virtuous cycle of reduced
interest rates, more capital for private investment, more people
investing in new businesses and new technologies. For families, debt
reduction has meant more money on
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average, $2,000 less in home mortgage payments every year for the
typical family, $200 less in car payments, $200 less in student loans,
than would have been the case had we not reduced the debt. That amounts
to a sizable tax cut for American families. We need a fiscally
responsible budget, not one that risks economic growth and makes it
impossible for us to continue to pay down the debt.
Third, we need to continue to invest in key priorities that are
clearly essential to our future: education, health, law enforcement,
science and technology. The budget proposed by the Republican majority
has nearly a 10 percent average cut in virtually all domestic
priorities. This would lead to serious cutbacks in everything from
reducing class size to cleaning up toxic waste dumps to putting more
police on our streets.
Furthermore, the budget is based on the assumption that the cuts
will grow even deeper over time. This is very important for all
Americans to understand. It is one thing to go out and propose all these
programs that cost money, and quite another to say, ``But we have to
have a tax cut first. And somehow, I'm sure it will work out.''
We tried it that way before, and it didn't work out. So if you have
a trillion-dollar, or even a larger, even bigger than a trillion-dollar
tax cut over a decade--plus, keep in mind, their defense spending
increases proposed are even bigger than the ones I have proposed, and I
proposed an increase in defense every single year I've been here, and
they've never failed to do that, to fund that--then you're either going
to have to drastically cut all these programs, education, health, the
environment, or go back and start running deficits, or have a
combination of both.
In other words, as I found out the hard way when I put together the
budget in 1993, if you're going to be fiscally responsible, sooner or
later arithmetic intrudes on politics. [Laughter] And this is very
important. Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but I hope
that arithmetic will be part of this year's campaign debate as well.
The proposal, from my point of view, defies common sense. I think
the argument is over. We had a test run. We had 12 years of their
proposals--do the big tax cuts first, and it will all work out--and we
had 8 years of arithmetic in public policy. And I think if you compare
the results, the argument should be over. Our commitment is to fiscal
discipline and to investment to move the country forward.
Still, in spite of all this hard evidence, later today the
Republican majority will vote on a budget resolution that is loaded with
exploding tax breaks and untenable cuts in critical investment. It will
take us back to an approach that failed before and will fail again; back
to ideas that didn't work before and won't work now; back to putting
Medicare and Social Security on the back burner, instead of up front
where they belong.
So I say again, we cannot afford to veer from the proven path onto a
trail of unmet obligations, unrealistic cuts, and unnecessary giveaways.
We can't squander the moment by squandering the surplus. We can't go
back to the rosy scenario of the 1980's. The new scenario bases tax cuts
we can't afford under the assumption that unrealistic spending cuts will
be made, at the very time they're out there in the election season
telling us that they want to spend more on education and health care and
the environment.
But the bottom line is this: The choices Congress will make this
spring are fundamentally the choices that Americans will make this fall.
What are our priorities? Will we maintain our commitment to fiscal
discipline? In a larger sense, what is our vision? There is room in the
vision I have outlined for the best ideas from both parties. When we
have determined to do it, we have worked together--in the Balanced
Budget Act of 1997, which passed both Houses by big majorities from both
parties; in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which passed both Houses by
big majorities in both parties; in the fundamentally education budgets
of 1998 and 1999, which passed both Houses by big majorities in both
parties. We can do this, but we have to make up our mind to stay within
the framework of what has served us so well for the last several years.
When I started, I quoted President Johnson, who said, ``We should
plan for tomorrow in the immediacy of the moment.'' And I told you that
when he spoke those words in the early sixties, it was in the full flush
of what was at that time the longest economic expansion in history.
In February, when we celebrated the longest economic expansion in
history, I asked my economic team when the last longest expansion was,
and they told me it was '61 to '69. And I got
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to thinking about that. We tend to think about yesterday, I suppose, as
we get older. But while I think we should keep focused on the future, we
shouldn't forget the past.
There is a tendency, when you're in the middle of a boom like this,
to think that you have to do nothing to shore it up, that it will last
forever, and that there are relatively few consequences to whatever you
decide to do or not to do. So indulge me just for a moment, before I
take your questions, and let me remind you of what happened to the last
longest economic expansion in history.
