The Chronicle: 4/11/2003: Toward a New Journalism

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From the issue dated April 11, 2003

Toward a New Journalism

By HERBERT J. GANS

The news media are the country's primary providers of adult education, day in, day out, teaching millions of people about what is going on in the world. One of their courses is "News and Democracy." According to a mostly unwritten professional creed, journalists aim to turn readers into informed, participatory citizens who will use the news to protect and advance democracy.

An excellent idea. It's not working.

The worthy ambition runs smack into a marketing imperative. News consumers seek mainly to "keep up" with events beyond their immediate environments. They pay closer attention to wars, disasters, and major scandals than to politics. News corporations have become evermore desperate to attract readers and viewers, whose numbers have been dwindling for more than a generation (or else they have so spread out over print, broadcast, and Internet sources that current ways of counting them are obsolete). News executives have consequently compelled journalists to cut back on political news, replacing it with "soft" but often popular "service" stories on health, lifestyles, family, and home.

Whether dwindling supply is decreasing demand, or vice versa, only a loyal hard core of "news buffs" closely follows the citizenship information that journalists have long considered an essential component of a healthy news diet. But even if more of the audience were there, the political news that journalists report would do little to help citizens participate in their democracy. Even the most activist citizens would not get far in the halls of Congress with what they learn from the news. That is because most journalists' focus is on high-profile tales of what a tiny group of senior elected representatives do for, and to, the news audience, mainly because journalists depend heavily on credible sources that can guarantee enough stories every day to fill their newspapers and television-news programs.

The White House and government agencies are the most dependable suppliers because they have the power and resources to create events that become stories. Even a routine presidential ceremony or speech is almost always news. High opposition leaders (a Tom Daschle, say) may also become key news suppliers -- but only when they are in opposition. The resulting conflict makes for drama, but the participants need to be people with whom the broad audience is already familiar.

The product is what I call top-down journalism. Look sometime to see how many front-page stories start with "President Bush said today ... " or words to that effect -- or how often all presidents are credited with policies formulated by their staffs. It's like putting the editor in chief's byline on every article in a newspaper.

In their dependence on top-down news, journalists often become unintentional publicists for the government. And the top-down pattern extends beyond political news. Just note the amount of news about the war on Iraq we get from generals and ex-generals.

Telling people what their top elected and appointed officials are doing and saying is important, but it is hardly the only information people need to participate in politics. Top-down news may even discourage participation because the news constantly demonstrates the clout of top officials and the relative powerlessness of individual citizens. In addition, over the last 30 years, the polls have shown that a majority of respondents distrust their political and other leaders. As de facto publicists for those leaders, the news media may be stained by that mistrust.

Even when journalists are trusted, they cannot require, and have little success persuading, citizens to inform themselves. And when people are upset or otherwise motivated enough to become politically active, they don't necessarily look for news that could be useful to them. Many rely instead on facts they choose to remember or beliefs unsupported by any facts. Over the years, antipoverty officials were unable to persuade voters that welfare benefits were not a humongous item in the federal budget -- those measures actually came to about 1 percent of that budget. Right now, many people do not see any difference between Iraqis and Saudi members of Al Qaeda.

I do not blame journalists for this state of affairs. Unlike teachers, their audience is voluntary. They are corporate employees, and most of the time they really don't have much choice. Top-down news is clearly the most inexpensively and efficiently gathered news. Moreover, despite the limits under which they work, journalists are critical to democracy. A modern society needs to know, constantly, whether it is functioning. When journalists report what has gone wrong -- say, a disaster -- they also try to report on whether survivors are being cared for and routine is being restored. Top-down news, which usually reports that the leadership is in place and at work, contributes not just to the appearance of normality, but to restoring that normality.

Without the news media, rumor would supplant fact. Without journalists standing by, public officials would be free to do what they wanted, including dipping into the public till. When journalists are around, public figures normally refrain from racist remarks; armies generally do not commit atrocities. Above all, investigative (or watch-dog) reporting sometimes helps to remove dishonest public officials and abolish unfair public policies. Journalists' mere presence doesn't guarantee a democratic dream world. But at least sometimes, it can prevent undemocratic nightmares.

Would America be a more democratic society if the news media were able to better supply information

citizens need? I share many journalists' faith that it would, but faith is not enough. We need to make political news more attractive as well as more relevant to news consumers' roles as citizens.

Some believe that the Internet holds the key, and perhaps it can help. But I'd sooner place my bet on trying out some different news recipes and looking for new ones than on hyping evolving technologies. Here are some ideas -- some that have been tried, some that should be, and some that are not yet practical. But then being practical is not my purpose. Practical is what helped get us here.

"Localizing" national and international news. Because people are generally most interested in local situations, one way to attract them to national and world news is, whenever possible, to spell out the local implications. Journalists in regions with large numbers of older residents can report on the national politics of Social Security and Medicare by detailing the consequences for local residents. News media in communities with branches of Korean or Japanese factories, and those trading with Southeast Asian countries, can inform their audience about what is going on in the Asian economy by its connections to the local one. True, localization has been a steady part of news coverage for decades. But localized stories often have a sidebar, second-class, afterthought feeling to them. Making them the main event, using them to bring the national news home to the news audience but vividly explaining the global context, might give national and even international news the luster and a little more of the attention they deserve.

Participatory news. Top-down stories treat the citizenry as passive spectators. They need to be balanced with bottom-up stories that assume citizens are actual or prospective participants in the democratic process. Instead of just including the best sound bites from the celebrity speaker at the antiwar rally, look for the protesters who have never been roused to activism before, and find out what compelled them this time, and how they mobilized themselves to get there that day. Report what strategies citizens used to organize for, and make, a presentation at the state house, or how they persuaded the mayor to adopt some of their suggestions. Tell viewers and readers what their fellow rank-and-file, unorganized citizens write about in the e-mail messages and letters they send to elected and appointed officials, and what they gripe to each other about regarding politics over the back fence or at the office water cooler.

Journalists should devote far more detailed attention to undecided voters, why they are torn, why they feel that none of the candidates reflect their views. And where is the thorough post-election analysis of the citizens who ultimately did not vote? Sitting out the election may indirectly have determined the results, and might influence what candidates do not run in the future or what issues are never raised.

Advocacy journalism. A touchy one, this, I realize. But advocacy journalism need not be partisan journalism, though there might be a bigger place for that too. Remember the old local "action line" columns that helped citizens obtain proper treatment and sometimes redress from public officials? How better to convince citizens that corporate media are looking beyond their boardrooms than to revive and broaden such forums? Imagine a weekly television program that helps cheated people get satisfaction from a major carmaker or aims its cameras at the IRS official who must rule on a frequently filed kind of income-tax appeal. Bringing together investigation with the proverbial "news you can use" stories like those would combine suspense and substance.

Analytic news. Would some people be more attentive to the news if journalists could try to explain events and circumstances better? Take the homeland-security and other Congressional hearings. Who calls them and what criteria are used to pick speakers? And what do the hearings contribute to the final actions that committees take? How do the lawyers and lobbyists hanging around the hearings affect those final actions?

Could journalists identify some of the underlying causes of disturbing conditions? For example, why federal bureaucracies fight; why the CIA and the FBI were at each other's throats instead of gathering intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 tragedy?

When journalists have time for more than description, they should help people understand why the crucial American and foreign political and economic institutions work as they do. Then readers and viewers might not so often be attracted to simplistic or conspiratorial explanations.

Economic news. The little economic news to be found is mostly about business and for investors. The Dow Jones industrial average is a list of stocks, not an economic indicator. I'd like to see more reports on how the lack of job security and stagnant incomes affect people's political thinking, whether economic inequality is widening or narrowing racial chasms, whether, or how, a hamburger flipper or a manicurist thinks about Fed pronouncements on interest rates. If they don't think about them, why not? How would inflationary pressures or a recession affect their region, their kind of work, their dreams for getting a community-college degree and moving on to something better?

Multiperspectival news. The news is mostly about mainstream (read middle-class white) America and its leaders looking at a diverse country from a single standpoint. Journalists need to tell the mainstream more about Americans who work blue- and pink-collar jobs. We need to hear more from young people about what they want, what they fear, what they think about the middle-aged and old people who are running the country. Why aren't foreign journalists -- and from all over the world -- invited to report American politics, adding their perspectives to our understanding of American democracy?

More opinion. People are supposed to use the news to make up their minds about the issues of the day -- and more opinions, as well as stories about other people's opinions, might help. But more important than quantity is a greater ideological range of opinion. For commercial reasons, news-media commentary is dominated by centrists and conservatives; only public-opinion polls offer much evidence that liberal ideas are still standing. Extreme ideas may be important even if only a minority of people hold them. A reader shouldn't be able to predict in advance every viewpoint he or she will see on the viewpoints page.

Political humor and "news fiction." Research tells us that young people often get their news from the monologues of late-night comedy hosts like Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart. What if the news media reported the best of the monologue material as well as the currently circulating political jokes and connected them with the news stories that inspired them?

Why not occasionally illuminate fact with fiction? What about complementing a political drama series like The West Wing with news about the White House -- and showing people how and why reality departs from plot? The West Wing did that with an episode soon after 9/11, but that was a hastily assembled rarity. Even docudramas can be enlightening, but only if they come with warning explications about when and why the writers have replaced fact or uncertainty with fiction.

News organizations are finely tuned assembly lines. Their executives don't like change, and neither do most journalists, who are as set in their ways as the rest of us. It will take new crises and opportunities, and a somewhat differently trained crop of journalists, to redefine and reinvigorate the news. Maybe they'll find ways to get the TV-news audience to take its thumb off the channel-changer, to make economic reports less dry and news writing more conversational.

Better journalism will cost more, but money has been tight even in good times. News chains and media conglomerates expect profit margins of 20 percent or more. If news is essential to democracy, other business models should be considered. Maybe news should be assigned the status of a utility and not that of the commercial cash cow it now often is. We should examine nonprofit or limited-profit news organizations, special tax write-offs, and even carefully controlled government subsidies.

Then again, perhaps people will not really inform themselves until they need the news as badly as they need a grocery store or a school; and perhaps they will not aim to become informed citizens until they find it desirable or necessary to seek drastic changes in government policies. Maybe the demand for a very different journalism will only come with the demand for a different America.

Herbert J. Gans is a professor of sociology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of Democracy and the News (Oxford University Press, 2003) from which this article is adapted.

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Volume 49, Issue 31, Page B16

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