Why “the Informed Citizen” is Too Much to Ask – and Not Enough

Excerpts from the keynote address of journalism scholar and author Michael Schudson, Professor of Communication and Sociology, at the University of California-San Diego, at the Batten Symposium, May 3, in Minneapolis. Schudson is a former Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. His most recent work, “The Good Citizen, a History of American Civic Life,” explores four stages of citizenship: the virtuous citizen, the partisan citizen, the informed citizen and the rights-conscious citizen.

As citizens, we should learn not to accept any analysis that tells us the game is over, that the world can’t get better, because the corporations have the politicians in their pockets, or because the corporations run the media, or because technology dictates certain outcomes, or because capitalism is an unstoppable dynamo, or because ethnic and racial hatred runs deeper even than capitalism.

Of course, you’d have to be crazy not to acknowledge the power of technology and money and hate. But, if that’s all there is, then we’d have no civil rights movement, we’d have no women’s movement, we’d have no fall of communism. And we’d also have no civic journalism.

My hopefulness is based on more than a general faith in the capacity of human beings to perversely violate our best predictions. It’s based also on my understanding of the American past and the ways that American citizenship has changed over the past 200 years.

We have moved through four different routes to civic participation…But we tend to be obsessed, I think, with one of the four models of American citizenship, the one we know as “the informed citizen.” The citizen who takes an interest in and participates in government, within norms of equality and the rule of law, is indeed the heart and soul of democracy. But this is not the same thing as what we’ve taken to calling “the informed citizen.”

“The informed citizen” is a very specific late 19th-century, Progressive-era invention with a troubling dark side of its own, with an unrealizable and therefore demoralizing ambitiousness, and with a strong contempt within it for other models of citizenship that can still serve us well.

Being well-informed, I think, is too much to ask of our fellow citizens and, at the same time, not nearly enough.

It’s hard for a teacher to say this, just as it may be hard for a journalist to agree to it, but it must be said: The link between information and democracy is not as tight as we’ve made it out to be. It is important. It is not all important. It did not dominate the imaginations of our founding fathers.

In the world of colonial Virginia,…the job of the voter – that is, the white male owning property – was to do no more than affirm the right to rule of the solid citizens of the community…There were no parties. There were no nominations.

Many journalists, like many Americans in general, have views of American history that are, to historians’ views, something like creationism is to science. Editorial writers, by and large, are creationists. God and Tom Jefferson brought forth on our continent a nation conceived in liberty and equality and our job since has been to work out the details.

It’s not so. The founders experienced a very different world and assumed a very different model of the good citizen. Their good citizen was a citizen of deference, a citizen who knew his place. That was “the virtuous citizen.” That’s stage one.

There’s something to learn from that sense of trust in others in one’s community. But we didn’t stop there.

A second era began roughly in the 1820s, in which the good citizen knew not his place but his party and was loyal to it.

At the end of the 19th century the era of “the informed citizen” begins. The Mugwump reforms sought to make elections educational and the Progressives after them tried to insulate the independent rational citizen from the distorting enthusiasms, as they saw it, of the political parties. It is to them that we owe the ideal of “the informed citizen,” and not, I think, to the founding fathers.

The ideal of “the informed citizen” has been, in part, an ideal of a restricted educated franchise. The ideal of “the informed citizen” has been directly and explicitly a rejection of partisan politics, of machine politics, of a politics intertwined and inextricable from every-day social life and social relations.

The idea of “the informed citizen” created essentially impossible intellectual demands on the ordinary citizen.

But a fourth stage developed, “the rights-conscious citizen,” that brought the courthouse as well as the polling place within the purview of the ordinary citizen as an arena for civic participation. Political movements and political organizations that in the past had only legislator points of access to political power now found that the judicial system offered an alternative route to their goals.

Indeed, at least one legal scholar has gone so far as to urge that a citizen has not only an obligation to vote but an obligation to sue. And actually, I agree with this.

…Let me share one telling statistic. In 1935 the Supreme Court handed down 160 decisions and two concerned civil liberties and civil rights. In 1989, the Court decided 132 cases and fully half of them, 66, concerned civil liberties.

Now, I think if the story I tell here of these four stages of American citizenship is correct, there are some lessons in it for civic journalism. One is that rights is not the opposite of community and rights is not the opposite of civility…Rights consciousness can be leveraged.

…The discrete and insular minority will always be a minority. And so it needs more than the legislative branch above it. It needs the courts to protect it from majorities.

“The informed citizen” model is ripe for reconsideration. We have to find a place in popular rhetoric and democratic theory for the use of specialized or expert knowledge…

Civic journalism will be making a mistake if it opts for a kind of sloppy populism: Anything the experts do must be tainted. Anything that happens at the grass roots receives the benefit of a doubt. That, I think, is the wrong impulse. I think we have to rely on expert knowledge. We just have to know, and we don’t, how and where and in what manner that expertise fits into a democratic process.

…Third point, news organizations and journalists should become less hostile to political parties…