Community Media Workshop
Opening Remarks
By Edward M. Fouhy
Founder
Pew Center for Civic Journalism
Chicago, May 20, 1997 – I want to thank Thom Clark for inviting me to speak to you. What I understand the Community Media Workshop is doing is of enormous importance. Rebuilding the relationship between news organizations and the people they serve is essential if we are to reinvigorate the community life that seems to have been so battered by the changes in our society.My charge is to talk to you today about the idea of civic journalism and how it may help in bridging the gap between journalism and the communities they serve. I assume Carol Marin wasn’t available. Seriously the recent controversy over the appearance of Jerry Springer on Channel Five’s news program has underlined the seriousness with which the people of this city take their news. We meet at a good time.
Let me start by saying that I was lucky to begin my career in journalism at a time when there were great stories to cover — the civil rights revolution in the South, the space program, war in Vietnam, Watergate, eight presidential elections. I can’t remember a time when I was not in love with journalism and I passed that love on to my children, one of whom is now rising through the ranks at CNN, so what I am about to say is said out of sadness and concern.
I believe that America’s spirit is sagging and journalists are losing their authority in the public life of this nation. I believe further that these two trends are related.
Civic journalism is my answer to the question of what ought to done about that state of affairs. If there are other answers, I’m not aware of them. Of course, journalists can stand still and do nothing, but I believe if they do nothing they will suffer a long slow death and our society will be much poorer without a vigorous, inquiring, connecting investigative press.
Let me give you some background on how my thinking has evolved. We can start with the words of political philosopher Benjamin Barber. He writes, “Because we regard ourselves as born free, we take liberty for granted. We assume that our freedom can be enjoyed without responsibility and that, like some great perpetual motion machine, our democracy can run forever without the force of civil activity by engaged citizens.”
A harsh charge from Mr. Barber: that we enjoy freedom without responsibility, but where is the evidence? Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam provided one answer recently in an important essay with the provocative title, “Bowling Alone.” In it he documented the decline in group membership in bowling leagues and also pointed to trends in our civic life even more telling — voter turnout in national elections is down 25% in 15 years; 40% fewer parents are engaged in PTA activity than were engaged in 1964; adult participation in Boy Scouts is down by 25%; interest in politics among college freshmen is at its lowest level since 1966.
What is the evidence for my assertion that journalists are losing their place? Shall we start with circulation? In a fast growing country, newspaper circulation has been flat for more than 20 years. Healthy Sunday sales mask a long term decline in daily readers. The audience for network television news is hemorrhaging. Consider this: Researchers at the Pew Center for the People and the Press find only about 43% of the public say they watch the news regularly. As recently as 1993 more than 60% said they did and in the very recent past 90% of the TV sets turned on at dinner time were tuned to news programs.
What went wrong? A lot. But for me it was best summed up by a woman I met at a focus group a year ago here in Chicago. She said, “They (meaning journalists) they talk about things I’m not interested in and they use words I don’t understand.”
So there I think is the evidence I can present in this short time for my assertion that there is a long term decline. Many of you already know that. I am here to say that many of the conventions of journalism, conventions I honored throughout my career, like detachment are no longer effective–if they ever were. Today the public is more educated, more demanding of TV news and newspapers than ever before and they are distrustful of journalists, because they believe journalists are unfair, inaccurate and intrusive, in other words they see us — correctly — as disdainful of them.
How can we journalists change? How can we regain our authority and status as the place where the community debates its future and its problems? And how do we do this without painting ourselves as hussies and pandering to our readers? Let me suggest that civic journalism may offer some solutions to the problems I have described.
First let me offer a definition: At its heart, civic journalism is simply this: an effort to give people the news and information they need in order for them to behave as citizens. If citizenship is defined as the active and informed participation of people in the life of the community — however broadly or narrowly defined community may be — then civic journalism is all about arming people with the knowledge they need to become active citizens, informed and involved participants in public life.
