Citizens express
many frustrations with American democracy, but if for some reason
one had to be singled out it would be an easy choice to make: They
resent to their core that problems don't ever get solved. In the
language of Meaningful Chaos, "People are seeking a sense of
possibility - that action might occur on a public concern, and that
they might play a personal role in it ... so that discussion on
public concerns does not seem so isolated from action." When they
find instead that political involvement doesn't get them anywhere,
they simply tune out, stop voting, grow cynical or keep their eyes
focused close to home, acting on a neighborhood scale where they can
make a difference. Journalist E.J. Dionne's best seller makes this
point in the plainest possible terms. Why do Americans hate
politics? Because politics doesn't work.
So far, this handbook has talked about how journalists can ...
give [citizens] the information they need and the opportunities for
discussion they want. And this is all well and good. But citizens
will lose interest in journalism, too, if it does no better than
politics in getting their judgment acted upon. As Jeremy Iggers of
the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune phrases it, civic
virtue is not its own reward.
Most editors (even public journalists) are reluctant to face what
this means. They would like to believe that whoever may be
responsible for civic action, it's certainly not the press. So
intensely concerned are they about crossing the line into advocacy,
they end up stopping well short of it - and rarely consider the
impossible expectations they're throwing on citizens as a result. At
a recent Project on Public Life and the Press conference, the editor
of a major public-journalism daily described where his paper
was going to draw the line: He would publish lengthy, in-depth,
value-centered coverage on public-agenda issues, collaborate with
civic groups to convene forums and report on them as a public
service ... then he would step back, wash his hands and "let
citizens act." He explained that going any farther would compromise
his editorial stance as an independent, unbiased, critical voice,
willing to tell things as they are and champion unpopular causes
(like free speech or affirmative action) if and when the majority
turned against them. Other editors in the room assented. This makes
perfect sense from the newspaper's own point of view; it's both
ethical and consistent.
But then someone asked exactly how citizens were supposed
to act. Put yourself in the shoes of an ordinary man or woman: not
Ralph Nader or Kate Michelman, but a busy Los Angeles truck driver
or Cincinnati schoolteacher. How would you - a private citizen -
bring your neighborhood forum into conversation with the fifty or
sixty others in your community? (Alternatively, who would you trust
to do it for you?) On what authority would you identify the
community's common ground? How would you publicize the "will of the
people" you'd heard - make it the standard against which public
action would from then on be measured? How would you hold the feet
of public officials and other citizens to the fire? The press and
public figures talk fast and loose about Americans "sending
messages" to Washington or the state capital, but how as a practical
matter are they supposed even to put those messages together,
without some central, trusted, neutral organization such as a
newspaper to help them? (The editor said that this was a good point
and, revealingly, one that had never crossed his mind.)
This chapter's premise is a natural extension of the whole
premise of public journalism: Acts of citizenship (besides voting)
are unnecessarily hard for ordinary Americans to perform, and so,
just as one ought to expect, they don't perform them often or well.
They don't find common ground, draft clear messages, act in concert
to solve their problems. Journalists should always be on the lookout
for ways to make those acts easier. The examples on the next several
pages demonstrate that there are indeed lines that newspapers can
draw - still well this side of bias, advocacy and subjectivity -
within which public journalists can do much more to help citizens
act. But first it's worthwhile to go back to the test of realism and
consider what "acting on the public's judgment" ought to mean.
Chapter One made the case that journalists too often equate
action with the things officials do; ordinary people, on the other
hand, see problems as too big and intricate for governments,
bureaucracies or think tanks alone to solve. People want results,
not activity. Congress can pass a wonderful crime bill, but thrown
into a vacuum it won't solve the problem of crime. Neighborhoods can
set up creative block-watches and anti-drug programs, but without
the appropriate laws, policies, budgets and regulations to back them
up, their grasp will fall woefully short of their reach. Truly
successful action can only mean coordinating the action of groups
starting with the family and ending with the state or federal
administration. To complicate an already daunting task, Chapters Two
and Three insisted that people see such problems as "schools,"
"drugs," "youth violence," "jobs" and "family" as so interwoven that
they must be addressed all at the same time. How can a community -
let alone its newspaper - transform something so large and
ill-defined into a concrete, practical task (without retreating into
the kinds of narrow, partial, Beltway-centered solutions and debates
people are so dissatisfied with)? How can it succeed?
The key may be a concept that David Mathews of the Kettering
Foundation calls "complementary action." Most social problems
are too big to solve all at once, but even so we get less for
our efforts than we might just because we so often head in
contradictory directions. What schools are doing to help troubled
kids doesn't jibe with what the police are doing. Voluntary
organizations embrace one solution for urban poverty while city hall
embraces its opposite. Employers' family-leave policies don't mesh
with Washington's economic, trade or welfare incentives. (And often
an unconsulted public balks at policies invented by their elected
and unelected bosses.) Activity waters down other activity, and
leaves us with less than the sum of the parts. If, on the other
hand, a community's varied and independent groups could all work
from the same basic credo - a well-defined public judgment on the
given issue, broad in scope even if slight in detail - their actions
could reinforce each other, leaving us with more than the sum of the
parts. Look around for precedents. Religious charities, Alcoholics
Anonymous chapters, environment groups, yellow-ribbon campaigns: in
each of these cases independent groups enhance each other's work not
through explicit co-ordination but simply through a shared
understanding of their goals....
