The Pursuit of Public Journalism

Theory, Practice and Criticism

Tanni Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135866549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Giornalismo

The Pursuit of Public Journalism is an engaging introduction to the theoretical foundations and practices of the journalistic reform movement known as 'public journalism.' Public journalism - stated briefly - seeks to reinvest journalism with its fundamental responsibilities to democracy and public life. This book argues against many deeply ingrained practices ranging from journalistic detachment to framing stories via polar conflict in favor of greater civic involvement on the part of journalists.

Tanni Haas traces the historical context in which public journalism emerged, develops a philosophy for public journalism, reviews empirical research on public journalism's performance to date and responds to the major criticisms directed at public journalism. He also examines the particular challenges that public journalism poses to curriculum and instruction: how can journalism educators teach students to write stories useful and of concern to citizens, and how can they encourage citizens to publicly criticize news coverage of given topics? Following review of the major challenges and criticisms of public journalism, the author offers practical solutions for improving public journalism and speculates on public journalism's likely future.

One

The Emergence of Public Journalism

The journalistic notion known as “public journalism” is a multifaceted phenomenon. It simultaneously represents, as Jay Rosen (1995, p. v), one of public journalism’s founding scholarly advocates, puts it: (1) “an argument [italics added] about where the press should be going,” (2) “a set of practices [italics added] that have been tried in real-life settings,” and (3) “a movement [italics added] of people and institutions concerned about the possibilities for reform.” In this introductory chapter, I provide a broad overview and discussion of public journalism as a journalistic notion. In so doing, I touch upon many of the topics that will be explored more fully in subsequent chapters. Following Rosen’s tripartite distinction, I outline public journalism’s basic arguments and their historical roots, describe how public journalism manifests in practice, including examining some of the earliest and most influential public journalism initiatives, and consider the individuals and institutions most responsible for the emergence and subsequent development of public journalism as a journalistic reform movement.

I begin by outlining public journalism’s basic arguments, focusing particular attention on what some of its founding scholarly and journalistic advocates—notably Jay Rosen, Davis Merritt, and Arthur Charity—have said about the relationship between journalism and democracy, how journalists should conceive of the public, and what role journalists should play in public life. Next, I trace the historical roots of these arguments from the famous debate between journalist Walter Lippman and philosopher John Dewey in the 1920s, through the reports of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press in the 1940s and 1950s and several theoretical and empirical works on deliberative democracy in the 1990s, to the much-criticized 1988 U.S. presidential election. Then, I describe how public journalism manifests in practice. After a brief overview of the practice of public journalism, I examine in more detail some of the earliest and most influential public journalism initiatives, notably those by the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer , the Columbus, Georgia, Ledger-Enquirer, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Wichita (Kansas) Eagle, and the Wisconsin State Journal. Following this discussion of the theory and practice of public journalism, I consider the role played by various individuals and institutions in the emergence and subsequent development of public journalism as a journalistic reform movement, including the Kettering Foundation, Knight-Ridder, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, the Project on Public Life and the Press, and the Public Journalism Network. I conclude by outlining the structure and argument of subsequent chapters.

Basic Arguments

While public journalism, as Rosen (1995) correctly notes, needs to be understood both in terms of what has been said and done in its name, its founding scholarly and journalistic advocates—Rosen included—have arguably failed to clearly articulate public journalism as a journalistic philosophy in its own right. Indeed, one of this book’s central arguments is that public journalism is in need of a guiding “public philosophy.” In the next chapter, I take on the challenge of developing such a public philosophy.