Civic journalism is an idea, a different way of thinking about the news. It’s a work in progress, it’s not an orthodoxy, there is no template, no one size fits all. It is being invented by editors all over the country who have become alarmed by the growing disconnect they sense between their newspapers and their community.
Perhaps it might also be useful to give you my definition of journalism. I believe that journalism is about giving people a window on their world. The framing may be through a newspaper, a magazine, a radio or a television set, for many people it’s three of those four frames, but the glass must be clear and clean, not flawed or distorted.
The trouble is that the window of journalism has been located, for the last couple of decades, in such a way that it looks down on the world and the view it takes is of the sensational, the tawdry, the tabloid and the trivial. Journalism has increasingly failed to show people the world outside their field of vision. Foreign news is disappearing. And the window has been located in fortress journalism, that is journalism as an aloof and isolated castle, high on a lonely hilltop, far removed from the community, surrounded by a moat called detachment. No wonder journalism is seen as irrelevant at best, hostile at worst; no wonder 70% of Americans think we get in the way of communities solving their problems.
As the world has become smaller, as the 500 channels of news and information we were hearing about only a few years ago lurches toward reality, the officers of fortress journalism’s garrison have reacted by looking ever more inward; they are ever more reluctant to venture outside the walls and they’re horrified at the thought that a Trojan horse filled with new ideas may be insidethe moat.
I exaggerate…a little. There are many newspapers that have reinvented themselves, that have reached out to their readers and found that listening to them, breaking the isolation, the cold indifference to the public life of their city, can be not only good journalism but good business. In Portland, Maine, for example, the meetings of the editorial board of the Press-Herald are open to the public. The board has made a successful effort to demystify the process by which they arrive at their editorial positions.
Listening to the public and listening well is one of the tenets of civic journalism. I mean listening not just for the killer quote or the 8 second sound bite but listening for the real meaning, for the music as well as the words, in the conversation a healthy democratic community is always holding with itself. I read recently that the average physician interrupts a patient who is describing his symptoms after just 15 seconds and, on average, it takes people about a minute to describe how they feel. No wonder there are so many incorrect diagnoses. We aren’t the only ones who listen too fast.
Jennie Buckner, editor of the Charlotte Observer, is amused that critics seem to equate listening to the public with pandering to the public, she says that ignorance of the public’s agenda is not bliss, it’s simply ignorance.
A few years ago, an assignment took me into factories. They weren’t what I expected. In today’s wired work environment, people are not meek recipients of top-down orders. The workplace is collegial; many voices are heard. The boss asks for and gets feedback. I learned that factory workers don’t run machines anymore. Workers run computers and computers run the machines.
Computers — and research tells us that 60% of Americans use computers in the workplace — computers are two-way devices. So why are we journalists behaving as if we are still living in a top-down world and wondering why it is that people no longer pay much attention to what we have to say?
One of the characteristics of today’s rootless society and anonymous suburbs is that there are few places where the public can come together to talk about the issues in a community; to have a civil dialogue.
But the newspaper is the place where a community can have a conversation with itself, where ideas may be debated and dissenting voices heard, where a civic consensus may emerge. But that’s best done when the walls of fortress journalism are torn down and the public is invited in.
How to do that? It seems to me that one way is for news organizations to reach out and invite people in. The Hartford Courant does just that, inviting people to spend time in the newsroom — up to three months at a time. They honor those who write the best letters to the editor at an annual banquet. They convene groups of readers whenever there is a major breaking local issue and the report the deliberations of these citizen groups when they illuminate the issue. In Dallas, WFAA-TV makes sure that a week does not go by without news reporters and producers attending at least one community group meeting. They are there to listen, not to cover the event, though sometimes they learn of future news stories by attending these events. A newspaper in California invites readers to write op-ed page pieces substituting them for the predictable views of the Washington insiders.
