PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE: This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as a Congressional press secretary in Washington, D.C., an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.

The Washington Post ran a column this morning that prompted me to think about the question in the headline to this blog: Whether ethical behavior and conduct by public officials matters any longer to voters and whether journalists can contribute to how the public views ethics.

Huge questions as we grapple with rampant unethical conduct from the president and Congress – conduct which seems to matter less and less to those who vote.

Generalizations are inadequate here because “what the public thinks” varies by individual. Some want ethical behavior on the part of those who represent us in local, state and federal governments. Others don’t seem to value ethics, preferring, instead, that officials take actions in accord with their biases ethics be damned.

In addition to Washington Post story, which I recount below, this issue – ethical behavior and conduct — matters to me for at least two reasons in addition to my own support for ethics.

First, I am privileged to serve as one of nine members of the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, which started in the Watergate era in Oregon (1974) and continues to hold public officials and lobbyists accountable for abiding by ethics laws and rules.

A second reason is that I am serving on a committee formed at the behest of Oregon Common Cause, which is working to suggest improvements in ethics at the federal level, some of which might be based on what works or could work in Oregon

Walter Schaub, the retired director of the Federal Ethics Committee, made a telling point a couple months ago when he appeared, via Skype, at one of our ethics committee meetings.

He contended that, given all of the years since the Watergate scandal, ethical behavior and conduct has receded from public view in contrast to the mid-1970s when it was top-of-mind for many due to the reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post. Today, he said other issues dominate so much that public officials bear little responsibility for their ethical behavior or mis-behavior.

In her column, the Post’s media writer, Margaret Sullivan, suggested that, given various cultural changes in the country, journalists are no longer able to monitor federal ethics in the way Woodward and Bernstein did when, for the Washington Post, they reported the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.

Sullivan attributed the change in the environment to several factors:

• “As the anniversary of the Watergate scandal’s beginning comes around again investigative journalism’s effectiveness is weakened. The reporting may be every bit as skilled, but the results are greatly diluted because so much has changed in the nation, including its media.”
• “During the Watergate era, there were three networks. Now, cable news, talk radio, thousands of websites and social media create a polluted firehose-blast of information mixed with disinformation. The cacophony is very hard to break through.”
• “Back then, what was said on those three networks — often fed by revelations from Woodward and Bernstein — was largely believed. Much more than now, there was a shared set of facts.
• In the Watergate era, “straight news was not relentlessly countered by bad-faith propaganda in the style of Fox News’s Sean Hannity” and, I add, those like him who function more as a cheering section for President Donald Trump than journalists.
• “News came to citizens from sources they trusted — including their local newspapers. While many editorial pages supported Nixon almost to the end, front pages all around the country were telling people what was happening, blow by blow. Those papers are no longer a major news source in many places. Facebook, though, is.”

In Sullivan’s piece, Columbia University Journalism School professor William Grueskin says today’s situation is not only about how the media has changed.

“The press can do only so much,” he said. “Without an independent judiciary, plus a Congress that’s invested in a genuine search for truth, rather than covering for the president, even the most intrepid journalism can slip into the void.”

I am not a big fan of presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren – she is not a centrist, but more a believer in big government– but a comment she made in a media interview the other day is worth repeating. She recounted her three takeaways from reading the Mueller Report (which, I add, is more than many of her colleagues in Congress did who talked on and on about the report, but, media report indicated, did not read it in full):

“Part one, a hostile foreign government attacked our 2016 elections for the purpose of getting Donald Trump elected. Part two, then-candidate Donald Trump welcomed that help. And part three, when the federal government tried to investigate part one and part two, Donald Trump as president delayed, deflected, moved, fired, and did everything he could to obstruct justice.”

Warren added: “If he were any other person in the United States, based on what’s documented in that report, he would be carried out in handcuffs.”

I reflect on all this as a former reporter for a daily newspaper in Oregon. That makes me one of those who likes newspapers, especially those these days that have retained, (a) solid writing, (b) labels for distinctions between news and opinion, and (c) a commitment to hold government accountable for performance.

As all of this crossed my mind this morning, the Washington Post Fact Checker column reported that Trump has now passed an incredible total of lies and exaggerations in the last three years – more than 10,800.

If you were to tabulate lies and exaggerations from Members of Congress – both Democrats and Republicans – the total would likely be in the same orbit with Trump as both sides spent more competing for attention from their bases that doing the hard work of good government, with a set of ethical commitments.

From my soapbox out West, I think the solution here is for members of the public – especially those who vote – to return to a time when ethical behavior and conduct mattered. If that happened, there would be no way for public officials to avoid a higher standard of ethics.

I am not holding my breath.