Cokie Roberts and her husband Steven Roberts were alarmed recently to learn that between 250,000 and 350,000 people log on to the Consumer Project on Technology Web site every day to monitor congressional activities in Washington. It did not strike the couple - one of Washington's most influential and visible - as cause to celebrate a new and participatory electronic democracy that could reconnect Americans with their civic lives.

Quite the contrary. The suggestion that the Internet offers citizens a new kind of ongoing electronic town meeting "makes our blood run cold," the two wrote in their nationally syndicated column last week.

To them, the ability of faraway citizens to register their views and concerns via email "sounds like no more deliberation, no more consideration of an issue over a long period of time, no more balancing of regional and ethnic interests, no more protection of minority views."

The founders of American democracy, wrote the Robertses, were clear in their advocacy of representative, as opposed to direct, democracy. They quoted federalist James Madison, who wrote, "The public voice pronounced by the representatives of the people will be more consonant to the public good than if announced by the people themselves convened for the purpose."

Fully three-quarters of the people surveyed, the Robertses noted, now favor putting national issues on ballots across the country. "Computers could make that possible," they wrote. "And, if we're not careful, they might." If politicians don't act quickly, they wrote, "Congress could eventually find its very existence threatened, thanks to the Internet. And that would make the current debate over pornography and cults seem like small potatoes."

This column is important and revealing on several levels. First, it proves the old adage that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean folks aren't really out to get you. Some of them are as arrogant and clueless as we think they are. They really do think they are smarter than everybody else. They really are trained to dismiss even the clearest expression of public will. The differences between old and new information cultures are profound.

The column serves as a window into the dark and disconnected heart of Washington journalism, a culture that fiercely defends its own freedom but has mixed feelings about everyone else's.

Cokie and Steven Roberts are Washington's first couple of journalism. She is the daughter of two former members of Congress, and is an NPR reporter; she also co-hosts, with Sam Donaldson, ABC's This Week. He is a former New York Times reporter and writer and editor for US News & World Report.

Both - but especially Cokie - have come to embody the ethical cloud and lack of moral clarity that seems to hang over Washington journalism as practiced at its highest and most famous levels. She has been criticized by certain media critics and organizations - American Journalism Review, the Chicago Tribune, and me, for instance - for accepting large speaking fees from organizations with interests in Washington, and for refusing to divulge her income from outside sources.

The couple embodies the power of the Washington press corps to set the national agenda and, in the best traditions of the "few-to-many" information model, tell the rest of us what's important. It is both a lucrative and powerful position.

What they are arguing for, of course, is not just the rights and power of elected officials, but the control reporters in that city have wielded for so many years. Call it "representative journalism."

Representative journalism has convened more than 1,400 accredited reporters to cover the White House (six handled the job during World War II). There are more journalists - estimates range from five to ten thousand - in Washington than any other place on the earth.

Washington reporters like the Robertses have learned to dismiss what their consumers think as irrelevant, even dangerous. Readers do not know what's good for them, as the Robertses' horror at the survey above clearly demonstrates. Only reporters and politicians, working together, can determine that. It's hard to imagine an interactive columnist on the Net or Web dismissing the overwhelming viewpoint of his or her readers so casually without having his eyebrows singed off, and deservedly.

Veteran pundits like David Broder and Haynes Johnson (who co-wrote the book The System last year) argued that journalism isn't functioning well in Washington. It doesn't advance understanding, promote resolution, or cover the intricate workings of politics and government. James Fallows was even more critical in Breaking the News, arguing that the media there is so destructive, confrontational, and remote that it actually undermines democracy.

The Internet challenges such journalistic concentrations of power, as well as those of many academics, educators, and politicians. It is the worst nightmare of people who are used to controlling the flow of information, and whose power, money, and influence directly derive from that power.

People like Cokie and Steven Roberts have long decided what stories would be covered and what information we'd get. The idea that hundreds of thousands of Americans would presume to do the same isn't a stirring idea to them, as the column demonstrates, but a terror discussed nonstop at Washington cocktail parties.

Sometimes such critics focus on pornography, sometimes on addiction or social isolation. But the bottom line is that the Internet reduces the power of journalists and increases the power and participation of individual citizens. If the Internet threatens the very existence of Congress, then what does it do to the lives and influence of the people who cover Congress?

That so profoundly democratic a medium, for all its many flaws, should be considered a threat to our system of government tells us how little modern media practitioners grasp about the values and intentions of the people who founded their profession.

At the time of the American Revolution, the free movement of ideas was permitted nowhere in the world; it was a radical, heretical idea that outraged clerics and monarchies. The ideas behind journalism and democratic government in America were crafted by intellectuals and patriots who saw diversity of opinion and the free flow of ideas as a cornerstone notion of their revolution.

Pamphleteers, publishers, farmers, wall-scratchers, poster-printers, merchants, individual citizens - those who were white and male, at least - were expected to participate freely in discussions of civic life. Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine - two close friends who shaped the values behind the world's first free press - never envisioned a corporatized journalistic enclave that filtered information for the rest of us.

In fact, Jefferson's writings reveal a proto-hacker. His most profound and eloquent wish for information was "That ideas should spread freely from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible all over space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

As for Paine, he would run shrieking back to England at the very sight of Cokie Roberts. In The Rights of Man, perhaps the most powerful written argument for individual liberty, Paine argued that republic democracy was too serious and important a matter to be left alone to governments and ruling classes.

Political elites (Washington journalism comes smartly to mind) wrap their sophistry in pompous and alienating obscurity, wrote Paine, so that ordinary people would find the process too alienating and intimidating. That this is the very attitude so many Americans now feel toward their media and politics is both bitter irony and civic tragedy.

Paine's idea was to make political communications as simple and accessible as possible, not to leave it to insiders in Philadelphia, Washington, Paris, or London. "As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand," he write, "I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet."

The advance of worldwide democracy required the replacement of what Paine called the "vassalage of manners" with a revolution in communications as well as politics.

One of Paine's and Jefferson's big ideas was that democracy required the easy participation of everyone and that communications and language were as political as armies and legislatures.

Technology does pose troubling problems for government, politics, and media. It speeds up the pace at which stories are presented, replacing them with new ones before we can digest the old. It sometimes emphasizes visual imagery over substance. It can overwhelm us with more messages than we can absorb. It can easily be manipulated by those with particular agendas and sophisticated knowledge. It has yet to organize coherent, safe, and effective common meeting places. It currently is beyond the means of the poor.

These are all serious problems, urgently in need of addressing. But the Robertses neither address them nor even seem to want to solve them. They weren't calling for the technology of the Internet to be made available to everyone, but warning that it might be used by everyone to participate in democracy.

Nothing in the writings of Paine or Jefferson suggests that either would be anything but enthralled at the democratic and free nature of the Internet, the opportunity it provides for distant, disconnected, and ordinary citizens to make their voices heard in Washington and to monitor and participate in government activities.

The cheap and direct style of email is precisely the kind of new medium Paine dreamed about. And the digital culture transmits ideas in just the stirring way Jefferson envisioned.

It is nothing short of a miracle that 300,000 Americans would take the trouble to check into what Congress is doing each day, a rebirth of civics that should thrill politicians and journalists.

That two of America's leading journalists consider it dangerous suggests that the chasm between the old information culture and the new is both real and vast.

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by Jon Katz

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