Despite this general lack of theoretical development and specificity, the writings of some of public journalism’s founding scholarly and journalistic advocates do contain certain broad-based arguments that help distinguish public journalism from conventional, mainstream journalism. Most fundamentally, advocates argue that public journalism is based upon the underlying assumption that journalism and democracy are intrinsically linked, if not mutually dependent. While advocates acknowledge that the practice of journalism depends upon certain democratic protections, most notably freedom from government intervention, they maintain that a genuine democracy depends upon a form of journalism that is committed to promoting active citizen participation in democratic processes (see, for example, Charity, 1995; Merritt, 1998; Rosen, 1999a). Conventional, mainstream journalism’s lack of commitment to such citizen participation, advocates argue, has contributed to widespread withdrawal by citizens from democratic processes, as manifested by declining voter participation in political elections and, more generally, by declining civic participation in local community affairs. It also has contributed to declining public interest in, and perceived relevance of, journalistically mediated political information, as evidenced by declining newspaper readership. Put differently, advocates perceive contemporary society as being riven by two widening, but not irreversible, gaps: between citizens and government and between news organizations and their audiences. To help alleviate, or at least reduce, those gaps, advocates argue that journalists should see their primary responsibility as one of stimulating increased civic commitment to, and active citizen participation in, democratic processes. As Glasser and Lee (2002, p. 203) put it, “Public journalism rests on the simple but apparently controversial premise that the purpose of the press is to promote and indeed improve, and not merely report on and complain about, the quality of public or civic life.” Rosen (1998, p. 54) makes a similar point, arguing that journalists should “help form [italics added] as well as inform [italics added] the public.”

While advocates maintain that journalism’s primary responsibility is to promote active citizen participation in democratic processes, they have failed to make clear which particular form(s) of democracy journalism should help promote. In one of the only explicit, but still exceedingly vague, statements on this topic, Merritt (1998, p. 142) merely notes that public journalism “does not seek to join with or substitute itself for government.…[I]t seeks to keep citizens in effective contact with the governing process.” Despite this lack of theoretical specificity, the actual practice of public journalism suggests that its newsroom practitioners are committed to a form of deliberative democracy that combines features of representative and direct-participatory democracy. More specifically, newsroom practitioners appear to be committed to a form of deliberative democracy in which government officials are held accountable to the citizenry and in which the citizenry actively participates in local community affairs.

While news organizations practicing public journalism, as I will subsequently describe in more detail, have done much to challenge prevailing election reporting practices—for example, by focusing their coverage on problems of concern to voters rather than on the campaign agendas of candidates for office, soliciting voter-generated questions about what the candidates are planning to do to address those problems and publicizing candidates’ responses, and organizing various voter-candidate encounters—news organizations have also done much to promote active citizen participation in local community affairs; for example, by focusing their coverage on problems of concern to local residents, elaborating on what residents themselves can do to address those problems, and sponsoring various temporary and more permanent sites for deliberation and problem solving, including roundtable discussions, town hall meetings, and local civic organizations. In the next chapter, I return to the question of which form(s) of democracy journalism should help promote by articulating a problem-solving model for public journalism. Specifically, I argue that, rather than casting this question as a choice between representative and direct-participatory forms of democracy, journalists should carefully consider (in a contextually sensitive manner) which kinds of intervention—governmental or citizen-based—would best help address given problems under investigation.

Aside from failing to make clear which form(s) of democracy journalism should help promote, advocates have neglected to consider how journalists should conceive of public discourse. While the public journalism literature abounds with references to journalists’ responsibility for facilitating public discourse, it is unclear whether journalists should conceive of public discourse as “face-to-face dialogue” and/or as “mass-mediated deliberation.” Although the actual practice of public journalism, as noted above, shows that both are integral to journalists’ work, advocates have not make clear what the proper relationship is between them. Again, in one of the only explicit, but still exceedingly vague, statements on this topic, Merritt (1998, p. 97) merely notes that public journalism depends upon journalists’ “ability and willingness to provide relevant information and a place for that information to be discussed and turned into democratic consent.” This lack of specificity also manifests itself, as I shortly discuss in more detail, in advocates’ references to contrasting conceptions of public discourse found in the theoretical literature on deliberative democracy.

To help further a deliberative democracy, whether understood in representative and/or direct-participatory terms, advocates argue that journalists would need to change the ways in which they traditionally have conceived of the public and of their own role in public life. Instead of perceiving the public as “thrill-seeking spectators” (Rosen, 1996, p. 49) who only attend to the news to be entertained by the political spectacle, or even as “consumers” (Merritt, 1998, p. 140) who attend to the news to be informed about the deliberations and actions of government officials, experts, and other elite actors, journalists should perceive of the public as engaged and responsible “citizens” (Charity, 1995, p. 12) who are interested in and capable of active democratic participation. These and countless other similar statements in the public journalism literature mirror Carey’s (1987, p. 14) often-cited argument that the public “will begin to reawaken when they are addressed as conversational partners and are encouraged to join the talk rather than sit passively as spectators before a discussion conducted by journalists and experts.” Implicit in this argument is the claim that conventional, mainstream journalism’s tendency to focus election reporting on campaign-managed events, candidates’ strategies and image-management techniques, and whose-ahead-and-whose-behind horse race polls, and, more generally, scandal-ridden news coverage, positions the public as mere spectators to a political spectacle. At best, conventional, mainstream journalism’s efforts to inform the public about elite deliberations and actions suggest that the democratic process is one in which the public itself need not be actively involved. While public journalism’s founding scholarly and journalistic advocates have done little to theorize the nature of the public beyond arguing that journalists should perceive the public as active participants in, as opposed to passive spectators to, democratic processes, there has been some subsequent scholarly debate about whether public journalism’s understanding of the public should be embedded within a communitarian or a liberal democratic framework. In the next chapter, I take issue with both of these possibilities as well as outline a third, arguably more viable, option: Habermas’s (1989) proceduralist-discursive notion of the “deliberating public.”

Second, and equally important, advocates argue that journalists would need to reconceive their own role in public life. Instead of perceiving them selves as disinterested (or neutral) observers who occupy a privileged position above, or detached from, citizens and their particular concerns, journalists should perceive themselves as “political actors” (Rosen, 1996, p. 22) or “fair-minded participants” (Merritt, 1998, p. 7) who care about whether public life goes well. As Rosen (1996, p. 63) puts it, “If journalists are to have any sort of critical voice or challenging role within a community, they must live in some fashion as members of that community. The force of their reporting will originate not in the distance they keep but in the connection they make to the real aspirations and daily struggles of the people they report on.” Indeed, Rosen (1996, p. 6) argues that journalists should acknowledge that journalism represents a “political institution [that] has a legitimate stake in whether politics works for all or becomes the professional playground of a privileged few.” Implicit in this argument is the claim that the increasing professionalization of journalism, with its virtually exclusive focus on the agendas and perspectives of elite actors, has distanced journalists from the concerns of ordinary citizens.

Ironically, despite advocates’ call for journalists to acknowledge, as Rosen (1996, p. 22) puts it, that they are “political actors,” advocates have spent more energy delineating what journalists should not—as opposed to should—do in the interest of remaining politically neutral. Specifically, advocates have argued, as I discuss in more detail in the next chapter, that journalists should be concerned with the processes, but not with the outcomes, of citizen deliberation; refrain from endorsing particular politicians, candidates for office, and political proposals; and avoid partnering with special interest groups that seek to further particular political interests. Taking issue with these and other stipulations, I argue that, under conditions of widespread social inequality, journalists should be concerned with whether both the processes and outcomes of citizen deliberation serve the interests of marginalized social groups; endorse politicians, candidates for office, and political proposals that would promote those interests; and partner with special interest groups that seek to further their particular interests.

Historical Roots

Although public journalism is a relatively recent journalistic notion, with scholarly and journalistic writings on this topic dating back to the early 1990s, its basic arguments have deep historical roots. Beginning with the famous debate between journalist Walter Lippmann and philosopher John Dewey in the 1920s, scholars trace public journalism’s underpinnings to the reports of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press in the 1940s and 1950s as well as to several theoretical and empirical works on deliberative democracy in the 1990s.

Public journalism advocates’ central arguments that journalists should perceive citizens as active participants in, as opposed to passive spectators to, democratic processes as well as assume a more proactive role in public life themselves can be traced back historically to the Progressive Era and, more precisely, to the 1920s debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey about the role and responsibility of journalism in a democratic society. In Public Opinion and The Phantom Public, Lippmann (1922, 1925) argued that the political problems of modern society are of a scale and complexity that make it impossible for citizens to participate actively in its governance. At best, citizens would be able to elect political leaders who, with the help of well-informed experts, could communicate the results of their deliberations and actions through journalists to the citizenry. Journalism’s primary responsibility, Lippmann thus argued, is to translate the technical deliberations and actions of political leaders and experts into a publicly accessible language to inform, as best as possible, a citizenry incapable of governing itself.

In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey (1927) took issue with Lippmann’s (1922, 1925) elitist (or expert-based) model of democracy by calling for a more involved citizenry via a more active role for journalism. Dewey argued that the modern means of mass communication, notably the daily newspaper, offer an unprecedented opportunity for journalists to help bring a deliberative public into being. The daily newspaper, Dewey emphasized, provided the opportunity to widen the arena of learning by educating the public about political problems, helping form the public by reporting on the connections between political decisions and their consequences, and assisting the public with acting on its understandings. Thus, Dewey concluded, modern means of mass communication offer the possibility of creating a “great community” where the public can both learn about and actively participate in democratic governance. For Dewey, as for public journalism’s founding scholarly and journalistic advocates, democracy represents, as Glasser and Craft (1998, p. 207) put it, “a way of life and not merely…a form of government.” (For references to the importance of Dewey’s work to public journalism, see, for example, Bybee, 1999; Coleman, 1997; Perry, 2003.)

The Lippmann–Dewey debate was revived in large part by the late Professor James Carey of Columbia University, whose works, in turn, inspired some of public journalism’s founding scholarly and journalistic advocates, including Professor Jay Rosen of New York University and former editor of the Wichita Eagle Davis Merritt. Indeed, Rosen (1999b, p. 24) has gone as far as to state that “the world’s shortest definition of public journalism is actually three words: ‘what Dewey meant.’” In a series of articles widely cited in the public journalism literature and circulated among its newsroom practitioners, Carey argued that, if journalists were to help stimulate citizens to participate more actively in democratic processes, they would need to move from a Lippmannesque “journalism of information” to a Deweyan “journalism of conversation” (see Carey, 1987, 1993, 1995). That is, instead of perceiving themselves as disseminators of “expert information,” journalists should perceive themselves as facilitators of “public conversation.”

The democratic ideals underlying Dewey’s (1927) vision were brought to bear more directly on journalism in the works of the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press. In its report A Free and Responsible Press, the Hutchins Commission (1947, pp. 21–28) concluded that journalism should: (1) “provide a truthful, comprehensive and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning,” (2) “serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism,” (3) “project a representative picture of the constituent groups in society,” (4) “be responsible for the presentation and clarification of the goals and values of society,” and (5) “provide full access to the day’s intelligence.” These ideals, which subsequently were summarized by three of the Hutchins Commission’s members as the “social responsibility theory” of the press in the report Four Theories of the Press (see Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956), can, as many scholars have noted, be seen to undergird public journalism advocates’ arguments about journalists’ responsibilities vis–à–vis the public (see, for example, Gunaratne, 1998; Lambeth, 1998; Delli Carpini, 2005). Aside from these early historical influences, several theoretical and empirical works on deliberative democracy published in the 1990s—notably those by James Fishkin, Daniel Yankelo-vitch, Richard Harwood, and Robert Putnam—have had a strong impact on public journalism’s founding scholarly and journalistic advocates.

Advocates’ understanding of what constitutes genuine public discourse owes much to the influence of the theoretical works of James Fishkin and Daniel Yankelovitch. In Democracy and Deliberation, Fishkin (1991) outlined a proposal for how a more direct-participatory form of democracy could be furthered within large-scale, complex societies. In explicit opposition to conventional public opinion polls, Fishkin advocated the development of so-called deliberative opinion polls in which statistically representative, random samples of citizens would be brought together and offered opportunities to deliberate, both in small groups and as a plenum, about given political problems over an extended period of time. Such deliberative opinion polls, which subsequently have been implemented numerous times both in the United States and abroad, would thus “provide the possibility of recreating the conditions of the face-to-face society in a manner that serves democracy in the large nation-state” (Fishkin, 1991, pp....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Emergence of Public Journalism
• 2. A Public Philosophy for Public Journalism
• 3. The Empirical Research on Public Journalism
• 4. Scholarly and Journalistic Criticisms of Public Journalism
• 5. Citizens and Elite Actors in Public Journalism
• 6. The Consensus Conference Model as a Public Journalism Tool
• 7. The Practice of Public Journalism Worldwide
• 8. From Public Journalism to the Public‘s Journalism?
• Bibiliography
• Index