Beyond Opinions: Setting The Stage   

Duke and Raspberry have shown how to do that.

When Paul Duke recently left his post after 20 years as moderator of PBS' powerful "Washington Week in Review," his fellow journalists repeatedly used the word "civility" in their warm salutes. Amid the strident opinionatedness that often now characterizes journalists' analysis of public issues, he had been a moderator in the best sense of the word: not moderate as in milquetoast, because he sometimes was visibly restraining some private passion ("Still, don't you think.."), but reasoned and mannered.

Moderation and restraint are not now hallmarks of journalists' analysis on television. Opinions tend to be torrid rather than tempered.

I'm torn about this. In print, those editorials, columns and analyses that pose important issues and then only massage them with clichés and parodies of serious thought drive me to..well, not to other media but to other pages. Some days it happens more than a time or two.

A strong viewpoint is appealing in commentary, if the subject calls for it; and if it does, nobody is fooled by evasive contrivances. But gratuitous opinion can be unnerving if it comes from someone whose day job is the construction of news. This may only be a matter of degree. No one should imagine that news people are without opinions and that these do not influence their work. What is unsettling is the shrillness and the level of self-importance in horseback fulminations of great sweep, offered about anything. A little modesty can become a journalist, and it has been known to break out.

In "Washington Week in Review," which has an almost cult-like national following, the journalists' biases often are evident, however well modulated. Does it matter that these people seem less strident, less self-righteous, in their analyses? Yes. It enhances their own credibility as well as the credibility of the program.

What Duke brought to a fine polish in TV news analysis was almost constitutional. He fastidiously established not only the process and parameters of the conversation, no matter who might be on the panel, but also the level of communication and the tone. The quality of that accomplishment, for a mass audience, was what made it compelling.

Others have fashioned programs in their own image. Take your choice.

Informed, civil discourse has unique value. "Washington Week" has provided that and, as Duke's successor, Ken Bode seems committed to the same kind of public conversation.

Bill Raspberry (see "The Solutionist," page 28) also comes to mind when you think about journalists who not only contribute to the dialogue on public issues but also create arenas for it, in their own mold. His particular contribution often is to make readers see farther by making it safe, or at least tenable, to think farther.

He has been doing this for a long time, provoking us to abandon ideological blinders, twitting us with the "Why?" questions. He works at freeing people's thought from fear and orthodoxies.

His new Pulitzer Prize for commentary is an overdue recognition of this. It honors someone whose role extends beyond comment, establishing a particular realm of commentary as distinctive as a newspaper's flag. l