By Edward M. Fouhy
Founder
Pew Center For Civic Journalism
In newsrooms around the country a debate has begun about the basic qualities of good journalism. In a craft not given much to self-examination, the debate over a concept called civic journalism has prompted sharp reaction as journalists have examined their role in society. Do they have, as some advocates of civic journalism contend, some responsibility for the consequences of their reporting? Do they have an obligation beyond just getting the facts right? Has democracy been wounded by the way in which journalists have done their jobs?
Much of the debate is inspired by the declining circulation of the press and the fear that young Americans, in particular, are losing the newspaper habit. Fewer than a third of women aged 18-34, the demographic group adver-tisers prize so highly, report reading a newspaper regularly. The numbers for men of the same age are not much better.
Even some of our best newspapers, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, have lost circulation recently. Others have gone out of business recently — New York Newsday, the Houston Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun, the Milwaukee Journal. In the years from 1990-95, 78 daily newspapers have gone out of business and average daily circulation has dropped by about five million copies.
Questioned by the Pew Center for People and the Press, a research group based in Washington, 71 per cent of respondents said newspapers get in the way when it comes to solving the problems our country faces.
Broadcast News
What about broadcasting? For more than two decades the majority of Americans have said they get their news from television. But is that really true? The audience for network newscasts, as a percentage of the population, was flat from 1981 until recently when a new study published this year indicated that the number of people watching network news on a regular basis–not a daily basis–had declined from 60% to 43%. The weekly ratings indicate that while about thirty million people a night gather around when Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw are on the air, they do not command the na-tion’s attention or set the agenda the way their predecessors, Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and Frank Reynolds did. And news is now available from CNN, as well as from many other sources, around the clock.
Asked to name their favorite network for news, the largest percentage of Americans named CNN, but remarkably few seem to watch it. Except at times of crisis, the CNN audience is about five tenths of one per cent of the nation’s 98 million TV homes.
Much-scorned local TV news has been the one growth area of American journalism for the last 15 years, but one need not spend much time watching it in the biggest cities to see how deeply infected with tabloid values it has become. A study last spring showed its audience, too, is declining.
People tell pollsters they simply don’t have time to watch but what they are really saying is that they get so little value for the time they spend watching television news that they have decided to spend their time elsewhere.
Declining Civil Society
The second premise on which civic journalism is based is that something is eating at the foundations of America’s democratic society. Take nearly any objective yardstick and use it to measure where we used to be and where we are now as a society:
Violent crime is up 500% since 1960, while personal income after inflation has been static for more than 20 years. More Americans than ever are living alone; even, as Harvard scholar Robert Putnam pointed out last year, bowling alone — membership in leagues is down 40% since 1980. More people are living in walled communities out of fear of one another. Perhaps nothing illustrated the problem more vividly than the startling difference in the way black and white Americans viewed the O.J. Simpson jury verdict.
Definition
As to the term — civic journalism — it is first an idea, a work in progress, an evolving theory, but at its base it means providing people with the news and information they need in order for them to behave as citizens, decision-makers in a democratic society.
Civic journalism is an effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers have about the issues in their lives they care most about, not in a way that panders to them, but in a way that treats them as citizens with the responsibilities of self-government, rather than simply as consumers to whom goods and services are sold.
Tools
Civic journalists start by making an effort to learn what is on the community’s agenda. They use commonly accepted research techniques — focus groups, survey research and polls. And they go beyond those tools to engage people in living room conversations and town hall meetings.
For example, the Pew Center recently commissioned a research firm to help learn about the issues that are on people’s minds this election year. The answers that have come back after listening to fifteen focus groups in 12 cities in four states are jobs and the economy; education; crime; families and values. Superficially the picture resembles the state of public opinion four years ago but there are important differences. Back then we saw raw anger at the depressed state of the economy, and eventually that anger was focused on President Bush. Now there is a real sense of relief that prosperity has returned and the economy is strong but people have not forgotten the lay-offs and downsizing that effected their job security and some are afraid it may happen again.
People worry about the values their kids are getting in school and from the tube. Because typically both parents work — they have to in order to sustain a middle-class life style — they haven’t enough time to spend with their kids, imbuing them with their values. They can’t be at home to supervise their TV viewing habits. And let’s not kid ourselves — television is where kids today are getting most of their values and their picture of the adult world.
Civic journalists are trying to plug back into their communities, to cross the gap that has opened and widened between the news media and their readers and viewers. Civic journalists understand that technology threatens to make the mainstream media — newspapers and broadcasting stations — less relevant in the future because new forms of communication offer a wide variety of choices. Soon information technology will become cheap enough and simple enough so that anyone may drop out of our larger society and retreat into the narrow slivers of self-interest that are the antithesis of the broad-based community the mass media have fostered and that democracy requires if it is to prosper.
Practicing civic journalism is hard, much harder than dealing with the same old sources, the experts, the media-savvy advocates of the same old tired points of view, the self-serving talking heads, known derisively in the television world as the Rolodex commandos, always available for the interview, always ready to spout conventional wisdom or a cynical one-liner.
At a time when newsrooms everywhere are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs, to shrink newshole, to cram ever more stories into thirty-minute news programs, deep, thoughtful reporting, which goes beyond the easy journalistic formulas is becoming rarer, especially at smaller, struggling news operations throughout the country. And even at some bigger newspapers hobbled by the bean counters at their chain’s corporate headquarters.
Civic journalists broaden their agenda from the usual overwhelming focus on political and governmental news to aggressively ferret out issues of interest to citizens who are not members of the elite. That means things like the education of their children, the security of themselves and their families, and the economic future they face. That means covering an agenda that is set more by citizens, by the people, and less by those who would manipulate them. That means, for journalists, thinking about the news not only from the standpoint of conventional journalistic practice but taking it a step further and thinking about a subject from the standpoint of the public and the public interest.
How does civic journalism differ from what you may be used to seeing and reading? The first habit many journalists follow when framing a story is to find conflict. Conflict is the chief ingredient of much news coverage. Republicans versus Democrats, Dole versus Clinton, Serbs against Croats. Conflict is an element in drama. Shakespeare’s plays all are based on conflict. Some journalists feel they have to dramatize the news. Why not just tell it straight?
Another journalistic habit is there are two sides to every story. But it is often misleading or inaccurate to force every story into a dramatic framework where there are only two sides, with only the experts from the most extreme points of view allowed on the air and into print, there to repeat their tired points of view. Take as an example abortion, the flash point of American politics for two decades. Journalism short hand requires that it be defined in bumper-sticker terms — pro-life or pro-choice. When there is a TV debate about the subject, we invite the people who espouse those extreme viewpoints and no one else. This despite the fact that even a superficial glance at poll data reveals the vast majority of Americans are deeply troubled about abortion and reject both those points of view.
What It Isn’t
As important as a clear definition of civic journalism is, so too is what it is not–
It is not boosterism, it is quite the contrary, an effort to take an unflinching look at the hard realities of community life while suggesting that there are solutions as well as problems.
It is not editors sitting on community boards or anchormen narrating chamber of commerce promotional videos. But it also is not sterile detachment from the life of the community, a detachment so remote as to be mistaken for indifference or even hostility.
It is above all else not an abandoning of the journalistic ideal of objectivity. We know of no serious effort at civic journalism underway anywhere in the country today that in any way fails to honor the principle of objectivity. Bill Kovach, at the Nieman Foundation, says objectivity is the organizing principle of journalism. He is right.
It is not using the news media as a propaganda arm of some enterprise, no matter how highly principled.
Finally it is not a newspaper or media partnership imposing its own agenda on its community. It begins with an organized effort to find the issues that are important to readers and proceeds from that starting point. It is the Boston Globe, WABU-TV and radio station WBUR covering the New Hampshire primary fromthe point of view of the citizens of a typical town, not in the terms of traditional political coverage — who’s up, who’s down? Who’s ahead in the candidate horse race? What are the tactics? Who are the insiders?
Second, it is an alliance of news organizations — ideally the three principal ones — newspapers, television and radio. When people talk about how they satisfy their information needs they talk about the news. “I saw it on the news,” they say. Many times, of course, they don’t remember where they saw it; maybe they read it in the newspaper or heard it on the radio driving home, or maybe they saw the ten o’clock news before falling asleep. People rarely remember the source, because they use all three media and now many are tapping into on-line sources too. So civic journalism isn’t just newspapers, it’s not just TV.
Summary
Are we saying that civic journalism can solve the problems facing the country or the state or the city? No, of course not. The problems have very deep roots and journalists are held in extremely low regard at the moment.
What we do say is that by listening to the citizen’s voice, and by using that voice as the organizing principle of some stories — not all — but some stories, it is possible to begin to overcome the sense of alienation and powerlessness which many Americans feel.