hese pages tell the story of an experiment. It began early on 1995, when Ed Fouhy and Jan Schaffer of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism encouraged the formation of media partnerships in various locations around the country in hopes of discovering better ways to cover election campaigns. The main focus was to be on the 1996 presidential primaries and caucuses. By late spring five partnerships had been formed in four states – New Hampshire, Iowa, Florida and California – and Fouhy had recruited me to be executive director of what we soon decided to call the Citizens Election Project.
In time, the project grew to include two additional partnerships (in Iowa and North Carolina), plus the California Voter Foundation’s online election guide. The CEP sponsored major undertakings by two Washington, D.C.-based opinion-analysis companies, The Harwood Group and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and contracted with Washington public relations firm of Neuman & Co. to handle outreach and press relations. We also arranged with the Nieman Foundation at Harvard to conduct weekend seminars on how the principles of civic journalism might improve campaign coverage.
Much as these various elements of the CEP differed from one another, they shared a common assumption: That something was radically wrong with political journalism in America, and that if journalists themselves didn’t do something to correct the problem, they might awake one morning to discover that their fellow citizens were no longer paying any attention to them at all.
The point cannot be overemphasized. Although civic journalism has been dismissed by some misinformed critics as “boosterism” or “political activism,” it is, as this report makes clear, nothing of the kind. Civic Journalism simply seeks to reconnect journalists to the people they have always claimed to serve – readers, listeners and viewers who want to be informed about the world they live in. That the connection over the past several years has been damaged, if not utterly destroyed, is a fact that many journalists have come belatedly to accept. The CEP experiment was an attempt to demonstrate, in the context of political reporting, ways in which the connection might be rebuilt.
The Washington Post’s wise and trenchant media columnist Richard Harwood (no relation to the president of the Harwood Group) has written:”Some of the critics of ‘civic journalism’ – inadvertently, perhaps – suggest that the only true and legitimate journalist is a strange species of citizen who betrays himself and his ‘calling’ if he harbors notions of civic responsibility or cares about the purpose and impact of his work. It is a species, fortunately for democracy, that exists in very small numbers if at all.” The best journalists, Harwood suggests, have never been uninterested in the moral and political implications of their work, and to the extent that they are uninterested today, they place their craft – perhaps even the political system – at grave risk.
In addition to the work done by The Harwood Group, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the California Voter Foundation, the Citizens Election Project consisted of the following media partnerships, all of which were mostly self-sustaining but which received funding from the CEP for specific purposes that fell outside normal editorial budgets:
IOWA. Two CEP partnerships used distinctly different approaches to the Iowa caucuses. The first involved the Iowa-based Lee Newspaper chain, Iowa Associated Press, plus radio and television outlets. They sponsored a series of six town meetings and a debate by GOP presidential candidates. The other gave Iowa high school students an opportunity to question candidates on statewide closed-circuit television.
NEW HAMPSHIRE. There were two CEP partnerships in the Granite State as well. One was based in Boston and followed the town of Derry, N.H. (pop., 30,000) and its citizens through the entire New Hampshire primary season. Among other things, this partnership conducted extensive polling and focus groups in Derry and sponsored local forums. The second New Hampshire partnership was statewide and was notable for a series of question-and-answer meetings it arranged and covered between small groups of citizens and the GOP presidential candidates.
FLORIDA. The largest of the CEP’s partnerships, this one included most of the major newspaper and television outlets in the state, plus radio station WUSF-FM and WSFP-FM. The group conducted two important statewide polls and sponsored a town-hall meeting prior to the Florida straw poll in November.
CALIFORNIA. A San Francisco-based partnership produced a series of articles about nine Bay Area neighborhoods, reporting the problems those neighborhoods, reporting the problems those neighborhoods faced and the attitudes of the residents on the eve of the San Francisco mayoral election in the fall of 1995. In addition, the partnership co-sponsored two highly successful candidate debates during the mayoral campaign. The debates featured questions from citizens and from a panel of political reporters.
In this report on the CEP’s activities, you will read articles by key people involved in each of the partnerships and by Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation in Sacramento. You will not, I think, find any boosterism or political activism. Rather, you will encounter the reflections of serious people who, recognizing that their projects were experiments, have frankly assessed what they did right and what they – we – did wrong. You will also discover a pride in having taken part in something that gave many of the participants a substantial edge over journalists elsewhere when it came to assessing which issues were of most importance to voters in the four key states where CEP projects existed.
Last March, after the race for the Republican presidential nomination had seemingly been decided in favor of Sen. Robert Dole, the New York Times published a major series of articles on the issue of “job security.” It was almost as if the Times, like Dole, had discovered that the issue was important only after seeing another GOP contender, Pat Buchanan, use it successfully in Louisiana, Iowa and New Hampshire. But, as several of the reports in this publication make clear, if other journalists had taken the trouble – as the CEP partners did – to listen carefully to what people were saying before the campaign reached its superheated stage, they would have known months earlier that job security was an issue, perhaps the issue. Indeed, the 15 focus groups that The Harwood Group conducted for the CEP in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and California had revealed the same trend as early as September, 1995. (See America’s Struggle Within, a Harwood Group report issued by the CEP in January 1996, specifically, Chapter II, “A Nation off Course.”)
In general, then, the Citizens Election Project was a major success when it came to gauging the views of the voters and helping them (as opposed to the politicians and the media) set the agenda for the campaign. Failure occurred in some areas when the partnerships were forced to rely on the candidates’ cooperation. As you will read here, a few town meetings either had to be cancelled or scaled back when the front-running candidates decided, for reasons best known to themselves, to boycott them. The events were citizen-driven, completely nonpartisan and unscripted – and it appears to have been precisely those elements that scared away the front-runners. In this era, when candidates believe that the ticket to victory is to do say as little as possible, it may be naïve to assume that they will cooperate simply to help raise the level of political discourse.
In any case, there is some feeling among the CEP partners that the time has probably arrived when civic journalism projects in the political arena ought to move beyond candidate forums and develop new ways of achieving the same ends. Over the long term, reform of political journalism will not rely so much on special projects or special events as on the development of new attitudes and frames of reference by political reporters and their editors all over America.
What is needed, above all, is a realization that treating voters as if the only time they really matter is when they actually cast their ballots or reply to some pollster’s questions is to miss the whole point of the electoral process and to play directly into the hands of the media manipulators who today have so much control over the process.
That is another way of saying that civic journalism will have come of age when it is no longer compartmentalized and no longer experimental but is part of the warp and woof of every journalist’s experience. On that day, the “civic” may be dropped altogether, and we will be back to plain old good journalism again.
STANLEY W. CLOUD
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
THE CITIZENS ELECTION PROJECT
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