2. THE NEWS

The second priority is, perhaps surprisingly, "the news." I do not mean here the general array of activities called the media or even the press; I mean the gathering, dissemination, and stewardship of the information and knowledge we must have if we are to be free. We have thousands of journals of opinion but we have more limited sources of news.

Who is responsible for the news?

Society seems to offer only two ways of providing essential information: the first is through agencies of government; the second is through the market. The Soviet Union and other such tyrannies convince me that governments are unreliable providers of news at best, and active sources of disinformation at worst.

The provision of news in the United States depends not on the government but on the market. There is a romantic notion that the economic market produces a competition for news that improves the gathering and dissemination of it. my impression is that the quality of news has deteriorated rapidly, all the more rapidly as the media have become more blatantly and unapologetically like an entertainment business rather than a public service.

For example, the news about the 0. J. Simpson trial, the Thomas-Hill hearings, even the Million Man March convince me that there is more money in exploiting racial tensions than in calming them.

Many people like to point out that civil societies are societies in which civility is a virtue. Open societies are societies in which civility is maintained in the face of democratic disagreement. One of the most common complaints about the media is that "the news" overstates disagreement and overreports violence; incivility receives far more attention than civility; catch-phrases, especially negative ones, replace thoughtful argument and cultivate cynicism. Those who worry about public morals should devote at least some of their attention to the failure of the news to offer a balanced picture of American society.

The Million Man March was, after all, a philanthropic event, a voluntary action for the public good; it was characteristic of an open society in its rhetoric and of a civil society in its behavior.

One of the problems that pro-capitalists like myself must worry about is the capitalist tendency toward concentration and away from competition. That appears to be what is happening in the media.

As I travel outside the United States I am persuaded that we have as good a system of newsgathering and reporting as many of the developed countries in the world -- and we're terrible. Reports in the American press about what is going on outside our borders are simplistic, biased, and misleading. We have a small handful of good journalists and a large number whose own education about the world is shamefully deficient.

Philanthropic efforts to improve the news -- MacNeil-Lehrer, National Public Radio, and the relatively few other occasional experiments, for example -- provide a higher and more reliable standard of news than anything available to us on the networks or even locally.

But philanthropic efforts to reform the media are no guarantee that the news will improve. The prevalence of ideology over ideas threatens all efforts to seek balance and reason. A philanthropic rejuvenation of the education of journalists (including editors and especially publishers) might bear fruit.

The encouraging work to advance a new "Public journalism,," led by the Kettering Foundation, may show the way.

The nonprofit Pacific News Service, led by MacArthur "genius award" winner Sandy Close, is the closest rival to the Wall Street Journal in covering news that the rest of the print media ignore. Philanthropists must find ways to support alternative sources of news as well as alternative sources of opinion.

All of us who use words to persuade others -- preachers, journalists, professors, advocates -- should have to wrestle seriously with the inescapable ethical ambiguity of our work. Everyone else should be taught ways to sift through our words to find for themselves whatever grains of truth might be there.

Perhaps a bridge between the priorities of an open society and the responsible dissemination of the news is the practice of advocacy. "Advocacy" is used as an epithet by some conservatives; it is used as a prayer bead by some liberals. Believe the rhetoric of neither, but remember that advocacy is essential to philanthropy, whatever position is advanced.

"Public health" may seem an odd priority for private philanthropy, partly by virtue of the unfortunate confusion between "public" and "government," and partly because the necessarily coercive quality of what public health entails seems beyond the reach of philanthropy.

Neither public health problems nor environmental issues respect political boundaries; both are public goods. Yet in recent years both public health and the environment have fallen to the government as if they were exclusively a first-sector responsibility, and many of the people who supported those movements seem to have turned to other things.

Two unfortunate consequences have resulted: the first is that government management of public health and the environment has been wasteful and inefficient beyond any acceptable level; the second result is that economic interests opposed to environmental constraints or to public health monitoring of products now have political allies. My reading of events persuades me that some people want to exploit public unhappiness with government performance as an opportunity to make a shambles of the important progress made in controlling both human disease and environmental pollution.

The mythistory I recount to myself when I try to think about such things sees broad-based, grassroots efforts to protect forests and rivers from destruction by narrowly selfish or ignorant economic interests. The strategy of the grassroots initiatives was to give force to their objectives by translating them into legal and governmental action. Unfortunately the result was the creation of some programs as blind and ignorant as anything the market could offer.

There is a philanthropic principle that one should "give back to the community from which one has gained wealth in the first place. Some companies, certainly those rooted in their communities and in business for the long term, willingly adhere to environmental conservation and consumer protection. Many of the now-derided "bureaucrats" are among the most dedicated and competent professionals we have in government. Voluntary associations concerned with public health and the environment should continue to make other corporations and government bureaucrats miserable whenever they fail to serve the public good.