Johnson was here speaking to this group in the early sixties, about
the time I graduated from high school in 1964. Unemployment was low;
inflation was low; growth was high. Vietnam was somewhere in the outer
range of our consciousness. No one really doubted that we would win the
cold war because our ideas were superior and our values were superior,
and no one expected the country to be rendered by that conflict. And at
the time we had a serious civil rights challenge, but most people
believed then, in the optimism of the moment, that it would be solved in
the Congress and in the courts in a peaceful manner.
A year later, we had Bloody Sunday in Selma. Two years later, we had
riots in the street. Four years later, I was here in Washington,
graduating from college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months
after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said
he couldn't run for President anymore because the country was split
right down the middle over the Vietnam war. And so we had a Presidential
election with three candidates amidst all the turmoil of the moment, and
in a few months, the longest economic expansion in American history was
over.
If I seem insistent about this, it's because not as President but as
a citizen, I have waited for 35 years for my country to have the chance
to build the future of its dreams for our children and to have the kind
of positive role in the world I believe we can now have. I have worked
as hard as I can to turn the situation around and get us pointed in the
right direction. And I just don't want us to do anything to squander
this moment, as it was once squandered before in my youth.
We have a chance that none of us may ever see again in our
lifetimes. And we have to make the most of it for our children.
Thank you very much.
N. Christian Anderson III.
Thank you, Mr. President.
The President's time is very limited, but he has graciously agreed
to take three questions. So, following our usual--well, I don't need to
give you the rules, because I see who's at the microphones. So let's
begin with Margaret [Margaret M. Sullivan, Buffalo News], please.
Possibility of Pardon
Q. Mr. President, first of all, as a New Yorker, although Chappaqua
is a few miles from Buffalo, where I'm the editor of the Buffalo News, I
wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood. [Laughter]
Yesterday Vice President Gore, before this group, answered a
question about whether he would, if elected, use the power of the
Presidency to pardon you in relation to the investigations being pursued
by the independent prosecutor. He said you had said that you would not
accept such a pardon by your successor. It turns out you didn't exactly
say that yourself, not publicly. So we seem to have a rather public
forum here. Would you request or accept such a pardon?
The President. Well, the answer is, I have no interest in it. I
wouldn't ask for it. I don't think it would be necessary.
I think it's interesting that you would ask that question without
going through the facts here. Let me remind you that there was a truly
independent review of the whole Whitewater matter, which was concluded 4
years ago, in 1996, by a predominantly Republican law firm for the
Resolution Trust Corporation, that said neither my wife nor I did anything wrong.
If you want to know what's really been going on, you have a good
book here, Mr. Toobin's book; you have the
Joe Conason and Gene Lyons book, which explains how this all happened. There are
independent counsels and then there are special counsels. The
independent review was over in '96. So I won't be surprised by anything
that happens. But I'm not interested in being pardoned.
We had--if you remember, during the House Judiciary Committee
hearings, there were five prosecutors, former prosecutors, including two
Republicans, who said that no prosecutor would even entertain bringing
any kind of criminal charges against an ordinary citizen like this.
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But there is something fundamentally changed in the last 7 years
about how the counsels were appointed and who they were and what their
priorities were. And no one has yet written the full story. I can
imagine why you wouldn't--particularly given the way a lot of this has
been covered.
But the answer is no. I don't have any interest in that. I don't
want one. And I am prepared to stand before any bar of justice I have to
stand before. But I would like just once to see someone acknowledge the
fact that this Whitewater thing was a lie and a fraud from the beginning
and that most people with any responsibility over it have known it for
years.
Next question.
Presidential Library
Q. Mr. President, Brian Stallcop from the Sun in Bremerton,
Washington--over here in the middle. You spent the last several minutes
talking about what I think you hope will be your legacy as President.
And I wonder if you could think ahead 5 years from now, when you open
your Presidential library and all the living Presidents are there with
you. Will there be a wing in your Presidential library to your
impeachment trial and to that whole era of your Presidency?
The President. Yes, we'll deal with it, and I will deal with it--
we'll have to deal with it. It's an important part of it. But I have a
slightly different take on it than many of you do or at least than the
Washington media does. I made a terrible personal mistake. I think I
have paid for it. I settled a lawsuit I didn't--that I won. I won that
lawsuit, remember. I won that lawsuit. I settled it anyway because of
the political nature of the people that were reviewing it, and because--
so I gave away half of my life's savings to settle a lawsuit I had won
because I wanted to go back to work being President. And we now know
that the questions asked were asked in bad faith, because they knew the
answer and they knew it had nothing to do with the lawsuit--something
hardly anybody ever points out.
