Research: Civic Journalism Reflects Old and New Traditions

“He did more than editorialize that someone should undertake the project. Instead, he used his Pennsylvania Gazette to bring together fire officials, citizens and public officials and they successfully designed and enacted a plan for a city fire department,” according to Assistant Professor Mike Dillon of Duquesne University.
The editor was Ben Franklin and the time was more than 250 years ago. Dillon compares Franklin’s campaign for a fire department to recent civic journalism projects in Charlotte and Wichita that “have sought to serve as a point of connection between diverse segments of the community – with the ultimate aim of shaping public policy – rather than as mere conduits for information about the community.”

Dillon’s academic paper on the historical roots of the civic journalism movement was presented last October to a symposium, “Public Journalism: A Critical Forum,” at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Dillon told the gathering that most proponents and critics of the civic journalism movement of the 1990’s were unaware of its roots. It’s not just old wine in a new bottle, or a version of muckraking or the new journalism, he said. But, as a product of its times, it reflects some old traditions.

“Civic journalism taps into time-honored values of American journalism that reach back far beyond the Age of Objectivity. The core principle of civic journalism – that journalists have a duty to enhance civic discourse and provide reasoned guidance to the public in civic affairs – can be found in the words and deeds of Benjamin Franklin, James Gordon Bennett, Horace Greeley, E.W. Scripps, Joseph Pulitzer, William Allen White, Upton Sinclair and other pioneers of the American press,” Dillon said.

Dozens of monographs were presented at the symposium, which gathered journalism educators from around the country and abroad. The papers ranged from Dillon’s on the historical and philosophical roots of civic journalism to present-day experiments in Russia, Swaziland and New Zealand. The participants divided over the merits of civic journalism, and a few painted the movement with such a broad brush – either good or evil – that civic journalists would not have recognized the results.

Several participants traced the roots of the debate to a philosophical battle of the 1920’s when Walter Lippmann wrote Public Opinion. Lippmann argued for an enlightened journalistic elite to guide the masses, and the philosopher John Dewey responded that Lippmann’s book was “the most profound indictment of democracy ever written.” For a democracy to work, Dewey wrote, required the “participation of every mature being in the formation of values that regulate the living of men together.”

Dr. Raul Reis of California State University noted that while “media academics” look to such philosophers as Dewey or Jurgen Habermas (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1989) for theoretical justifications, “professional journalists’ minds are set in a very pragmatic, goal-oriented way. They scrutinize their own professional experiences to detect where both the mistakes and the promising ‘cracks in the system’ are.” He added that both groups are struggling to define a new way of doing journalism.

Conference Highlights

Excerpts from other presentations at the conference:

• “Opponents of public journalism, mainly in the newspaper industry, insist on clinging to hackneyed ideas of objectivity and detachment, but the fact must be faced that any choice represents a decision.” Recurring Questions, Renewed Perspective by Greg Selber, University of Texas.

• “It is true that ‘objectivity’ has been criticized (and placed with suspicious quotation marks) by cultural relativists, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, new historicists, radical feminists, social constructionists and other academics who deny a clear contrast between truth and fiction. But working journalists daily confront the recalcitrance of the real world. The house on the corner of Second and Elm either burned down last night or it didn’t. President Clinton either wants to cut Social Security or he doesn’t…No amount of exposure to postmodern theory will persuade news editors that truth and fiction are indistinguishable in these cases. Public journalists …can (and should) accept a rigorous commitment to accuracy. Their quarrel with mainstream journalists is about selection of stories and allocation of resources, not about ‘truth’…Public journalists argue that reporters should stop taking direction from official press releases and news conferences and start pursuing the voters’ agenda.” The Press in a Deliberative Democracy: On Public Journalism and its Critics by Peter Levine, University of Maryland.

• (On a survey of 143 editorial writers) “Many responses focused on key concepts that seem to have become stereotypical representations of public journalism. For instance, the idea that public journalism places no value on measured, fair reporting and in fact favors no-holds-barred advocacy is one example. Clearly this is an exaggeration, but it is a vision that seems lodged in the minds of many journalists nonetheless. Another example is the belief that public journalism bends too far to accommodate readers and viewers, thereby sacrificing editorial focus and independence. This is clearly another exaggeration. And it reflects an elitist mindset, which public journalists point to as a root cause of much public cynicism toward both politicians and the media.” Defining Public Journalism: The Editorialist’s Perspective by Camille Kraeplin.

• “Televised politics cultivate a false sense of civic involvement…Public journalism faces an enormous task…To succeed, it needs to challenge the fundamental, pervasive message of the media in general and television in particular…that citizens cannot or need not be actively involved…(and) must provide the opportunity, means, and motives for actual – not armchair – participation.” Bigger Than Both of Us: What Public Journalists Can Learn From Cultivation Theory by Kathryn B. Campbell, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

• “Whether for good or evil, we will find ourselves marching in orderly and harmonious fashion into some kind of neo-authoritarianism under the banners of social responsibility …The image of this Brave New World is gaining popularity.” Social Order Banners Are Being Hoisted: Are We Ready To March? by John C. Merrill, University of Missouri.

• “Even if we avoid inflammatory comparisons of communitarianism with Nazism and Bolshevism, its external similarities with fascism cannot be ignored… ” Public Journalism as Postmodern Phenomenon by Debra Reddin van Tuyll, University of South Carolina.

• “Traditional newspaper publishers seem to be more likely to practice cheaper journalism than the citizen-based journalism publishers.” Is Public Journalism Cheap Journalism? by David O. Loomis, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

• “Broadcasters committed to public journalism devoted more air time to policy issues and less to campaign tactics than those pursuing conventional election coverage, but the differences in coverage were so small that they almost uniformly fell short of statistical significance.” Public Journalism Through the Television Lens: How Did the Broadcast Media Perform in Campaign ’96? by Scott Maier, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Deborah Potter, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

• “Public journalism’s detractors criticize it as community cheerleading, pandering to readers or failure of journalistic professionalism. Supporters laud it as reconnection to the community, respecting readers as citizens and recognizing that journalists, too, are members of the communities they serve.” Public Journalism’s Incubator: Identifying Preconditions for Support by John R. Bender, and Charlyne Berens, University of Nebraska.

• “The press’s commitment to the concept of objectivity, its notions about the sanctity and newsworthiness of official pronouncements, its devotion to polls and dramatic narrative, the heed it pays to the process of government, and its penchant for heightening discord by focusing on polarities are as entrenched in American newsrooms as the Russian tsars once were in the Winter Palace. To suggest that journalists relinquish their role as observers and become agents of change; to pay as much if not more heed to the average citizen as to the mayor; to abandon the idea of winners and losers in the coverage of public issues is to inject a kind of Bolshevism into the newsroom…The revolution in Norfolk is over. The Bolsheviks have hunkered down. A new – albeit benevolent – tsar has taken up residence in the Winter Palace.” Public Journalism: A Case Study of the Virginian-Pilot by Joyce Hoffman, Old Dominion University.

• “What is often missing in contemporary journalism is the reader. He or she is considered the vital end-unit of the production process, but only as a potential consumer…We can be sure that we have reached a crisis when it even occurs to us that it might be necessary to append the word Civic to the word Journalism.” Present Tense, Past Tense: Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Public Journalism by Mike Dillon, Duquesne University.