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September 22, 2003
Spokesman for Press Priesthood LaughsJack Shafer of Slate says public journalism bombed. Here's what I say back to him.Jack Shafer, who writes the PressBox column for Slate, was for ten years the editor of Washington City Paper, the alternative weekly in DC. This is an extremely good vantage point on big time journalism, for Shafer had to succeed every week at being in some way “alternative” to the Washington Post and the rest of the national press corps gathered in the Capital. One of the simplest ways of proving this is to report heavily on the goings on at the Post, especially in times of agony, strife or high gossip. A weekly in Washington that does real journalism in between the ads competes on some stories with the big guns in the daily press, and all the bureaus. It’s hard to imagine a better education—or acculturation—in press think at the top than Shafer’s ten years as editor of City Paper. They gave him intimate knowledge of how elite journalism works and they required him to think in alternatives. But one alternative he cannot stand is the one I have actively stood for: public journalism, also known as civic journalism, also known as failed idea, well funded in Shafer’s corner of Slate. Just so you have it clear, Shafer didn’t like my book about the public journalism movement, Shafer didn’t care much for James Fallows writing favorably about it in the conclusion to Breaking the News, (a book that is very critical of elite journalism, from the Washington editor of the Atlantic) and Shafer wants to make sure that people know how insidious and stupid the whole thing is. He is especially wary of public journalism’s central claim, which is to him preposterous and vain. Here is how I would put it: People ought to participate more in American democracy, and if journalists wanted to help, they could probably find better ways to engage us as citizens with a stake in what happens. They might also realize their own contribution to public frustration, and change some of their more careless practices. This in turn might be good for us, good for them, good for things overall. After all, everyone knows that the press is not just a source of information but a force of its own in public life, a player in our democracy. The public journalism movement was several thousand professionals who said “yeah” to that. No matter what anyone tells you—especially Jack Shafer—these four sentences are the heart of it. Lots of things bother him about the argument above, but a key to his frustration is that people bought into this nonsense. He has special scorn for the foundations and nonprofit institutes that sheltered and funded public journalism. This paragraph (posted Friday at Slate) gives summary to Shafer’s view, but more important is the tone: The journalistic priesthood abhors advice, but it reserves special scorn for those who would counsel them to rejigger coverage in a way to “improve” society. This do-gooder school of journalism, which answered to the names of “public journalism” and “civic journalism” in the ’90s, received funding and promotion from the moneybags at the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Poynter Institute, spawned laudatory books by James Fallows (Breaking the News) and Jay Rosen (What Are Journalists For?), and picked up a few adherents at the dailies in Wichita, Kan.; Charlotte, Va.; and Norfolk, Va.; before groaning to a halt under the weight of its own pretension. Through the weekend and into Monday, Shafer had Charlotte’s state wrong. It’s in North Carolina; Charlottesville is the one in Virginia. This is a trivial error, (since corrected) except that Shafer’s point in naming towns is to show how provincial and third rate the journalism must be there. More telling is how it counts against public journalism that the do-gooding “moneybags” at Pew and Poynter supported some of the costs of the experiment. Now since Shafer’s salary is paid by Microsoft, world’s most powerful corporation, it would seem that supporters of public journalism might at least win a draw in the “who’s more polluted by funding” contest. His purpose in mentioning foundation support is to explain how the idea got as far as it did in the mainstream press: the do-gooders poured money into it. But since Pew is no longer funding its Center for Civic Journalism, why worry? Last month I asked a Times-man about the reason for the tone of the portraits, and he said it was to “give solace to the families.” Conceivably that’s what the Times tells itself—although in itself that’s a departure from past policy on obituaries. But the real significance of this series is clearly to give solace to a community—not simply the community of New York or those who knew the victims personally but the entire national community for which the remembrances have become a powerful sacrament. Why should a newspaper bother to give solace to anyone? Because it has stopped kidding itself about its ability to remain detached from and objective about public life. It is trying to help its city and its nation, and it is succeeding. The Times of this era will always be known for this coverage, especially for the portraits. They will be the monuments to the greatest public journalist of them all, Howell Raines. Many journalists have stopped kidding themselves about their ability to remain completely detached. But this thought is rarely developed because it might lead to asking: what kind of attachment to the republic—or local community—should journalists be developing today, given everything going on around them? Existing press think does not cover this ground, which is more important than ever. You can call the press a player, but what you cannot do is ask: what’s it playing for? Fallows tried to sketch a few ideas, and that is why he was attacked by Howell Raines in 1996 and ignored by Jack Shafer Friday. Shafer’s immediate purpose in ridiculing the public journalism “crusade” is to associate it with another “horrible idea”—columnist Matt Miller’s “two-percent solution” for America’s domestic problems, which Miller has bravely put into a book of that title. Solutions journalism—what a joke! Shafer reminds us that journalists aren’t “catalysts of change, social engineers, or builders of political cadre.” He speaks up for readers who “tend to cringe if preached to from a pulpit, no matter how well-meaning the sermon might be.” Journalists hate it, readers hate it, PressBox hates it, and so public journalism “bombed,” he says. “But never underestimate the power of a bad idea.” Where could this power possibly originate? Perhaps it has something to do with the insularity of a journalistic priesthood that hates getting advice, shows scorn for those who would try reform the church, and can’t remember what state the hicks in Charlotte are from. See Art Cline’s carefully-written Rhetorica for more on Shafer’s column. Correction Box: I had earlier written: “(Also, Shafer has his facts wrong about Poynter, which never funded or promoted public journalism.)” But this was incorrect. In 1994, there was an NPR project in which Pew and Poynter collaborated. What I should have said is that Poynter was not a major institutional supporter of public journalism. Thanks to Straci Kramer of OJR for correcting the record.
