Meeting Citizens’ Needs: What’s Next? Can the news media do more to inform citizen choices?

Moderator Robert Zelnick engaged panelists David Shribman, the Boston Globe’s Washington Bureau Chief; Jeannine Guttman, Editor of the Portland Press Herald; Candy Altman, News Director of Boston’s Channel 5 television; Chris Satullo, Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial pages; and Joe Sciacca, The Boston Herald’s deputy managing editor for politics and investigations.

Zelnick (right): David, what’s your listening post for interpreting citizen concerns?

Shribman: I’m using myself this year, it’s a new experiment … I have to tell you that I’m bored beyond tears by most of what I’m reading. If I’m this bored and this troubled, then how must a normal person be?

If we broadly define civic journalism … to be a journalism that begins and ends with the assumption that the public is more important as a class than the politicians are as a class, then I think we can begin to shape our journalism to fit that.

Zelnick: Candy, you’ve assigned a full-time researcher to ad-watch the candidates. What are you finding?

Altman (left): We expected to be looking at charges and countercharges and a lot of falsehoods. The reality of the New Hampshire ad campaign was that it was more image-focused advertising.

We learned that the candidates have taken control of the way we all do our business and we need to figure out a way to wrest it back…We’re also involved in Commitment 2000 with other Hearst-Argyle television stations covering candidate-centered discourse… What I learned is that the candidates don’t want to cooperate. They do not want to be a part of issues discussions unless the candidates set the agenda for and can control them.

That’s a real problem. It’s very easy to go out and cover what they say and follow the controversy of the day and allow the 24-hour talk news cycle of television to take control of that. But we need to figure out a way either … to bring this back to a real discussion of the issues or else we’re going to continue to wring our hands every time an election comes around.

Zelnick: Aren’t candidates entitled to present their message… in the order and in the increments they feel is most effective?

Altman: The problem is we’re not forcing them to go beyond their message…The candidates are so programmed and so fearful that, in an age where their sound bite is going to be replayed 500 times a day and analyzed by 10 different people on five different networks, they’ve got to watch every word they say so carefully that everything is way too controlled for a real active dialogue.

Sciacca (right): I’m not sure it’s our job to get candidates to focus. We can ask the tough questions and they can answer them or not. If they don’t answer them, then their silence will speak for their candidacy in some way. We’re dealing with some of the most sophisticated voters in the history of campaigns…

It’s our job to serve as a vehicle to help voters get to the candidates as directly as possible. I think that means not clouding our coverage with a lot of superfluous kind of things, like debates.

Guttman: It is the candidate’s responsibility and role to delineate issues. But voters also have that responsibility and role… Why don’t we ask how voters’ lives should affect the government and the presidential candidates? I really believe voters can shape that agenda. If candidates hear from voters and understand how their lives are changing, how concerns are rising for them or falling, they will adapt. I think that’s part of our job.

Shribman: To buttress what you just said, Jeannine, I think in this election the public is far more interesting than the candidates. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t go… full time on the public because they’re far more compelling than the two guys who are candidates.

Satullo: I think it would be a mistake, though, to assume that the electorate consists primarily of C-SPAN junkies and people who are really hitting web sites…What they are doing is driving their kids to band practice and soccer games and just trying to make it through another day. People are dipping into what we’re doing at odd and unpredictable intervals and trying to make some sense of it. We can’t assume that they know what narrative we’ve decided and that they’re following it with the passion of the people who play the game for a living.

Zelnick: Jeannine, the book you put together on the last Maine gubernatorial race. How did that fit into the campaign?

Guttman (left): We did a very in-depth, open-ended issues poll. We asked people what their top concerns were for their personal life, for their region and for Maine as a whole. Then, we interviewed 1,200 residents. From that we built a large database and got a really good grounding in things people were concerned about. We took that to the gubernatorial candidates and said, “So what is your response to this?”

The feedback in our state is that people feel as though an election is something that is done to them. They don’t really feel involved in the process. The candidates responded to this. So this year we’re doing another poll.

I think our mission in Maine right now is we’re going to cover the voters. And we’re going to let the national media cover the candidates…I think if every mid-sized newspaper did that across 50 states, that would create enormous momentum and the candidates would have to listen.

Zelnick: How do candidates construct the message in the first place? Don’t they take polls?

Satullo: Candidates do take polls. Newspapers take polls. But … for different purposes. Candidates take polls to find out where the electorate is, whatever state of ignorance they’re in. Then they look to use and exploit the people…activate their likely voters and discourage the people who aren’t likely to vote for them. That’s not how journalists should use polls.

We should use them to map the terrain. And then fill in the polls with a lot of conversation with voters… What you’re looking to do is to find how the public thinks about issues. Frequently, what a candidate wants to do is to get people lined up on a particular partisan notion of The classic example would be abortion or gun control “either [for] or [against].” Most Americans reason in a kind of “both/and” politics.

I don’t know why we should cooperate with politicians in trying to take the public where it is, in a “both/and” sort of thinking and jam them in to the “either/or” context that is much more convenient for the campaigns and the consultants who tend to lead what campaigns do.