So I think I've paid quite a lot. I struggled very hard to save my
relationship with my wife and my daughter. I have paid quite a lot.
But on the impeachment, let me tell you, I am proud of what we did
there, because I think we saved the Constitution of the United States. I
think--first of all, I had to defeat the Republican revolution in 1994,
when they shut down the Government, and we beat back the contract on
America. Then we had to beat it in the impeachment issue. Then we had to
beat it when I vetoed the tax cut last year. Then the voters had their
verdict in the 1998 election and in the 1996 election.
But as a political matter, you have no idea--I'm not ashamed of the
fact that they impeached me. That was their decision, not mine. And it
was wrong. As a matter of law, the Constitution, and history, it was
wrong. And I am glad I didn't quit, and I'm glad we fought it. And the
American people stuck with me, and I am profoundly grateful.
That has nothing to do with the fact that I made a terrible mistake,
of which I am deeply regretful. But I think that an average, ordinary
person reviewing the wreckage left in that would say that I paid for
that. And I should have paid for it. We all pay for our mistakes.
But I'll deal with the impeachment. But you have to understand, I
consider it one of the major chapters in my defeat of the revolution Mr.
Gingrich led, that would have taken this
country in a very different direction than it's going today and also
would have changed the Constitution forever, in a way that would have
been very destructive to the American people.
Elian Gonzalez
Q. Mr. President, Edward Seaton, the Manhattan, Kansas, Mercury. I
want to turn to the news events of today. The Attorney General has set a
2 p.m. deadline for the Miami relatives to turn Elian Gonzalez over to
his father. Is your administration prepared to send Federal marshals in
if that happens?
The President. Well, first of all, let me say this. Attorney General
Reno has done her best to try to resolve this in
a peaceable way. This has been a very painful situation for her,
personally, because she was the prosecuting attorney in Dade County for
12 years. She knows a lot of the people involved in this. And she went
there to try to handle this personally. And she hopes, and I still hope,
it won't come to that.
Since she's on site and events are unfolding
almost by the minute, I think I should let her address what we're going
to do and when we're going to do it from the site. I think that's the
best thing to do, because I haven't talked to her today about it.
Let me just say, I think the issue here for me is the rule of law.
We have a system. The
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system has--if you don't think it's right, then you can say, well, we
ought to change the laws. But we have a legal system, and it has been
followed. And the decision that was made, that Elian Gonzalez's
father was a devoted and fit father and
could proffer to speak for his son and, therefore, to make decisions for
his minor son, was ratified in a district court and is now on appeal to
a court of appeals. But none of the courts have granted any kind of
interim relief which would justify opposition to the plain rule of law.
So, to me, this case is about the rule of law.
I've done everything I could to stay out of it to avoid politicizing
it. But I do believe that it is our responsibility to uphold the law,
and we're doing our best to do that.
Constructive Criticism of the Press
Q. Mr. President, I'm Tom Koenninger, editor of the Columbian at
Vancouver, Washington. This organization, ASNE, takes pride in receiving
constructive criticism from its readers. As a reader of America's
newspapers, I would like to offer you the opportunity now to provide
your constructive criticism. And I'm speaking of newspaper and wire
service coverage, not broadcast media.
The President. Well, the only difference in me and somebody writing
a letter to the editor to give you constructive criticism is that what
I'll get from my constructive criticism is a bomb on the head.
[Laughter] I know I'm not running for--I realize I'm not running for
anything, but I'm not totally dumb here. [Laughter]
Q. Well, this is your last opportunity, though, to address us.
The President. No, it's not my last opportunity, it's just the last
opportunity I'll have when anybody will pay any attention to me.
[Laughter] It's ironic, you know, when I can say what I think and nobody
will care anymore. [Laughter]
I think the most I should say--first of all, I think it's
interesting--I think it's hard to run a newspaper today in an
environment in which you're competing with television news, Internet
news sources, radio news, and entertainment which abuts on the news, and
all the lines are being blurred, both the technological lines and the
categorical lines.
