Poking fun at USA Today, bemoaning a lack of public confidence in the press and worrying about the liability crisis in the newsroom, a panel of distinguished journalists sounded off yesterday on the state of journalism.

Warning that journalists "suffer from being arrogant as hell" about their First Amendment rights, Peter Braestrup, editor of The Wilson Quarterly, noted that journalists "need a lot of public humility. Everybody needs humility, even Harvard."

Humility aside, Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis '48 praised the First Amendment and a free press as the hallmarks of a democratic society compared with current press restrictions in South Africa.

Lewis warned, however, that the tendency to feel proprietary about the First Amendment costs reporters much of their public support.

The panelists at the symposium entitled "The First Amendment and the Cause of Democracy" said that in addition to losing public support, journalists are losing their edge partially from fear of lawsuits.

"We're also in an era when self-censorship comes not only because of lawsuit problems but because there is going to be a letter writing campaign, picketing, a different climate of public opinion," said Ellen P. Goodman '63, a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Pulitzer-prize winning author J. Anthony Lukas '55 told the audience of about 200 that the press corp's main fault is not its failure to be aggressive in the face of lawsuits, but its endemic refusal to cover the powerless.

"There is a world out there that the political reporter does not see. What the press does very badly these days is to cover the poor and vulnerable," the author of Common Ground said.