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Topics:
Civic Communication
Civic
Journalism
Rebuilding the Foundations of Democracy
By
Edward M. Fouhy
Executive Director, Pew Center for Civic Journalism
From Civic Partners, Spring 1996.
Published by the Pew Partnership for Civic Change.
Civic journalism
is about providing people with the news and information they need
to allow them to function as citizens, to make the decisions they
are called on to make in a democratic society.
It is an
effort to reconnect with the real concerns that viewers and readers
have about the things 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 as consumers to whom goods and services are sold.
It takes
the traditional five w's of journalism—who, what, when, where,
why—and expands them—to ask why is this story important
to me and to the community in which I live?
To understand
this "work-in-progress" of civic journalism, it is useful to lay
out the premises on which civic journalism is based. The first
premise is that something is eating at the foundations of our
society. Take nearly any objective yardstick and use it to measure
where we used to be and where we are now as a society:
- Illegitimate
births are up 16 1/2 percent from 1973-1992;
- Violent
crime is up 500 percent since 1960; and
- Personal
income after inflation has been static for more than 20 years.
More people
are living in walled communities out of fear of one another. And
the startling difference in the way black and white Americans viewed
last fall's jury verdict in Los Angeles echoed what the Kerner Commission
wrote after cities erupted in flames in the summer of 1967: we are
two societies, one black, one white.
The second
premise of civic journalism is that journalism is in real trouble.
- Fact
One: Newspaper circulation is sliding at an alarming
rate. Of the top 25 newspapers in the country, only one, The
Boston Globe, did not report a drop in circulation in the last
reporting period.
- Fact
Two: Fewer than a third of women aged 18-34, the
demographic group advertisers want most, report reading a newspaper
regularly.
- Fact
Three: In a recent survey, less than half the adults
in America answered yes when asked if they had read a newspaper
yesterday.
- Fact
Four: 71 percent of Americans
say that newspapers get in the way when it comes to solving
the problems our country faces. What has happened to the image
of the newspaper as the paladin of the people crusading against
crooked politicians and corrupt businessmen?
What about
broadcasting? For more than two decades the majority have said
they get their news from television. However, the audience for
network newscasts, as a percentage of the population, has been
flat since 1981. Sure 30 million people a night gather around
when Dan, Peter, and Tom are on the air, but these anchors do
not command the nation's attention or set the agenda the way their
predecessors, Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reynolds, did. And news
is now available from many sources around the clock.
So those
are the twin premises on which we base our assertion that it's
time to take a hard look at journalistic practice. First, we as
a people, as members of a community, what some call the civil
society, are threatened. And second, the news business is in trouble.
And I believe those two things are linked. Tocqueville, the French
statesman who was such a keen observer of American life, said
it 160 years ago: you cannot have newspapers without democracy;
and you cannot have democracy without newspapers.
Civic journalism
has been accused, ironically, of boosterism, and indeed some early
experiments came close to being just that. No one gets it all
right the first time. Experiments are about failure as much as
success. Today, we see many successful civic journalism initiatives
that are far from boosterism because they begin with hard, unflinching
reporting of the real issues that face a community. What are those
issues? The Pew Center for Civic Journalism recently commissioned
a research firm to help us learn about them. And the answers that
have come back after listening to 15 focus groups in 12 cities
around the country are remarkably alike. They are, in no particular
order: jobs and the economy, education, values, crime, and families.
I heard
a man say at a focus group in Chicago,"l don't see anything on
the six o'clock news that has anything to do with my life." Another
focus group member said of journalists, "They write about things
we don't care about and use words we don't understand." That leads
to what one of my colleagues calls rational ignorance. The theory
goes like this: "I don't vote because I don't know enough about
the issues; and I don't read the paper or watch the news because
I don't vote anyway."
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 constituents—their
readers and viewers.
Plugging
into the community is hard. It's much harder journalism 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, always available for the interview, always ready with conventional
wisdom or a cynical one-liner.
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 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 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 public interest.
Can civic
journalism solve the problems facing the country or the state
or the city? No, of course not. The problems we face 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—it is possible to begin to overcome the sense
of alienation and powerlessness that many Americans feel.
Resources
Video: "Civic
Journalism, A Practical Guide" ($14.95). Pew Center for Civic Journalism,
1995.
Jan Schaffer
and Edward Miller, Eds. Civic Journalism:
Six Case Studies. Washington, DC: Pew Center for Civic Journalism
and The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1995.
America's
Struggle Within: Citizens Talk about the State of the Union. A
Report prepared by The Harwood Group. Washington, DC: Pew Center
for Civic Journalism, 1996.
Davis "Buzz"
Merritt. Public Journalism and Public Life and What It Means to
the Press. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.,1995.
Art Charity.
Doing Public Journalism. New York: Guilford Publications, Inc.,
1995.
More
Information
Pew Center
for Civic Journalism
1101 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 420
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202-331-3200
E-mail: news@pccj.org
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