And I think the--but I think there is a special role for the old-
fashioned newspaper in daily life, although I think it's interesting--
the papers that are being made smaller or more readable or also put on
the net and all that, I think that's very good. I think you ought to
maximize that.
But it seems to me that one of the things that you have to fight
against--I've often felt happened here over the last 7 years--is sort of
getting stuck in a place that amplifies the sensational and the
emotional, which carves out a certain market share in the short run, but
may undermine the fundamental and the purpose of a newspaper over the
long run.
And I think that--but I think that it's very hard--I mean, I think
it's really quite challenging to run a good old-fashioned newspaper,
where you've got the news stories on the front page and the editorial
opinion on the editorial page, and you don't really mix the two, and you
don't try to get caught up in sort of a given point of view on a big
story and then have to keep grinding it and pushing it, no matter what,
because that's what's driving the place you've marked out for yourself
in an increasingly competitive market.
I don't know what the answer to that is. But I believe--and I'm an
old-fashioned person--I don't even--I hate to say this; it will get me
in trouble with the networks because--and I need the exposure still.
[Laughter] But because of my schedule, usually my only source of news is
the newspaper. I'm sort of a troglodyte media person. I actually sit
down and read the papers. Normally I'm not home at the time of the
evening news, but I watch CNN a lot because I can get it any time of the
day or night.
But I have thought about their dilemma. The networks also have real
challenges. And I think this whole communications revolution, which I
think on balance is an exceedingly positive thing, runs the risk of
giving people more information than they have ever had before without
adequate perspective or framework or balance or background or back-and-
forth.
I still think the editorial page and the op-ed pages of newspapers,
where the editorial pages may be consistent and forthright, but you've
got people on the other pages with different opinions or even writing
about subjects different from the ones that the editors have time to
write editorials about--I think that is a great thing. I think it's very
helpful.
The thing I worry most about is that people will have all the
information in the world; they won't have any way of evaluating whether
it's
[[Page 699]]
true or false, A; and B, even if it's true, how to put it in proper
perspective. That's what I consider to be the single most significant
challenge presented to all of you by the explosion of media outlets and
competitive alternatives in the information age.
On balance, I think it's a plus. And people are smart, and they
nearly always get it right, which is why our democracy's around here
after over 200 years. They nearly always kind of get it right, if they
have enough time. But still, you've got--how much will it cost your
paper?
I'll just give you an example. When the full sequencing of the human
genome is announced in a few months, how much will it cost you to run a
long series on exactly what that is, what its implications might be, how
it came to be, and where we're going from here? And how many people have
to read it for it to have been worth the investment? What opportunity
costs did you forgo? And then when things start to happen, spinning out
of the human genome, how are you going to deal with that? That's just
one example.
I think newspapers actually are going to become more and more
important again, because so much of what people will have to absorb
about the new century will be advances in science and technology, that
it's very hard to put into the time constraints of an evening news
program. And I think they will have all kinds of political and social
ramifications as they unfold. So I think in a funny way, even if you
feel beleaguered now, the nature of what is unfolding may make
newspapers and old-fashioned newspaper work more important in the next
few years.
But I think the information revolution and the sort of changes in
the media structure have presented you with a lot of very difficult
challenges. And if I were you, rather than asking me what my criticism
is, I'd sit around and I'd really try to have an organized, honest
discussion about how the fundamental purpose of the newspaper can be
maintained and you can still make enough money to stay afloat. Because
somebody needs to organize and give perspective to all this information
and opinions and all the stuff we're flooded with. I think it's very,
very important.
I wish I were in your position. I wish I could do it, because I've
thought about many times how hard it is for you. But I wish you well,
because it's really important. People need more than facts. They need to
know the facts are accurate, and they need to understand in some
perspective about what it means and where it's all going.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Anderson. Mr. President,
on behalf of all of these troglodytes, thank you so very much. One more
little bit of trivia, and that is that every year you have been in this
country you have come to this convention, during your 8 years in office.
We're very grateful for that and grateful for the time you've spent with
us today.
Please stay in your places while the President leaves. Thank you
very much, Mr. President.
The President. Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at 11:45 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
J.W. Marriott Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to N. Christian
Anderson III, president, American Society of Newspaper Editors;
independent counsel Robert W. Ray; authors Jeffrey Toobin, Joe Conason,
and Gene Lyons; Juan Miguel Gonzalez, father of Elian Gonzalez; and
former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich.