George,

What is the chalkboard?

Not physically what is it, but what does it represent?

Retired journalist Sander Vanocur writing in the current issue of the Miller Center Report raises important concerns we should all have over the level of information we get and what we are disposed to do with it.

Under the title "Can Democracy Survive the Mass Media" Sander laments that today via TV, radio, and what passes for newspapers in some areas we get "toxic informational chaff, a 24-hour-a-day Tower of Babble."

He's right, of course. TV is chock-a-block with quasi journalists shouting each other down to drown out each other's points, and entertainers with no concept of journalistic standards being hired as news readers because they look nice.

News editors define covering the news as finding people at the extremes of an issue and letting each have 20 seconds to blow off. From that the viewer is supposed to depart "informed on the issues."

Sander recalls that from the death of JFK in 1963 until Reagan's inauguration, "a virulent toxic strain made its way into the political bloodstream of this nation." The Vietnam War fueled that. But without a Vietnam we all saw how explosively that toxic strain came back to attack the Clintons when Washington was made a circus for much of two terms.

I join Vanocur in seeing a need for less drum-banging, less promulgation of poorly or uninfoirmed opinions, less personal attacks and short-sighted snap judgments, less mud-slinging.

We have that sort of chalk talk well covered in America. It's drowning out everything else.

What we need from the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression is creating more awareness of the need for a free people to be fully informed, not barely informed.

This is not furthered by a graffiti wall, especially where the eraser as much as the chalk can be the mode of expression.

Rey Barry (electronic mail, February 8, 2001).