Does every reader opinion merit respect? Of course not. But there are many voices in a community which, when invited to do so, are surprising with their eloquence, their wit, their common sense. Some of you might try your hand at writing for, if not the big dailies, the community and ethnic newspapers that enrich this city. The are today’s popular civic forum. A role television with its fixation on popular entertainment values even in its news programs, has chosen not to play.
Television teems with Washington opinion mongers. The TV food fight is now as much a part of the weekend as hot dogs and barbecues. But the Washington talking heads are remote, in touch with the issues that resonate inside the Beltway and you know how few of those issues resonate outside the Beltway.
I believe that what readers hunger for is information, analysis and opinion on the issues close to home — that is not available from television.
Most are not attracted to the TV screaming heads who shout slogans like pro-choice or pro-life, when we know the values many people bring to the discussion are about the mushy middle. That’s where most people live.
But wait a minute. Doesn’t that take the thunder out of the traditionally lusty Chicago school of journalism? I don’t think so, not if you get the framing right. Trouble is too often journalists get it wrong. As John Leo pointed out in a recent issue of US News, the newsroom sees many stories in stereotypical terms, may I call them politically correct terms, a phrase he does not use.
Take the other TV trend story: lesbians and their heroine, Ellen. Leo says the newsroom convention is that homosexuals are members of an oppressed and victimized class. They are equated with blacks and are seen to be in a noble struggle for their civil rights. Words like bias, exclusion, tolerance and rights are used in this narrative. In reality, he says, the public’s attitude is more one of tolerance, live and let live. But, polls show, a large majority of Americans have conflicted feelings, particularly when it comes to gay marriage and classroom teaching that comes close to endorsement of homosexuality. In the newsroom this is treated as homophobia, Leo says. So the real conversation, the story of people’s values and their conflicted feelings about homosexuality is off the table because of this flawed framing.
Now I am not a public relations man. I will leave it to others far more expert than I to talk about the techniques that non-profits are successfully using to get their message out. What about some specific techniques to engage, not repel, the reader and viewer? I have made a couple of suggestions already about the ethnic and community press.
In addition, I think local talk radio gets a bum rap because of the many extremists who use it to advance an ideology. My experience is that there are many talk radio programs that have become a kind of local town square where ideas are discussed in rational terms. There is no reason to allow the extremists to dominate the air waves.
Cable television presents still another opportunity for community groups to get their message out, though most fail because they ignore the production values viewers demand.
The World Wide Web because of its low cost has enormous potential as a virtual town square. I think the lessons we are learning as people use the Web around the country, is that people want to interact with other like minded souls that’s why chat rooms and listservs outstrip home pages in popularity.
Let me conclude with one unpopular observation — I think one of the reasons many journalists are cynical about civic life is that many single issue groups, who claim a community relevance and legitimacy they have not earned, are extremely adept at manipulating the media. They use phony grass roots mail, fax and phone campaigns — called Astroturf in Washington — to advance their agendas. They use emotional direct mail campaigns to raise the money to get their TV spots on the air and create conflict which draws journalists the way sugar draws bees.
In 1968 I was one of the reporters who stood in front of the Hilton Hotel and reported the police riot. It was a time of great turmoil in this city and this country. The news media had done a first rate job of reporting the civil rights revolution and was in the middle of illuminating the situation in Vietnam. Watergate lay ahead. As a country we needed to make important decisions and the news media served us well by giving us the informationwe need to make those decisions. The information was accurate, the decisions we made were correct. As a nation we will face equally important decisions in the future. Unless we reverse the trends we see now in journalism the newspapers and television networks of this country will not have the authority to do what they did 30 years ago; they will not command our attention because they will have lost their credibility. Many people are beginning an effort to rebuild credibility but the road back will be long and probably very rocky. I think journalists will get back their authority if they remember the central idea of civic journalism — that the purpose of journalism is to serve people the news, information and analysis they need in order to allow them to participate in their democracy.