According to David Burnham, former investigative reporter with the New York Times, "the news business has been bad for a very long and continuous time." Mr. Burnham attributes the fact to passive reporting on behalf of journalists, who choose to accept what they are given rather than do concrete reporting about what is going on. "Watch what we do, not what we say," said John Mitchell, former Attorney General for the Nixon administration, while responding to reporter's questions on the administration's civil rights record. Mitchell's "wonderfully sage advice", Mr. Burnham argues, has been routinely ignored by most reporters. "Most reporters don't report what the government has been doing but report what the people in government and people in corporations and people at Harvard University are saying," Mr. Burnham says. The result has been the lack of concrete reporting about current events and while these trends have been bad for print media, they have been disastrous for TV news. Mr. Burnham considers himself a firm believer in a representative democracy, but he also believes that in order "to have a representative democracy you have to have an informed public." Mr. Burnham believes that with the "awful press of today ... you are not getting an informed public". According to Mr. Burhnam, what complicates the problem is that the current Bush administration has been "withholding information from the few people who are trying to get it" and neither the public nor the press "seem to care very much".