Journalists to Citizens: "Drop Dead!"
Who's afraid of "public journalism," and why?
By JAY ROSEN
"Excuse me while I run screaming from the room." So writes David Remnick of the New Yorker, alarmed about the rise of "public journalism," a small reform movement that has lately drawn attention from big guns in the press.
Set off by James Fallows' mild endorsement in "Breaking the News," the likes of Remnick, columnist Maureen Dowd and Howell Raines, editorial page editor of the New York Times, have taken aim at our suggestion that public-spirited journalists might assist in the repair and revival of civic life.
I say "our" because I have worked for several years with those who are pushing the idea forward. Now that the elite has pushed back with force we can see what's at stake: a self-image of the journalist as beyond "politics" and exempt from the very notion of reform.
Let's start with a summary. Public journalism says the press is in trouble. Why? Because its natural constituency is an engaged public, and the public today is less and less engaged -- in politics and in journalism. The loss of readers and viewers is one result, but the deeper loss is to citizens themselves. People don't see what they care about reflected in the polarized debates and predictable maneuverings of the political class. So they withdraw.
This disconnection between the public and its business is serious, but not untreatable. Journalists can respond by listening better to people's deepest concerns and framing the news accordingly. They can do more to help citizens get engaged, and to help communities have better discussions. The press can show imagination by investigating possible solutions; it can also reduce some its own cynicism. Reconnecting people to public life will take more than an aroused press, we know. But that's no excuse for not trying.
In Wichita and many other places, public journalism has meant election coverage grounded in a "citizen's agenda" -- culled from conversations with people about their lives, not their votes. In Charlotte, it's crime reporting that highlights what a neighborhood needs to tackle the problem, according to the people who live there. In Madison, it's a regular series of televised forums where citizens deliberate -- rather than just sound off -- about policy questions like land use, health care and government deficits. (Some have been hits in the ratings.) Dozens of other experiments show a similar approach: start where citizens start, then move toward the public arena with their concerns and ideas in hand.
According to its critics in the press, public journalism is a marketing gimmick for an industry unwilling to invest in quality news. It turns the press into a social service agency, distracting journalists from their real task, which is to print truth and raise hell. In its eagerness to "reconnect," the movement will either enslave the news to readers' desires, or devolve into boosterism. By interfering in public life, the press may undermine its independent status and ruin its credibility as an impartial observer.
These are apt warnings, and they can make for < href="http://tabletalk.salon1999.com/webx?13@@.ee7568f/0">a lively debate. But the elite critics aren't having any of that. Like a boss on a tirade, they want public journalism dismissed, immediately. Behind their bluster they're protecting something: a mental picture of the press as a bystander in public life, a political innocent with no world view, no investments and no motives beyond finding the truth.
The Left and the Right have mounted furious attacks on this self-image, but the press discounts their fury as politics-by-other means. Conservatives and leftists are perpetually upset because they want the story slanted their way. But the news isn't slanted anyone's way, says this view. It's just the news.
Dissatisfaction with journalism is thus misplaced grief about recent political history. As Dowd wrote: "Americans did not become disillusioned because the press distorted the workings of government, but because the press exposed the workings of government." In other words, it's not us, it's those lying creeps in the Pentagon and the White House, it's the spin doctors and the cover-up artists. "We don't need Mr. Fallows' version of 'public journalism,'" Dowd says. Those who want to think about journalism's role in a democracy should visit the Vietnam Memorial, she advises.
Her aim here -- amazingly high-handed -- is to associate Times-style journalism with the absolute innocence of soldiers sent to their deaths behind the Pentagon's lies. That was 25 years ago. To public journalism's suggestion that the press is implicated in democracy's current discontents, Dowd offers the names of the dead, and Remnick runs from the room. (This, by the way, is what it's like to argue with the elite press.)
Howell Raines, meanwhile, charges us with wanting to abandon a "high, independent and venerable calling." Reporters, he says, are called on to "forswear partisan advocacy, to be indifferent to the fortunes of individual candidates, to be agnostic as to public policy outcomes, to be dogged in the collection and delivery of information for its own sake." In other words, they believe in nothing, save their lonely quest for truth. No wonder Fallows sees the elite press as being in "deep denial."
What's being denied -- and it takes work -- is any image of the press as an influential player in political life; any duty to democracy that even mentions its possible repair; any suggestion that journalists have their own way of seeing the world, which they might, upon reflection, enlarge or revise; any civic purpose they might discover beyond telling the news and hounding the candidates. What's being denied to journalists is really their imaginations. "Leave reforms to the reformers," writes Max Frankel of the Times in his attempt to make public journalism go away.
But it won't go away, and for a simple reason. It's one of very few efforts to think creatively about the civic crisis and the crisis in journalism as one problem. That doesn't mean it's right, or even on the right track. But it does mark a serious intellectual divide between those in the press who say "we're players and we're implicated," and those who cry: "it ain't us, it's them."
Scarier still, this divide runs straight through the New York Times. As Katharine Q. Seelye, a Times reporter, wrote: "Modern American culture is loud and adversarial, and politics reflects the culture. And the ever-adversarial, conflict-seeking press helps shape the politics."
Our point exactly. And if the press "helps shape the politics" we have, then how can it shape the politics we need? This is the question public journalism has placed on the table. The boss can stomp and scream, or head for the door, but the question is there, along with enterprising journalists who are eager to keep asking it.
Jay Rosen is associate professor of journalism at New York University and director of the Project on Public Life and the Press.
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