“… If you can’t do both, get out of the business”

We are cynical to too large an extent about the world around us – or despairing. We are cynical about the internal trends within the media. We are profoundly conservative about change within our own institution. We suffer from that famous cop syndrome in ways we don’t even want to accept, in which it is us against them, in which we  understand and they  don’t. We  protect while they  attack. We are the players who have to deal with the slop of the world, so why don’t they love us for picking up after them?

We have arrived at a time in which those for whom we profess to speak do not seem to believe that we actually do speak for them – for the people for whom the whole point of this exercise is focused. They tune out of politics, they tune out of the news, they tune out of community in ways that are perplexing because this is precisely the time when so many indicators suggest that they ought to be tuning in.

And we meet in the right city for our enterprise. It is a place where too many people in public life have forgotten why they got in, if they ever knew, and where, in fact, too many of us, brothers and sisters, look upon our endeavor with a smirk of knowing cynicism. In which our conversation, rather than being about that which can be done, is about that which we think we already know cannot be done.

We know the questions, don’t we? We know the answers. We are so knowing that we no longer indicate to our people whom we allegedly serve that we care about question or answer. We are simply “players,” as in the fine movie of the same name.

And here comes Jim Batten and Jay Rosen and Ed Fouhy and Poynter and Pew and Kettering and a host of others saying that it’s not too late. Cynicism is not enough. Conservatism will kill us and there is an opportunity here that we must seize.

We are people who constantly say to others: you only go where the wind blows. We say to them: you’re not leaders, you’re followers. We say to them: you are afraid to experiment. Let us look in the mirror. We have an amazing failure of nerve when it comes to one of the best ideas for reinvigoration of an old idea that you could imagine.

We debate as though we honestly believe that we can’t chew gum and walk down the steps at the same time, that we cannot involve people in the process and at the same time speak truth to power. Think about that. We do not trust ourselves enough to say that we can do those two things simultaneously.

We fear some new contamination. We fear that we may become embroiled in the projects of others and be incapable of speaking truth about them. As an old publisher, as an old editor, as an old player in community, I say we are kidding ourselves. We are already participants, whether it’s the New York Times  sending children off to fresh air fund retreats and never asking whether that doesn’t divert resources from something more valuable or whether it’s me at the Chamber of Commerce meeting committing myself as publisher to Project A instead of Project B.

This is all the normal part and parcel of what we’re about. The problem is that those with whom we commit this act of supposed sin are those who are already the beneficiaries of society. What civic journalism says is let us reconnect with those who are not now on the beat system, who are not already those anointed with power, with standing, with prestige, with an avenue or voice. Civic journalism says let us listen to the people and let us give them voice and let us hear what they have to say about those we routinely cover.

God knows there’s nothing more fun than playing the game the way we play it. We love it. We are players, we get to believe that we are important in the process of governance. We get to believe that we are part of a team, we are the fourth branch of government. We are everything, of course, except what the people would like us to be: an adequate voice and conduit for them, a megaphone for those without their own.

I ran a very small-town paper. I believe it can be safely said that the editorial policy I ran was not designed to make friends of the majority of my readers or the society in which I lived. But I can assure you, I found no contradiction between kicking ass on the editorial page and being involved in that community in a way that brought us the highest penetration of our circulation area of any paper in that state. You can look it up. Because we told that community we cared and we listened to that community while we kicked ass. If you can’t do them both, get out of the business.

We are parts of an organism, we are parts of a process, we are parts of something living, not sterile, not textbook, not detached.

Robin MacNeil really wrote something I’d like to quote: “We have to remember as journalists that we may be observers, but we are not totally disinterested observers. We are not social engineers, but each one of us has a stake in the health of this democracy. Democracy and the social contract that makes it work are held together by a delicate web of trust and all of us in journalism hold edges of the web. We are not just amused bystanders watching the idiots screw it up.”

This is not theology and it’s not ideology. It’s common sense. We do try too often to play the Wizard of Oz to our readers. In any case, it is time to remind them that while we may not be very good wizards, we would like to be good people, that we would like to be good citizens, that we would like to be part of the process in which they live, not just the process of those who have the power, but those who are touched by power.

We are, or should be, responsible corporations, just as we demand such responsibility from all other corporations. We are citizens, benefiting as no other business does from the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is actually about people and their   voices more than about ours. We are businesses with a stake in our immediate environment, we are political animals, we are citizens in the sense that we have an absolute stake in the future of this nation.

I want to close with something sort of corny that Dad once wrote in a book called Their Words Were Bullets,  about the duty of the press. He said it was to make men ashamed, to make men proud and to keep men free.

You can’t do that, folks, at the other end of the microscope.