The ethics of public journalism
This is a good place to discuss ethics, because helping citizens
act is the final straw for many critics of public journalism. They
object to the innovations in this handbook not so much on the
grounds that they're time-consuming or ineffective but in the belief
that they're dangerously unrestrained. If a newspaper starts setting
agendas, framing issues, forcing candidates and experts to explain
themselves in different ways, promoting forums and spelling out
"what the public wants," it may think it's speaking for ordinary
citizens but it will really end up speaking only for itself.
Journalism's one protection against arrogance - its one claim on the
public trust - is its refusal to get involved. Giving that up, it
will inevitably careen down the same slippery slope as demagogues
and spin doctors. It will end up speaking only for citizens it
agrees with, and cheerleading civic action in which it's improperly
involved.
Actually, public journalism has a golden rule - an ethical line -
every bit as sharp as mainstream journalism's rule, and just as easy
to elaborate into a code book of professional norms. "Journalism
should advocate democracy without advocating particular solutions."
And it isn't so different from the conventional rule as it might
seem at first glance.
Newspapers already recognize that certain democratic norms are
essential for the news media to play their social role, and they
feel no qualm about championing these norms, on the news pages or
off. Free speech, for example. No paper would hesitate to advocate
the First Amendment, nor think twice about throwing its full
resources into the First Amendment's defense. This is because,
unlike abortion rights or aid to Russia or presidential candidate X
or ballot initiative Y, the First Amendment is a sine qua non
of informed public debate. Public journalists, looking at citizens'
anger and apparent apathy, have simply asked themselves what other
sine qua nons have gone unrecognized and unchampioned so far.
The evidence in this handbook shows that, if the news is truly to
help people judge events wisely and exercise control over their
government, then a number of things have to happen, both inside the
newspaper and out. Candidates have to address the questions citizens
want answers to. Expert opinions must speak to citizens' values.
People must face the consequences of their choices. They must
deliberate across social barriers like race, gender, geography and
class. The "public voice" must be the basis for governmental action.
Private citizens must be given opportunities to act. And so on.
Newspapers ought to advocate the spread of these practices as
aggressively and with as little shame as they advocate the spread of
free speech and a free press....
To turn the whole question around, public journalists could well
argue that the mainstream's rule of non-involvement is the one that
realistically threatens the public. In cities such as Huntington,
W.Va., and Dayton, Ohio, social problems were going largely
unaddressed and citizens were growing ever more frustrated and angry
until a newspaper broke tradition to advocate intelligent discourse
and democratic process. Editors in such situations often come to see
their new way of doing journalism not as an ethical minefield at
all, but as far more natural and self-justifying than the old. (One
executive editor now says, "I'd rather increase voter turnout than
win a Pulitzer.") Which form of journalism is really more flawed and
dangerous in a free society: the one that sits passively by while
people grow divided, or the one that finds ways of bringing them
together?
Sidebar: Managing the marketplace of ideas
David Rubin, dean of Syracuse University's Newhouse School of
Communications, came up with a good way of seeing where conventional
ethics fall short. He suggests looking at the "marketplace of ideas"
as if it were a real thing. He says he can no longer have faith that
"if you have an open marketplace, a cacophony, and the left is
speaking and the right is speaking and [ordinary] people from
Kenosha are in the mix, then everything will come out okay." That
may satisfy the ethicists of journalism, but it just isn't how real
marketplaces work. Real marketplaces have structure.
Rubin's right. The New York Stock Exchange, for all its
capitalist freedoms, tolerates nothing like the anarchy of the
marketplace of ideas. It is a thoroughly regulated place, with
rules, habits, traditions and penalties to make sure that trading is
fair, free and open. An exchange official can tell you the date and
time of any sale and all the procedures that were followed. Market
failures like insider trading, deals taking place after the closing
bell, misleading statistics on prospectuses and volatility that
might lead to a crash are nailed down with vigor and corrected with
legal rules. Similarly, in the marketplace of science, ideas don't
make it past the laboratory door until they're expressed in
standardized terms using mathematical language. Peers must review
experimental work and be able to duplicate the results. All this
rigor is in place because investors and scientists want their
markets to work.
If the press wants the market of ideas to function equally well,
then it had better be just as relentlessly concrete. Are national
debates (as we envision them) taking place? Then name the date, time
and place. If you can't, then they're imaginary, and you must help
figure out how to make them real. Are "public voices" forming? Then
write them down for me. If you can't, then they're imaginary too,
and you must go out and find them by listening, help to cobble them
together. Is this all somebody else's job? Then tell me whose. If
you can't, do the job yourself. You are, for better or worse, the
only manager the marketplace of ideas has.
Critics of public journalism may think this logic arrogant, but
it's not. A manager is even necessary in groups of 20 or 30 people,
gathered all in the same room, according to National Issues Forums
veteran Bob Arroyo. Deliberation usually won't take place unless a
moderator clears the channels, invites in the silent, chastises the
domineering, suggests when to move on - in short, nails down the
market failures and corrects them with vigor. A successful
moderator, Arroyo says, is always "neutral but not passive."
Traditional journalism's sense of objectivity has often led it to be
passive; one might argue that public journalism is trying to
discover how to be neutral instead.