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Topics: Civic Communication

Getting the Connections Right:
Public Journalism and the Troubles in the Press

Jay Rosen is the Director of Project on Public Life and the Press at New York University and a member of the CPN Journalism Editorial Team. Selected chapters of this book have been relocated to the Web site of the The Century Fund, where you can also find information on how to order the book in its entirety.

Index

Two selected case studies from chapter 5, "Disconnect: The Origins of Public Journalism," available on CPN:

The Wichita Eagle
The Charlotte Observer

Contents

The Wichita Eagle

Disconnect: The Origins of Public Journalism

The Wichita Eagle

Like many of his colleagues, Merritt was disgusted by the spectacle the nation endured during the 1988 presidential campaign. Shortly after the election, he wrote a column calling for "a total rearranging of the contract between the candidates and journalists." The existing arrangement, a "mutual bond of expediency," was satisfying only to the campaign professionals who had learned how to profit from it. Merritt fixed on the false sense of motion the system produced. As the campaign went forward public dialogue did not progress, despite the daily coverage of what the candidates did and said. Of the consultants' approach he wrote:

While your man is standing still, make sure he says nothing of substance. Then say something pungent but pointless, preferably about the opponent, and jump on a bus or plane for the next stop. The trailing pack of journalists has no choice but to hastily rip out a new lead or a sound-bite and race for the next stop, fearful, despite all recent evidence to the contrary, that something meaningful might occur on the next tarmac or courthouse square.75

These were standard observations about the manipulation of the campaign press. What made them interesting was Merritt's emphasis on a "new political contract" that he said journalists would have to initiate. In the 1990 gubernatorial campaign in Kansas, the Eagle did just that. Sensing a repeat of the pattern in 1988—a campaign of phony charges and counter charges with only minimal attention to important issues—Merritt announced a break with tradition in a Sunday column headlined: "Up front, here's our election bias."

The headline was itself noteworthy: a news organization shares its plans with the public by announcing the "bias" it will bring to campaign coverage. Of course the particular slant Merritt had in mind was hardly controversial: "we believe the voters are entitled to have the candidates talk about the issues in depth." Few would dare to challenge that. But making good on this pledge involved a significant shift in the premise of campaign journalism. The notion of "covering the campaign" was effectively replaced by a new principle: making the campaign "cover" what mattered to citizens. The Eagle vowed to give readers "the opportunity to understand in great detail the candidates' positions on every major issue Kansas faces."

This had important implications. For example, it meant that the point of departure for the Eagle would no longer be the daily events along the campaign trail, or what the candidates were doing to win votes. It would be the needs of citizens who had a "right to know what the candidates intend to do once in office."76 Campaign coverage would begin with citizens and their needs, and then approach the candidates with this priority in mind. Imagine if doctors, locked in a battle with lawyers about who was more responsible for soaring malpractice costs, suddenly turned to patients to understand anew their dissatisfactions with medical treatment. Something like this shift was implied by the Eagle's "new political contract." It was "new" only because it departed from what had become the norm; but it could also be seen as a return to fundamentals.

Merritt had recognized a simple fact about campaign journalism: The journalist's ultimate "client" was the public, but the primary working relationship was with politicians and their hired hands. In the approach he was suggesting, the emphasis would be on the experience of citizens on the receiving end of the campaign. Press treatment would focus on improving that experience rather than documenting the daily encounters between journalists, politicians and handlers. There was a second implication of Merritt's announcement: If the Eagle was going to focus on "every major issue Kansas faces," then defining those issues would have to become the newspaper's responsibility. It could not be left to the campaigns, since the whole purpose of Merritt's approach was to take the momentum away from the pollsters and handlers.

In effect, then, the Eagle was planning to argue with the campaigns over what "the campaign" should be about. Such a move could be seen as a naked power grab, or the assumption of a deeper level of responsibility. Merritt was betting on his and his staff's knowledge of Kansas politics, their professional judgment about the importance of various issues to the people of the state and its future. They had polling data to help them, but this data still had to be interpreted, raising the question: What were the grounds for determining the central issues in the campaign?

For a campaign advisor, the grounds are clear. A good issue is one that solidifies a base of support, motivates new recruits, weakens an opponents' coalition, or targets an important subgroup— typically, undecided voters. A bad issue is one that angers supporters, alienates potential recruits or exposes a weakness in the candidate's record. The image of a "wedge" issue—one that divides the electorate to your side's advantage—suggests the values at work when campaign professionals do the naming and framing of issues.77

One way a journalist can counter those values is to expose the candidate's strategy. The wedge and how it works may then become the object of "analysis." But think for a moment: how does this help me form my judgments as an intelligent person aware of the Kansas governor's race? Should I vote for the candidate with the best strategy? Reporters who try the expose the machinations of politicians and handlers believe they are striking a blow for truth. And they are, in a "buyer beware" manner typical of consumer reporting. But Merritt wanted the Eagle's journalism to be more than a prophylactic, a series of signs reading: BEWARE OF MANIPULATION BY CANDIDATES TRYING TO WIN. Consider, then, two different ways of telling the story of the governor's race: one assumes that a campaign has its own reality, which journalists ought to decipher for us; the other assumes that the campaign becomes decipherable by us when it addresses the realities facing Kansas. The Eagle decided on this second course, striking its own blow for truth with the proposition that "voters are entitled to have the candidates talk about the issues in depth."

Using its own judgment, supported by polling data, the Eagle focused its coverage on ten key concerns: education, economic development, environment, agriculture, social services, abortion, crime, health care, taxes and state spending.78 Each was the subject of a long background piece in the Sunday paper. Each issue was also charted in "Where They Stand," a weekly feature which gave a brief description of what was at stake, a summary of the two gubernatorial candidates' position on the issue, and then a report on what, if anything, was said by the campaign that week. For example, the section on the environment noted that Kansas faces new demands on its water supply as current sources dry up. Finding innovative ways to reuse water was a major concern throughout the state. The paper treated the positions of the two candidates (Democrat Joan Finney and incumbent Republican Mike Hayden) as follows:

Finney
Would increase the state's role in recycling. Has no specific plan. Has not discussed the water issue.
This week: Restated her position.

Hayden
Helped pass state water plan to manage resources. Wants private lands more accessible for public recreation. Encourages dryland farming research to reduce demand for water. Wants to research drilling wells into geological formations deeper than the Ogaliala aquifer.
This week: Repeated his position.

Under the heading of "Agriculture" the Eagle wrote about the Democrat:

Finney
Wants agriculture secretary elected by all voters. No other stated position on agricultural matters.
This week: Did not talk about it.

When "news" made was made under this format it tended to be news of positions taken, or views clarified. For example, under the heading of Taxes, the Eagle wrote:

Finney
Now is proposing that $460 million be raised by placing a 1 percent surcharge tax on up to 52 categories of good and services now exempt from sales taxes. Finney would use the money to provide for a 30 percent reduction in property taxes.
This week: Substantially changed her tax proposal Tuesday. Originally had proposed raising $800 million in new tax dollars by placing a 1 percent surcharge tax on up to 52 categories of good and services now exempt from sales tax. On Tuesday, she lowered that amount to $460 million. Would not say before the election which categories would be taxed. Would use the money to provide for 30 percent reduction in property taxes. Would no longer raise $180 million for state programs— money she has said was necessary to deal with a possible state revenue shortfall.79

Several things are worth noting about this scheme. First, any responsible newspaper would report a major change in a candidate's position on taxes. In this sense the Eagle's coverage was entirely conventional. What was different was the conscious display of issues and positions as the major theme of the campaign. If we think of the pages of the newspaper as a public space designed by journalists, then what the Eagle did is arrange this space so that the proper concerns of politics ("issues in depth") shone though. Time was also reconceived. "This week: Did not talk about it," is a fact generated by a particular way of imagining political time: as the weekly process by which the choices facing the state are (or are not) discussed by the candidates. The strategy theme contains its own conception of time: how the candidates are shaping their images, outmaneuvering each other, struggling to win as the "race" winds down.

"Where They Stand" was thus more than a handy voters guide, although it was also that. Fundamentally, it was an argument for what politics is supposed to be about: public concerns and public debate. It was a powerful use of political space, especially the threat of a blank appearing under a candidate's name. Deploying this threat was the Eagle's way of being "tough" on the candidates. Here, however, toughness doesn't becomes an end in itself, as so often happens in political reporting. A candidate can avoid the penalty of white space by cooperating in a process that will help voters make up their minds. The system is publicly announced and the rules are clear: say something meaningful about the key issues; we'll report it and keep reporting it. The journalist creates a system of incentives for political speakers, who are rewarded for taking the risk of genuine public dialogue and punished for declining it.

Such a system, consciously deployed, offers an alternative to both the excesses of the adversarial pose, where a contemptuous dismissal of all public statements is assumed to serve some public good, and the limitations of "balance," in which equal quotes from opposite sides is supposedly the desired norm.80 Both practices refuse to be discriminating in their judgments about political speech. The Eagle's approach does discriminate, but on a principle that is announced and defensible: political talk should address our most important public concerns.

However—and this is an important qualifier—the public's immediate concerns may not include everything that is of genuine public concern. By starting where citizens start, the Eagle created a new challenge for itself: not to end where citizens end, not to assume, for example, that candidates won't display vision and enterprise by going beyond "the issues" to speak to deeper truths— deeper, perhaps, than people presently want to hear. The challenge to the Eagle was to remain open to this possibility, and to keep in mind that citizens are not gods, their vision not unfailing. Political reporting cannot be reduced to a restatement of their concerns. But surely it can begin there, which was the point of the Eagle's experiment: to address the "disconnect" between public concerns and political dialogue.

Merritt's answer was a redirection of the newspaper's various and subtle powers—for example, the power to name and frame public issues, to view events through a particular lens, to arrange public space and define public time. These are forms of power journalists routinely deploy but rarely discuss. The Eagle learned to become self-conscious about them in order to alter their use; in the process it also redefined what campaign journalism was "for." Not a savvy take on a degrading spectacle, but a useful handle on problems and choices is what the Eagle aimed to provide. The paper had an aspiration for Kansans: that they be able to experience politics through the identity of the deliberating citizen.

In a post-election survey financed by Knight-Ridder, readers said that the most useful features were the "Where They Stand" box and the in-depth explorations of issues. Horse-race coverage, often touted by journalists as a way to make the story exciting, ranked far down the list.81

A further (and more radical) experiment in "connectedness" came two years later, when the Eagle launched the "People Project."82 It drew upon the insight that the troubles with politics, and journalism, went far deeper than elections and campaign coverage. Politics didn't seem to address people's problems, and this meant that political journalism couldn't connect either, unless it revised its view of what "politics" was about. A definition built around government institutions was troublesome if these institutions were seen as out-of-touch or unable to solve problems. Ignoring what governments do was no solution. But neither could journalists avoid the widespread frustration with politics-as-usual, or the growing conviction that some problems are beyond government's capacity or domain.

The "People Project" tried to respond to these facts and revivify politics as a participatory drama. The experiment had a self-conscious and idealistic premise: that journalism could "empower people to take back control of their lives," as Merritt's initial planning memo read. The project began with 192 two-hour interviews with Wichita area residents, who were asked to speak about their lives, troubles, and fears, along with their perceptions of the political process. From these interviews, and from the Eagle's own observations, the following premises emerged, as outlined in Merritt's memo:

1. People feel alienated from many of the processes that affect their lives. The political process, the education system, the justice system are seen as incapable of resolving anything.
2. People see these issues as interrelated, inseparable and, perhaps, unsolvable.
3. People's response is to fall into frustration and anger, to drop out of the processes, to abandon community in a self-protective response, rather than seek solutions which they very much doubt exist.

Merritt was searching for a way to address public cynicism and despair without adding to it, on the one hand, or whitewashing reality, on the other. From one perspective, the idea that average citizens can "take back control" of institutional structures and social forces seems a bit naive, perhaps dangerously so. It can lead to a kind of mythmaking, where the realities of power and influence are obscured by the charged rhetoric of "empowerment." But from another perspective, journalists have every reason to emphasize the citizen's ability to act, to take seriously the notion of "self-government" as the living root of democracy. A journalism so "realistic" that it sees through everything risks persuading people that politics is a farce, government a joke, rhetoric a sham, leadership an illusion, change a mirage. This is a journalism that by succeeding becomes defeatist and self-canceling — in a word, absurd. For if all these things are true we don't need journalists and their daily reports. Indeed, we have no use for democratic politics because problems and systems are clearly beyond our control.

It was just this fear—that public problems have gotten beyond us—that came through in the background interviews the Eagle conducted. In trying to counter public hopelessness, the "People Project" was not a utopian exercise at all, but a clear-eyed and hardheaded probe for a way to restore journalism's relevance. Merritt outlined the aims of his project as follows:

1. Recognize the frustrations and explain the reasons for them, including the core, often competing values that stand in the way of solutions.
2. Give readers hundreds of places where they can get a handle on problems through the existing, non-government mechanisms.
3. Elicit from readers, and print, their ideas for other mechanisms and solutions.
4. Summarize it all and produce a...reprint that would be distributed to non-subscribers through various devices...
5. Encourage, or, with a partner, actively cause continued involvement at various levels.

The "People Project" became a ten-week package of articles, service features, community events and "idea exchanges" sponsored by the Eagle and several broadcast partners. Its purpose was to persuade Wichita that at least some public problems were actionable, and that the actor didn't have to be government. Thus, the subtitle of the project: "Solving it Ourselves." In a front page column Merritt described the initiative as a "collaborative effort to give shape and momentum to your voices and ideas, with the goal of reasserting personal power and responsibility for what goes on around us." For ten weeks, Merritt wrote, the Eagle and its two partners, KSNW-TV and KNSS radio, would make the space and time available for "an informed community discussion of critical issues" from which "ideas about solutions can arise, as well as the commitment to carry out the solutions."

The "critical issues" emerged during background interviews as the most troubling to area residents. They included faltering schools, crime and the lure of gangs, political gridlock, and the stresses that built up on families and individuals trying to cope with competing demands. Each issue was the subject of a package of features in the Eagle, the bulk of them written by veteran reporter and longtime Wichita resident Jon Roe. Roe outlined the problem and what residents said about it in interviews; then he examined why the issue was so difficult to address, attempting to cut through the surface of conflict to what the paper called competing "core values." By encouraging readers to examine their deepest values, and those of other citizens, the paper hoped to "encourage a search for solutions among people with differing ideas," as Merritt put it.

For each of the major issues under discussion, the Eagle published a comprehensive list called "Places to Start," with the names, addresses and phone numbers of organizations and agencies working on the problem. Repeated invitations were made to readers to phone, write, fax or deliver in person their comments and suggestions for change. A series of "idea exchanges" were held at various public sites where concerned residents could connect with others like themselves, and meet with representatives of community and volunteer groups. A regular feature called "Success Stories" focused on individuals who took the initiative and were making a difference. The paper's broadcast partners produced parallel reports during the ten-week run of the project and provided on-air forums for the discussion of problems and potential answers.

The "People Project" was political journalism in a different key. The emphasis shifted from government, and its contending factions, to citizens and their ties to each other. The aim was to "connect" people to public life and its full range of voluntary organizations. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville called these groups "associations;" for him they represented the tensile strength of American democracy. The "People Project" thus drew on a long tradition of political thought, usually called civic republicanism, in which the ideal citizen is engaged with others through a rich web of local associations.

"At the heart of republicanism," writes E.J. Dionne, "is the belief that self government is not a drab necessity but a joy to be treasured. It is the view that politics is not simply a grubby confrontation of competing interests but an arena in which citizens can learn from each other and discover an 'enlightened self-interest' in common."83 By portraying Wichita as a civic culture rich with opportunities for mutual engagement, the Eagle made use of a power that is rarely visible in discussions of the press: the ability to render the political landscape in a particular way; in this case, as inhabitable by concerned residents willing to learn from each other and "get involved."

What were the results? As Merritt later wrote, "Kansas was not free of crime or health care problems and the schools did not visibly improve—nor had we anticipated any of that." There were a few hopeful signs: volunteerism in Wichita schools was up 37 percent when the school year opened. Circulation remained flat, but no jump was expected. In an annual survey by Knight Ridder, reader satisfaction rose 10 percent, the highest increase in the chain.84

Both of the original Wichita projects recognize that beyond "information," the press sends us an invitation to experience public life in one manner or another. Reflecting on what this invitation should say is the real innovation pioneered by Merritt and his colleagues. The experience should be participatory, the Eagle dared to assert. It should propose and deliver a useful dialogue about issues. It should address people in their capacity as citizens, in the hope of strengthening that capacity. It should try to make public life go well, in the sense of making good on democracy's promise. These "shoulds"—central to the mission of the press but far more peripheral to the media—would later form the core of public journalism as a philosophy. although they did not get much notice in the press coverage of the movement or the debates that it sparked. As Merritt later wrote:

Something intriguing and promising had happened. We had deliberately broken out of the passive and increasingly detrimental conventions of election coverage. We had, in effect, left the press box and gotten down on the field, not as a contestant but as a fair-minded participant with an open and expressed interest in the process going well. . . It was also a liberating moment, for me and the journalists at the Eagle. We no longer had to be the victims, along with the public, of a politics gone sour. We had a new purposefulness: revitalizing a moribund public process.85

Notes

74 See James K. Batten, "Newspapers and Communities" in Jay Rosen, Community-Connectedness: Passwords for Public Journalism, (St. Petersburg: Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 1993), p 14.

75 Davis Merritt, Jr., "A New Political Contract: Must Restore Meaning to Election Campaigns," Wichita Eagle, Nov. 13, 1988, p. 3B.

76 Davis Merritt, Jr., "Up Front, Here's Our Election Bias," Wichita Eagle, Sep. 9, 1990, p. 13A.

77 For an example of such an analysis, see William Safire, "The Double Wedge," New York Times, Feb. 23, 1995, p. A23.

78 This description is adapted from Steve Smith, "Your vote counts: The Wichita Eagle's election project," National Civic Review, Summer 1991, pp. 24-30 and Davis Merritt, Jr., Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News is Not Enough, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), chap. 7. See also Michael Hoyt, "The Wichita Experiment," Columbia Journalism Review, July. Aug. 1992, pp. 43-47; and John Bare, "Case Study-- Wichita and Charlotte: The Leap of a Passive Press to Activism," Media Studies Journal, Vol, 6, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 149-160.

79 Wichita Eagle, Oct. 7, 1990, p. 1D, 2D.

80 On the adversarial pose see Adam Gopnik's analysis of journalism's "culture of aggression" in his "Read All About It," The New Yorker, Dec. 12, 1994, pp. 84, 86-90, 92-94, 96, 98-102. On the limitations of "balance" see Davis Merritt, Jr., Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News is Not Enough, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), pp. 19-20.

81 Ibid., p. 82.

82 This description is adapted from the Wichita Eagle's special reprint, Solving it Ourselves: The People Project (Wichita: The Wichita Eagle and Beacon Publishing Company, 1992); Davis Merritt, Jr., Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News is Not Enough, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), pp. 84-86 and from various internal planning memos provided to me by Merritt.

83 E.J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).

84 Davis Merritt, Jr., Public Journalism and Public Life: Why Telling the News is Not Enough, (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995), p. 86.

85 Ibid., p. 83.

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