Civic Journalism: From Citizens Up
The 1995 James K. Batten Symposium on Civic Journalism featured many outstanding speakers. Excerpts from their speeches are featured below.
Thomas Winship
Chair, Batten Award Advisory Board
Cynicism about public life is at all all-time high. History’s first presidential campaign to engage new media techniques galore is about to begin. And in the media, it’s a merger a day. Callous cynicism and failure of confidence abound in too many newsrooms. Circulation and listenership are flat or sliding in the traditional print and electronic outlets. Civil public dialogue in public spaces is disappearing…This is a watershed time for the media, to say nothing for the spirit of our country.
David Broder
Political Writer, The Washington Post
Keynote Speaker, James K. Batten Award Symposium
I did not want the obit on my generation of political reporters to be some smart-ass remark that for 40 years we had reported everything that was happening in American politics except that public support for the system was collapsingIFor years, my colleagues and I had accepted the proposition that it was up to the candidates and their advisors to determine the content of the campaign. They made speeches, we reported them. They decided their schedule, we went where they took us. They ran the ads, we wrote about the ads.
It finally dawned that we might actually raise the question as to whether the campaign period was the property of the candidates and their advisors or whether it might be thought of as something that was the property of the voters, the time for them to get their questions answered. And, if that was the case, why didn’t we begin our campaign coverage by doing some serious reporting with the voters, spending enough time with them so that we could learn about the questions they had and find out from them what they would like the election campaign to be about?
This is not a time when any of us can sit back complacently and say, ‘What, me worry?’ The bonds of trust on which this system of representative government have been built are badly frayed. There are powerful movements afoot to substitute some form of direct democracy – be they Ross Perot’s electronic town meetings or the national initiative and referendum kind of device – for the kind of representative government that we have had in this country for over two centuries. That movement, in my view, poses a genuine threat to all forms of liberty, including the freedom of the press.
But we will not thwart that trend or movement simply by writing columns or editorials decrying them. We have to do what we can as journalists to make the phrase representative government real again to people, first by building the links between ourselves and our readers and listeners and viewers, and second, if we can, by finding ways to shorten the distance between their needs and the actions of their elected representatives. I think that is a challenge for all of us in journalism.
E.J. Dionne
Columnist, The Washington Post
Moderator: “Decaying Civic Life: Does Journalism Have a Role? Believers vs. Naysayers.”
We have passed from an ethic of partisanship back in the 19th century to an ethic of objectivity earlier in this century, to an ethic that is now neither partisan nor objective. You might think of it as an ethic of skepticism. The danger of this ethic is that it can make journalism increasingly disconnected from the obligations it has to promote a healthy democratic debate and actually engage citizens in that debate. I still think that is one of our roles.
Real argument is not bad; it’s good. It engages people. It reflects the fact that in a democracy, citizens will not always agree, but in fact disagree passionately about lots of things…Seen this way, the task of civic-minded journalism is not just to try…to impose consensus where none exists, but to draw citizens into a real debate to unmask phony or manipulative arguments, to be sure, but also to highlight real disagreements and explore their implications.
Ed Fouhy
Founder, Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Civic journalism is providing people with the news and information that they need to allow them to behave as citizens, as participants, in a self-governing society.
For many years, we journalists behaved as if the principles that govern our business were handed down on tablets. Now, I think we’ve confused principles with habits …It seems to me the first habit that journalists follow is framing a story to find the conflict…We think we somehow have to dramatize the news. Why not just tell it straight?
Another habit is that there are two sides to every story. I used to think that was true. Now I don’t. I see many sides to most stories and I instinctively reject the attempt to force every story into that sort of dramatic framework where there are two sides, two extremes, with only the experts from the most extreme ends of the spectrum allowed to appear in print and on the air.
Let’s talk about what civic journalism 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 an anchorman narrating Chamber of Commerce promotional videos. But it is also not a sterile detachment from the life of the community…It is, above all else, not the abandoning of the journalistic ideal of objectivity.
Jennie Buckner
Editor, The Charlotte Observer
It seems to me that public journalism is about putting a new lens on our camera. It’s putting a wider-angle lens on what we do …so we can begin to see something more than what we have been seeing…It seems to me that there had to be a better way of looking through our lens because that wasn’t the whole world and I knew it…Too often, stories that we meant to engage and to educate instead ended up bringing disengagement and misunderstanding …Crime news, in particular, was helping to kill communities, one scary story at a time.
Folks have asked: ‘Should we be in the business of convening town meetings?’ I don’t have a problem with it…Every night on TV news shows, from MacNeil Lehrer to Nightline, the press convenes people. It pulls folks together to talk about the issues of the day. But it’s usually elites, talking to elites, through the elite lens. There are very few citizen voicesIAnother unusual piece of our special effort is that we list ways citizens can get involved. Again, people ask, ‘Is that your role?’ Again, I think it is…Think of all the ways we help people engage in their community. We list ways for readers to find the best restaurants. . .where to write for travel destination information. We print phone numbers for the ballet and the hot new rock club. Why not list ways to help fellow citizens?
Everette Dennis
Executive Director, Freedom Forum Media Studies Center
I’m not here to rain on a parade…but rather to challenge, to some degree, the fundamental premise that civic life is decaying…In general, I believe that public life is more vital and stronger than ever and that the gloomy prognosticators who link a grim societal and community diagnosis to some new form of journalistic commitment have simply got it wrong…There is a growing cottage industry with a vested interest in telling us how bad things are, even when they are appreciably better than they were in earlier times.
What should journalism do about the coverage of public life? Well, I think three things. One, give us the facts… there are some purely descriptive details that everyone can pretty much agree upon. . .and give us some context as well. Second, tell us what forces and factors are in play in the community on given public issues…Third, give us intelligent speculation about what the news means and tell us who thinks so and why.
William Woo
Editor, St. Louis Dispatch
About public journalism, I think of myself as a skeptic – someone persuadable but yet to be fully convinced…I would confess also to being somewhat distracted by the subject at hand. I’m distracted by the death of the Houston Post and New York Newsday and by the demise of the Milwaukee Journal as a distinct paper. I am distracted by the great elimination of jobs at newspapers large and small all over…By the terrible convulsions in Detroit …Finally, I am distracted by my own newspaper, whose newsprint bill is increasing by nearly $38 million. So, I’m having trouble focusing on whether we have ordered enough pizzas for the citizens group that is being convened to tell us what the public really has on its mind.
For me, it is not yet self-evident that public journalism enhances credibility …I am thinking of the effect of public journalism on the principle of detachment …of its effect on the way we think about the people we write for and who buy our paper – transforming them from readers to citizens, from ordinary folk to a participatory elite…of its effect on our modesty and humility as we declare ourselves the conveners of our community and the enablers of democracy…Ultimately, we are in the news business, and I am wary when someone asserts that this is no longer enough.
Steve Smith
News Executive, Knight-Ridder Inc.
Moderator: “Civic Journalism: Is it Good Journalism or Pandering to the Public?”
I’m a former managing editor at The Wichita Eagle, one of the nurseries for public journalism…. We never saw the support of public life or the facilitation of reader/citizen involvement in public life as a substitute for great watchdog journalism, aggressive institutional reporting, award-winning investigative reporting, or even as a substitute for the more mundane tools of the marketplace – the color weather map and the readable movie calendars. And we never saw the act of talking to people about their public life concerns as a compromise of our journalistic objectivity.
Cole Campbell
Editor, Virginian Pilot
To Walter Lippman, the journalist is an eyewitness, trying to describe what the insiders are deciding to a passive public, whose only real role is to vote the rascals in or out.”
To his colleague, John Dewey, the journalist is a catalyst of conversation, and insiders and citizens alike are active participants and partners in that conversation. The conversation, in the end, is the medium of democracy – not newspapers.”
At the Virginian Pilot, we have discovered a more powerful kind of accountability beyond the scared, deer-in-the-headlights, freeze-frame of the expos?. We are learning to hold citizens accountable, not only in asking them during conversations to reconcile their beliefs with contradictory evidence, but also asking them to spell out what they believe to be their responsibility for the health of the community.
Journalists who listen for quotes miss what’s being told to themIIf we pretend that we are, in fact, astronauts wearing suits with helmets on and we breathe different air and are screened from gamma rays and walk independently among everything we cover, we’re only kidding ourselves. The more fruitful discussion is going to be …how does one maintain an appropriate level of independence and an appropriate level of interdependence?
Teresa Hanafin
City Editor, Boston Globe
I just want to say that, just as much as people in our promotion department, I consider myself to be in the business of selling papers. And I’m not going to apologize for that. And, yes, I subscribe to all the noble platitudes: I want to help the disadvantaged and I want to keep my eye on the crooks, but, hell, you know that’s our job also is to sell papers.
I call all of this that we’re talking about just real journalism. That’s how I put it to my reporters.
Too often in the past, our very smart journalists were the only ones in the tent with the movers and shakers. Now, as we lift the flaps of the tent to let in the non-journalists, the citizens as it were, let’s not drive out the journalists. I firmly believe that if this movement is going to last, we’ve got to convince the folks in the trenches, on the front lines, that it is real journalism, that it is effective, that it is interesting and that it is relevant.
Lou Heldman
Editor, Tallahassee Democrat
Yesterday, I met with 10 active participants [of our Public Agenda project] and asked them whether the newspaper or the TV station should stay involved. Their answer was a resounding yes for really what was a single reason: credibility. They say that the involvement of the TV station and the newspaper gives the Public Agenda credibility because we’re considered honest brokers. We don’t come with an agenda of our own and we’re not asking them to do anything. We’re only asking them to grapple with the tough problems, to educate one another and then educate the community as they begin to reach consensus.
Dave Iverson,
Executive Producer, Wisconsin Public Television
Now, are there dangers in us convening these gatherings, of bringing citizens together? Of course, there are…I think it is all right to organize and convene…I don’t think it’s all right to become a participant and to advocate…There’s only one thing that we can advocate for, and that’s for the public’s right to know and the public’s right to participate.
If we can introduce our fellow citizens to each other to explore their lives, their concerns and their questions, I believe that will always be worth a little ink and a little air time.
Rebecca Rimel
President, The Pew Charitable Trusts
I think the public feels a bit betrayed. They’ve been playing by the rules, and they feel abandoned – abandoned by their leaders and abandoned by the American dream that they all bought into…The size of the problems are so large, and the helplessness that they feel – they can’t make a difference, so why try? Only the experts can solve these problemsIThe press has a very important role. You provide a voice for policy makers, a voice for politicians and a voice for public figures. But I would ask: Have you given a seat at the table to perhaps your most important voice, the voice of the people?
Jean Batten
In accepting the first $25,000 James K. Batten Award for Excellence in Civic Journalism
For Jim, journalism was a noble calling, to illuminate the issues of the day, to be the providers of information that is democracy’s life blood. When, after he became chairman and CEO of Knight-Ridder, a Fortune 200 company, a stranger would ask him what he did for a living, he would answer simply: ‘I’m a newspaper man’IFor years, Jim was as much a traditionalist as any of today’s public journalism’s opponents, but he came to realize that in a society in which communities struggle with problems that were unheard of 25 years ago, and in a time when readers are finding newspapers increasingly irrelevant, papers must play an active, but non-partisan, role in bettering their communities.