The scholar Donald Horowitz once wrote that ethnic conflict is the most serious destabilizing force in the world. His argument is that the world will not end with a bang (nuclear disaster) but with a whimper (the weeping of refugees). I agree with that assessment. The notions of open society and civil society mentioned earlier assume that it is possible for humans to live together harmoniously -- despite the evidence to the contrary.

The banal insight that civil conflict is a sign that the first sector has failed in its first responsibility occurred to me on a train from Belfast to Dublin a year ago. That caused me to ask whether the second sector had any responsibility for preventing or controlling civil conflict; I decided it didn't. The market is interested in private rather than public goods, and peace is a public good. That then led me to the humbling conclusion that the only place we can turn when civil conflict erupts is to philanthropy -- to "voluntary action for the public good," weak, fragmented, and confused as it may be.

Philanthropy can be more confident that it will be effective if its work begins before civil conflict erupts. "Education for Mutual Understanding" is the name of an educational effort in Northern Ireland that seems to make sense in a country where "common schools" enroll only ten percent of the children. The other ninety percent are divided between two religiously-based school systems. In Northern Ireland, the site of such terrible violence and suffering over twenty-five years, children are expected to learn to live together by going to separate schools that seem to emphasize why they can't and perhaps shouldn't live together.

Philanthropy provides a web of affiliation based on voluntary choice rather than on ethnic identification; voluntary associations offer the promise of alternatives to violent conflict. There is nothing certain about that result, of course, but readers in search of certainty will have dropped out of this essay long ago.

Would it be presumptuous of me to suggest that the philanthropic responsibility for holding communities together is a primary responsibility of religious philanthropy? Presumptuous or not, I believe that religious philanthropy is failing in its duty. In some cases politics overrules the religious responsibility to be mediator and peacekeeper; in other cases it is ideology, and in too many other cases indifference or ignorance.

As the Irish religious leader and author Jonathan Swift put it almost three centuries ago: "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Of all the elements gathered under the rubric of ethnicity, religion is often the most powerful and usually the best organized. Perhaps organized religion should be thought of as the steward of ethnic harmony; if so, it is time for it to accept its responsibilities.

My recommendation is that ethnic organizations, including religious ones, take it upon themselves to help control and limit ethnic conflict. I would urge that, to be a member of an ethnic organization, it would be necessary to have a commitment to encourage and maintain ethnic harmony.

What I am groping for others could understand and express better than I can: some way to turn the strengths of ethnic cohesiveness to societal concord rather than division. If we can use sex to sell jeans, perhaps we can find ways to use passions like ethnic loyalty for higher purposes. (By the way, have you noticed how ethnically and racially integrated and inclusive advertising and marketing have become?)

Ethnic organizations are a very different kind of philanthropic resource than, say, rich people or business corporations. They are more democratic, broadly-based, diverse, and close to the grassroots; their membership represents a large potential pool of volunteers and small individual donors. They sometimes have some of the strong qualities of religious congregations, and are in fact often closely tied to them.

The core of all philanthropy is concern and care for those Robert Goodin calls "the vulnerable." People without land in an agricultural society provided the impetus for ancient charity; something like that is still needed. It makes little sense to tell small children to care for themselves, or orphans to get help from their families, or Alzheimer's victims to work for a living. Last week in Oaxaca, conversing with a young Mexican friend, I was approached a dozen times in an hour by small children and old women selling things. Five Chiclets, for example, or a shoe shine, or a toy. The distinction between asking for help by selling something and by begging vanishes. I can walk along any major street in Manhattan and have something like the same experience, although in New York I will be confronted by more adult men and women, more alcoholics and drug addicts, than I met in Mexico. My problem is that in neither place will I find much organized and systematic effort to change the lives of these people who seek my help. The forces of government seem more concerned to keep the vulnerable out of sight than to serve their needs.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees counts people in two categories of what is now increasingly called "forced" or "involuntary" migration. There are those living involuntarily outside the country in which they claim citizenship. These are called refugees and there are about 25,000,000 of them in the world at the moment. There are others who cannot stay in their homes but flee from violence or oppression to another part of their country. These people are called displaced persons and there are an estimated 17 million of them worldwide.

Someone recently commented that the size of the refugee and displaced person population is not proportionately greater than it was between World War I and World War II. If so, the "crisis" may be chronic and of longstanding.

I doubt that the UN Commissioner's count includes all the world's homeless. There is also the ongoing debate about whether and how to count people on the road for economic reasons -- the cast of The Grapes of Wrath.

We will argue to what extent government is responsible for providing shelter to our homeless. Who is responsible for refugees? What is the role of philanthropy in the refugee crisis that never seems to end?

Neither a civil society nor an open society can tolerate large numbers of people suffering from neglect or oppression and remain "civil" or "open." The existence of such conditions calls for better and more careful news reporting of what is going on. It appears to be the case that some cultures care better for their members than others. My own white, Protestant, middleclass, geographically-mobile culture is among the most deficient in such matters, I'm embarrassed to say; we have let economic claims undermine other values.