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Journalism & Mass

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 DOI: 10.1177/107769580405900103

2004 59: 9Journalism & Mass Communication EducatorJeremy Cohen and Herbert J. Gans

Journalism, Journalism Education, and Democracy  

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Educato Symposiu Is Political Freedom Our Primary Task?

More than a half century has passed since Alexander Meiklejohn wrote in his preface to Political Freedom that “a primary task of American education is to arouse and to cultivate, in all the members of the body politic, a desire to understand what our national plan of government is.”

There are many views of what our national plan of government is, of whether there is an obligation to teach it, of how that plan should be represented and taught in colleges and universities, and of whether or not teaching about political freedom- democracy-includes teaching students to participate in political communities be- yond the classroom.

These are not idle questions. Robert Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Con- stitution? (2001) offers a decidedly uncharitable analysis of the Constitution as an instrument of democracy. Richard Posner’s Law, Pragmatism and Democracy (2003) argues in the name of pragmatism for an elite, rather than a deliberative, democracy. Legislative forays in Colorado and in the U.S. House of Representatives to mandate the balancing of allegedly liberal faculty with conservative educators suggest sharp schisms among those trying to decide on a proper educational response to the Constitution’s dictates.

Meiklejohn’s view appears to offer a more comforting position for those seeking a libertarian outlook in which the press and the public play a fundamental role in a government of We the People. Meiklejohn’s is a highly instrumental reading of the First Amendment right of freedom of speech, one in which the familiar phrasing of “Congress shall make no law. . .” is designed to promote informed participation in the governing process. Others have lent support to this notion. “The critical dimension of individual liberty is the right to participate in public affairs,” historian Eric Foner wrote in The Story of American Freedom (1998). “Public discussion is a political duty,” Louis Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) and concluded that “this should be a fundamental principle of American government.” “The principle of the freedom of speech springs from the necessities of. . . self-governance” Justice William Brennan wrote in New York 7 h e s v. Sullivan (1964).

The Educator Symposium that follows springs from an invitation to five colleagues, each of whom has made significant research contributions in his or her own right to a substantive understanding of democracy and political freedom. The request was straightforward. Please address the obligation of higher education to arouse and to cultivate, in all the members of the body politic, a desire to understand the principles and opportunities of public engagement in the democratic community. Are we suc- ceeding? Have we rejected Meiklejohn’s charge in favor of something else? Is there a special saliency to Meiklejohn’s Political Freedom in the study of journalism and mass communication?

- Jeremy Cohen, Editor

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Journalism, Journalism Education, and Democracy HERBERT J. GANS

Many institutions want to be seen as contributing to the democratic com- munity, and educational ones are no ex- ception. Whether they would actually cany out what Alexander Meiklejohn called its primary task is another ques- tion, for schools, like other big institu- tions, are often nervous about politics of any kind. Perhaps for that reason, universities rarely teach anything stron- ger than political science, and adminis- trators become nervous if students are too actively interested in controversial issues.

Journalists are to some extent the exception, for political news is their life- blood. Also, they have long believed that one of their obligations is to involve the members of the body politic in poli-

tics. As they see it, democracy rests on an informed citizenry, and journalism’s task is to do the informing. However, the deadline and other commercial pressures under which journalists work keep them so busy that they rarely ask whether the information they supply is what an informed citizenry needs, or whether they can do much to create such a citizenry in the first place. News audiences may be declining in size, but they were always more interested in keeping up with the news than in be- ing or becoming informed, except per- haps on Election Day.

True, even if the news audience is not fully committed, journalists are es- sential in many ways to the survival of democracy, which is why dictators seek

Herbert I. Gans [HJG~@COLUMBIA.EDU) is the Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and the author, among other books, of Democracy and the News [Oxford University Press, 2003). A 25th-anniversary second edition of his I979 book, Deciding What’s News, will be published by Northwestern University Press later in 2004.

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control of the news media the moment they take power. As Michael Schudson and others have pointed out, journal- ists not only keep people up-to-date on what the political institutions that rep- resent them are doing for and to them, but also their mere presence reminds public officials that their performance is being watched and reported to their constituents.