Shribman: The difficulty in getting candidates to focus on what the people really say rather than what their message is underlines what’s probably the fundamental division in politics right now, and it’s not between Republicans and Democrats. I think it’s between the professional class and the rest of the public.

…I take what I hear here as a symbol of an even more profound, a more troubling schism in American life. That’s not between the press and the public or the press and the readers … It’s between the political class and the rest of the people, the people who govern and the people who are to be governed. I think that’s a really serious civic problem.

Zelnick: David, you said the candidates are boring and the people are interesting. What’s interesting about the people?

Shribman (right): We’re in a very unusual period of immense prosperity. And basically of contentment. Also, of a huge separation between the poor and the rich. None of us really knows how to cover contentment because we think of journalism as involving contention…

This is a period with only one antecedent in our history, the 1870s and 1880s, where the energy of the country and its best resources and best minds aren’t being thrown into the area we’re most familiar with – the clash of political ideas and ideologies. But into business and in creating wealth and inventing new forms of communication and new forms of human interchange and new forms of human commerce.

I think that we should turn some attention to the part of the culture that is so active and has so much energy…. I think Bill Gates will be remembered more than some of these characters we’re running around covering.

Guttman: At ASNE a couple of weeks ago, Gerald Seid from the Wall Street Journal made the point that America is a very different place than it was just 10 years ago … He said elections are a time to put a microscope on the country and to examine the change and to examine how we, as a people, are changing. I think that’s a very powerful story, a very compelling story to tell readers, because through storytelling you learn about each other and ourselves..

Satullo (left): …We’re an enormous forum and part of what I think the public wants us to do is hand over to them a little more of the forum that we control, which is a magnificent utility.

We have a page every Sunday, Community Voices, which is a set of essays longer than letters, shorter than the standard op-ed. Around the time of the Bob Jones speech in South Carolina, we asked a question about religion and politics. But, we’ve learned, it’s very important how you frame the question – to frame it in terms of the citizens’ experience, not in terms of how the political culture is framing the issue.

So we didn’t ask what did you think of George Bush going to Bob Jones University. We asked them how does your religious faith affect your political views? And how comfortable are you with religious faith affecting what politicians do?

We got about 200 essays on that. We culled them down to about 15 or 16 and ran those. I would put them up against any stories that reporters did as a portrait of how Americans think through a tough issue like that. Sometimes, we should get out of the way and put their words and their views in the paper or on the air.

Altman: I agree and it gets to this issue of spontaneity … I would love to see a weekly chat that’s not programmed, so that over time, you get to learn who these people who want to govern us are…

The world is changing around us, the way people get information is changing every minute. And so is the way we all do our jobs while maintaining the basic tenets of journalism. We need to rethink how we communicate with people in this new age and… how we reinsert spontaneity into a cynical public and into a system that thrives on order.

Sciacco: The more ways that we can find to get readers’ opinions out there without our interpretation or analysis is good. It’s good for them and they feel like they’re part of the process.

Participant: What might be the role of the Internet news sites?

Satullo: One of the great advantages of the Internet is simply there’s no newsprint cost and no air time cost. The Internet gets you around that problem of reporters saying, “Gee, I already wrote that story, I don’t want to write it again,” although the moment has come when most of the public needs to have that story.

Altman: From a television standpoint, the Internet really helps give depth to our coverage … From an issue standpoint, it offers the unlimited ability to let people delve into issues. And I also think that the candidates might be more prone to talking online.

Participant: Have any of you been able to measure whether your efforts had the effect of getting citizens more involves in the civic process?

Satullo: There’s an underlying assumption that voter turnout is dramatically and desperately down and it’s a terrible problem for America. I spent a couple of hours with … a political scientist at Princeton who studies this for a living. He solemnly assures me that it is simply not true. Voter turnout is relatively stable. The larger number against which the percentage is now calculated includes convicted felons and illegal aliens, and those numbers are at an all-time high.

Also, the high turnout blips of the 20th century were 1960, the Kennedy election, and 1972 and 1976. Those are the ones that today’s political journalists cut their teeth on. So we have a notion of what’s the norm for America that is a little off.

Which leads me to say that, as a matter of fact, my name is Chris and I am a civic journalist. I’m willing to admit that.

But voter turnout is the wrong measure. No one project by one media outlet or whole phalanx of media outlets is going to move the needle in that sense. I think what you can judge is, looking at a given election, did there seem to be the conversation? Did it seem to be more about what people sensed in their guts the problems were? And did they seem more satisfied with that conversation when it was done?

Guttman: I think that media can influence community and community also influences media. In Maine, we have one of the largest voter turnouts year-in and year-out … But I think part of the reason that we also practice public journalism, or civic journalism, in Maine, and we do it with those words … is people in Maine are very connected to where they live. The town meeting is an annual ritual. People take it very seriously. They go there and vote on whether to buy a new school bus or a fire truck. And they expect the newspaper to be that involved. So they fit together.