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CONRAD: I think the media also bear substantial responsibility for the frustrations people feel about government. Reporters are chasing every rabbit of scandal, and it's not healthy. Journalists have gone from a healthy skepticism to a destructive cynicism. The House bank story has got far more attention that it deserved. Meantime, virtually no attention is being paid to the $400 billion worth of hot checks being written by the Federal Government. I think the media fail to deal with substance in favor of any minor scandal that comes along.
Q. Why is that?
WIRTH: You tell us.
WEBER: We are in a decaying spiral of public confidence. The public does not trust the institutions; they don't trust the political parties. It used to be, "I hate the Congress, but I love my Congressman." Now they've decided they hate their Congressman, too. Having fully discredited the parties and the institution, now we're discrediting the individuals. I'm not by nature a pessimist. I like to think that our system works and is going to right itself. But I see it decaying. I don't know what comes next after we have this tremendous cleaning-out election, mainly driven by discrediting people as individuals, and then the Congress gets together next year and people find we still are not going to reduce the deficit, we still are not going to reform health care.
WIRTH: When Kent decided not to run again, he said to me, "I just didn't enjoy the idea of coming to work every morning." Later I repeated that to my wife, and she said, "You've been saying the same thing for months." There is a common pact we all make -- that there is a role for government and that each of us can make a difference. Now that's missing. What's happened? It seems to me that many journalists feel they are somehow a culture unto themselves. It's as if they can't have any patriotism, they can't have any friends in Congress, they can't be committed to an idea or make a judgment that one idea is better than another idea. They're detached, very little involved in the process. There's enormous economic pressure put on reporters to do the short, USA Today-style piece, and that does not serve the hard work of government that we're all talking about.
WEBER: If we vote to raise congressional pay, the press galleries are filled. Have a serious debate about the deficit or defense, and we're lucky if two or three reporters cover it.
WIRTH: The massive scramble to get the list of who bounced checks, that corridor full of reporters. It was ya-hoo! It was like we were feeding all these people into a chute, and at the end of the chute was the list, and everybody was dashing to get it. Reporters were lusting after it. They know more about how the House bank works than how campaign-finance reform works.
CONRAD: I've been in public life for 18 years, and the change in the attitudes of people in the news business is dramatic. In the past three years, maybe a little bit longer than that, there has developed an attitude that everybody in public life is not honorable, that they are all corrupt, and it's just a matter of confirming it.
Q. Each of you has mentioned the problem of the federal deficit. How many of you have gone back to your constituents and said, The only way to cut the deficit is to cut either entitlements or defense?
((All three raise their hands.))