The journalists are not always suc- cessful in carrying out these basic democratic tasks because politicians know how to behave when reporters are present or wait until they are gone. They also have political and rhetorical de- vices that journalists cannot cope with. More important, there are limits to what journalists can do. For example, in or- der to fill their news pages and pro- grams, they must have a reliable and steady supply of news, and thus they must rely on public officials who have the authority, power, and resources to produce newsworthy events and state- ments. As a result, much of the national news is of the top-down variety, report- ing what the White House and other high-level officials want people to know.

In fact, much of the day-to-day na- tional news consists of reports on what the government does, and, if journalists can get the story, on what government does wrong. The economy is usually relegated to the business section. Al- though its high-level officials have the authority, power, and resources to in- fluence government; elect candidates; buy “access” to them; and obtain favor- able legislation, they do not have to pro- vide information to reporters. Even the major lobbies that translate their clients’ economic power into political power rarely get into the news.

As for the citizens, what they do politically is almost never news, except

on election day, and even then, the half of the country that does not vote is for all practical purposes ignored. Other- wise, citizens are mostly newsworthy when they protest in ways that threaten or enrage the police. Polls are, of course, a regular vox populi, but the news me- dia do little more than summarize them and report some highlights. Thus, news does not often travel from the bottom UP.

Some other journalistic shortcom- ings in carrying out the profession’s democratic obligations have become glaringly apparent since November 2000. The news media worked hard to cover the post-election maneuvering, but they also wanted it to end as soon as possible. In order to be able to se- cure their steady and reliable supply of news, they needed the transition be- tween governments to begin and the new White House to be in place on schedule. Thus, they were not eager to have the Florida vote count continue. Even the later investigation of Florida’s voting irregularities was only backpage news, and the possibility that the elec- tion had been stolen in Florida or in other states was never seriously pur- sued in the mainstream news media.

Subsequently, journalists failed to notice that the Bush administration’s mandate, and the legislation based on it, bore no relation to the election re- sults, and no one asked whether the norms of representative democracy were being violated. Indeed, very few news stories have seen any connections between regular administration devia- tions from democratic routine by the Bush administration, for example, ex- cluding Democrats from participating in legislative deliberations. Journalists have also failed to write much about the ability of both political parties to so re-

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district and gerrymander the country that about three-quarters of all House seats are now safe. Elections in these districts may well be superfluous, and the “winners” no longer have to be very representative.

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The journalists’ reluctance to cover undemocratic or anti-democratic pro- cesses cannot be explained by any of the currently popular accusations made by the media critics. That reluctance is not the result of celebrity journalists traveling in the same circles as top elected officials, or of the practice of recruiting national journalists from the upper- or upper-middle-class and Ivy League colleges. That journalists were allegedly once mostly liberal and are now increasingly conservative is not even accurate, and the same can be said of the conservative charge that they are and have always been too liberal. Nor can the journalistic shortcomings be traced to the increasing proportion of “soft” or nonpolitical stories (often con- demned as “infotainment”) in the news media, or even by the conglomerate takeovers of some major national and many local news media.

Most of what is wrong preceded these changes. Indeed, in a way the problem goes back to the very begin- ning of the United States and the fact that many of the founding fathers were not eager for citizens to participate in the new government. Thus, no institu- tions were created at the time to report governmental decisions and actions. American journalism came into being for other reasons, although eventually it began to supply the political commu- nication that has to accompany repre- sentative democracy.

Even so, one must never forget that the news media are first and foremost an assembler of audiences for the ad- vertisers who help provide profits for commercial news firms. (Many are, in- cidentally, currently aiming for a 25 percent profit, although most busi- nesses are happy when they can attain 5 to 10 percent margins.) Since costs must therefore be kept low, and news firms cannot send the product to be manufactured overseas by cheap labor, news staffs are always too small.

As a result, journalists have to be passive; they pick up news from those making it and cannot go out to find or dig it up. If they could, news executives might have reporters in at least every major federal agency that is busy creat- ing new restrictions on citizen rights. However, they cannot easily discover such news when there is no time or staff to undertake active journalism, or if they depend on these agencies for their supply of suitable stories.

That passivity and the dependence it carries in its wake actually help to explain much about the general thrust of political news in America and the way that news is framed. Admittedly, these are not the only factors, for if jour- nalists became too active, for example, if too many wrote stories about stolen elections, political roadblocks would probably be erected against them. Op- position might come from national ad- vertisers, who do not like to antagonize significant numbers of their diverse constituency or to have their own poli- tics questioned. The large number of commentators and pundits who are conservative would also have joined the opposition, and conservative citizens who complain when their opinions are not regularly reported would bombard the news firms with letters and e-mails.

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Nonetheless, conservative opposi- tion to news coverage is in many ways commercially motivated. If reporting stolen elections dramatically increased rating or circulation figures, many road- blocks would come down. We also know from ethnographic studies of news organizations that outright censor- ship is rare and even deliberate self-cen- sorship does not often happen. More often than not, the questions journal- ists ask are the kind that occur also to their audience, or journalists ask them- selves what questions their audience wants to have answered.

Besides, most journalists are far more interested in telling stories than in undertaking political instruction. Just the reverse: Their professional norms of objectivity and detachment encour- age them to remain politically neutral or apolitical. These journalists are also trained to communicate to their audi- ence, which is lay, older than the me- dian Americans who have little pa- tience for complex political (and espe- cially economic) news.

Furthermore, most journalists are, like other mainstream Americans, un- used to thinking about ideology or in deliberate ideological terms. Thus, few even noticed when the Bush adminis- tration began to play ideological hardball. Many may not even be aware of their own ideology, which has long been a mixture of center-right conser- vatism about the economy combined with a center-left or liberal approach to “social” issues. But if journalists who are personally center-right have to write news about far-right politicians, their stories will be more conservative than when liberal politicians are in power and are then their primary sources.

But ultimately, the shortcomings I have traced to the structure of Ameri-

can journalism must also be connected to the news audience. It is under no obligation to be informed, and it is free to jump to conclusions without the facts or in opposition to them. Except around election time, during wars, or in times of crisis, much of the audience is satis- fied with brief TV news programs that report the headlines or a newspaper’s “national news summary.”

Moreover, government’s role in American society is sufficiently mini- mal and invisible that many citizens have no recurring direct need for the news, other than perhaps the weather forecast or the medical news now so often featured in many news media. The nonpolitical citizenry does not need po- litical news, except during elections, and in part because it does not need the government-until the absolutely nec- essary services it takes for granted break down. Only the people who have a di- rect and continuing economic interest in what government does and pays out literally need the news, and most of them get the news they need from news- letters and other specialized news out- lets. Of course, poor people have direct need for news of government help, when it is available, but they know that the news media do not cater to them, and usually report them only if they upset the middle classes.

The inadequacies I see in journalism’s contributions to the health of American democracy are no accident, but they can be traced to basic struc- tural features of American society. As a result, they are also not easily corrected. The main journalistic weapon is media criticism, but because it tries to achieve its objectives by shaming colleagues, it is not a very effective method.

True, journalists can sometimes overcome shortcomings, for example,

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by working above and beyond the call of duty, or acting heroically. Such be- havior is in fact encouraged by the ar- ray of journalistic prizes awarded for extraordinary performances. But soci- eties cannot depend on heroes, as Bertoldt Brecht pointed out long ago.

When and whether media criti- cism, the recommendations issued from time to time by professional organiza- tions, or other reform strategies actu- ally work is hard to tell. In fact, mass communication researchers should treat it as a particularly significant re- search topic.

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Where does this leave journalism and mass communication educators? I am not one myself and so am not the best commentator on this subject. More- over, journalism schools, like other pro- fessional schools, are mostly in busi- ness to provide new cohorts of work- ers for their professions, although some are given a little leeway to use that edu- cation to try for changes in the profes- sion. For schools with such leeway, I would make half a dozen suggestions.

First, such schools could take the journalistic ideal seriously and start thinking about feasible or potentially feasible solutions to some of the short- comings I have described and urge their practitioner colleagues and news firms to do a little experimenting. Some ex- perimentation is already taking place, but there could be much more. (I have invented and reinvented a few such solutions and some impractical ones in my recent Democracy and the News.)

Second, courses in journalistic theory and others could move away from simple formulas about informing the citizenry and encourage some seri-

ous rethinking about what journalism can actually contribute to the mainte- nance and improvement of American democracy. Such rethinking might mean less emphasis on getting the story and getting it first, and it would no longer see the prime goal of journalism as producing a first draft of history, if in fact it ever did.

Relevant questions for such courses include whether democracy requires an informed citizenry; how much the jour- nalists’ information encourages or helps citizens to participate politically; and, if not, what kind of information might do so. (Before that, one might ask whether today’s representative democ- racy even has much need for citizens other than on election day. And if there is a further decline in the number of “swing states” in presidential elections, and an additional increase in the num- ber of congressional districts that are more or less permanently gerryman- dered in favor of incumbents, one might also have to ask whether elections or citizens will still be needed.)

That current condition raises a larger question: whether and when jour- nalists are able to tell enough of their audience that the country is in a politi- cal or other crisis. Whether a crisis ex- ists is, of course, a political question, but when enough people feel that a cri- sis exists, can today’s journalism, or any other kind, reach citizens who are not personally, directly, and immediately affected. Maybe such a task is beyond journalism as we know it, especially when the citizenry is detached from politics and distrusts politicians. We know that demagogues are able to reach such people, but that alone justifies the search for substitutes.

In addition, these courses would have to explore the limits of journalism,

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including what it cannot do in behalf of democracy and what must be done by other institutions and through eco- nomic and political change. For ex- ample, the entire array of educational institutions, from first grade through graduate school, has to figure out how to educate Americans about politics. There is no reason why journalists should have to do so; their job is to re- port the news. They should not have to teach people how to prevent being fooled by political rhetoric or sold down the river by political tricksters. In an ideal world, the schools, adolescent peer culture, and the political process itself would provide the basic instruc- tions and leave journalists to update the information needed for citizens to par- ticipate and to protect themselves.

Third, these schools should try to move the profession further away from its traditional generalist assumption: that every well-trained journalist can cover any story on a moment’s notice, and without much prior knowledge other than a quick Googling or a scroll- ing through Nexis. The old generalist assumption may help to enable journal- ists to communicate with their lay au- dience, but it cannot long serve a 21st- century audience. More news is going to have to come from journalists trained in substantive beats, so that they can properly cover today’s economy, polity, and society, in America and in the world in which it is now so deeply embedded. Such reporters will have to be trained in the universities, and J-Schools will have to work with experts in their aca- demic departments to provide the train- ing.

Fourth, perhaps the most important beat is, nonetheless, a general one: analysis and explanation. The catego- ries are old but they need to be revital-

ized, and the J-Schools able to do so should revitalize them. Ideally, analy- sis and explanation-providing the contexts as well as the causes of and reasons for the subjects of important stories-should be an intrinsic part of journalism. This duo also represents an easy, inexpensive way for journalists to be active. Equally important, the abil- ity to undertake analysis and explana- tion would make it possible for journal- ists to supply “informed opinion,” opinion based on their legwork and analytic-explanatory skill. Then, jour- nalists could speak with their own voice and not be dependent on finding an authoritative and quotable source through whom they can express a per- sonal opinion. Journalists who can sup- ply informed opinion might also make it possible to replace the general pun- dits, the columnists, and commentators who have to offer opinions on the ques- tions of the day whether they know anything about them or not.

Some journalists might specialize in analysis and explanations; others could be beat reporters able to combine legwork with analysis and ex- planation. But they would remain jour- nalists who communicate to a lay au- dience and should not be taught to be- come social scientists. Social scientists can help journalism do a better job of analysis and explanation, and, in re- turn, journalists might be able to coax them down from their ivory towers more often.

Fifth, journalism and mass com- munications faculty should take a close look at the journalist-audience relation- ship. I would begin with research, find- ing out when audiences have an incen- tive to keep up with the news and why -and also when they follow specific stories closely and why. Then research-

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ers need to look at when audience pay attention and comprehend, and what journalists can do when attention lags and comprehension falters. Once an- swers are available, ways by which jour- nalists could more effectively inform their audiences might be found.

Learning to better inform the audi- ence becomes even more important if and when the news media do more beat reporting. If the beat reporters cannot communicate with the lay audience or can communicate only with its elite members, the journalists’ contribution to democracy would shrink instead of grow. Concurrently, someone has to find out whether and how audiences can be helped to deal with specialized and

even technical knowledge, but that is not a task for J-Schools. And maybe we need to design a democracy that does not depend on citizens being informed.

Sixth, J-Schools might also take a new approach to the economics of jour- nalism; trying to figure out how to set up news firms’ content with a lower profit, or more realistically, borrowing the utility model, combining limited profit margins with other incentives. I still think government subsidies to the news media might work, if loophole- free legislation to prevent government interference could be written, but jour- nalism will not be able to fulfill its ob- ligations to democracy if it is required, first and foremost, to be a cash cow.

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