Posted by Jay Rosen at September 22, 2003 10:02 AM
Comments
I don't read Slate often and I've never read Jack Shafer, so I was glad to see your rebuttal here. Based on what you quoted from him, I'd say that Shafer completely misses his target. Public journalism, "Breaking the News" and "What are Journalists For?" are about an alternate way of viewing the purpose of journalism. In short, its an idea -- and ideas don't really die. Instead, they contribute to the debate. I'm a former reporter and editor, longtime college journalism teacher and I'm here to testify, brothers and sisters, that public journalism's re-thinking is the most energizing idea in journalism in many a year. I can tell you that students who passionately love journalism are typically repulsed by the soul-deading reality of most corporate journalism. When I expose those same students to Rosen's writings, well, there's a transformation. We can, in fact, see this transformation first-hand. It's called blogging, which is nothing less than public journalism on a vast, egalitarian scale: citizens trying to engage other citizens through unmediated writing. Posted by: Roger Karraker at September 22, 2003 3:51 PM | Permalink Damn -- I mistyped the URL for my new address and new blog in the above post. This one should read correctly (I hope). If not, my email is editor@hellsheet.com and the blog is at www.hellsheet.com Posted by: Roger Karraker at September 22, 2003 3:55 PM | Permalink Well unlike Roger Karraker I did read Shafer's piece and I feel Rosen in anger at someone having a different point of view has misinterpreted Shafer's piece. I didn't get the feeling he was "ridiculing hicks" in Charlotte for example... it just seemed to me to be a list of areas where public journalism had been tried. What are the words that ridicule those areas or characterise people there as hicks? Rosen doesn't quote them because they don't exist. Actually while it's clear that Shafer isn't sympathetic to public journalism, I felt the piece was more about the problems of convincing journalists who are as he says more interested in being first and beating the competition. Shafer doesn't praise this as a motive either... he's just stating what seems to me to be true. I suspect Rosen might even agree. And let's just remember that most journalism is deeply attached to a community. Perhaps Rosen should go and stay in a place like Charlotte for a while and see what the local paper and local TV channel and radio station cover... might it just be stories about the local community? Especially for papers, news is becoming more and more local... You can be attached to a community and reflect that community without preaching or pretending you have all the answers... And finally on Karraker's praise of blogs... how informed can his blog be if he is prepared to sound off on Shafer without even reading him? My impression of blogs is that most are written for the satisafction of the author alone, rather than to "engage other citizens". Posted by: Dean Bedford at September 22, 2003 5:43 PM | Permalink >>(Also, Shafer has his facts wrong about Poynter, which never funded or promoted public journalism.) Jay -- Poynter teamed up with NPR, which was funded in large part by The Pew Charitable Trusts, for the 1994 election project. I wrote about their cross-media efforts "to bring citizens back into the political process" in Civic Journalism: Six Case Studies. [ http://www.pewcenter.org/doingcj/pubs/cases/index.html ] The joint report by The Pew Center for Civic Journalism and The Poynter Institute for Media Studies was funded by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism and Poynter. It had two editors -- Jan Schaffer from Pew and Edward Miller from Poynter -- and one reporter intrigued by the chance to get beyond the hyperbole from proponents and opponents of public/civic journalism. Staci D. Kramer
Posted by: Staci D. Kramer at September 22, 2003 6:40 PM | Permalink Hello Dean Bedford: thanks for your comments. I agree completely--and so do public journalists I know--that "you can be attached to a community and reflect that community without preaching or pretending you have all the answers." Shafer sums up public journalism as "preaching" because he hates what it preaches to journalists. Who wouldn't hate journalists who pretend to have all the answers? The question is: where are those journalists to be found? If I'm a political editor at the Daily Post and I ask you, Dan Bedford, as citizen in a free country, what you want your local elected officials to be discussing in the next election, and I take your answers seriously, using them to guide the nwes coverage and commentary I offer you and your fellow citizens (not the *only* guide, but a vital one)... would that be "preaching" or listening to the public? This simple idea--wow: a citizen's agenda--was the beginning of the public journalism movement, and it does a pretty good job of summing it up still. Does it have any resemblance to what Jack Shafter described? Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 22, 2003 7:09 PM | Permalink Stacy: You're right. I had forgotten about that 1994 project. I will write something for the front correcting that. Thanks. Posted by: Jay Rosen at September 22, 2003 7:18 PM | Permalink It seems that the premise behind "public journalism" is that journalists are better informed about factual and normative social and political issues than others. It is from this vantage point of superior information that journalists guide citizens toward the "good society". Leaving aside the obvious point that facts are underdetermined by values, the assumption is false: journalists are no better judges of large social or political issues than anyone else. Frequently, in fact, they are poor judges (Cf. Durante and starvation in the USSR). The failure of reporting in Iraq has made this painfully clear. Bias and naked dishonesty caused journalists to slant or falsify stories in hopes of turning citizens towards a desired belief set (usually anti-war). Purposive misquoting, false reporting, poorly concealed editorializing were frequently employed in this project. The result was journalistic corruption, laziness and incompetence, as noted by John Burns. Instead of informing the public about the atrocities of the Iraqi regime under Saddam - information crucial to public debate about the war - journalists bought access from Saddam; they exchanged their journalistic integrity and further Iraqi slavery for ratings and a politically desirable anti-war message. Incredibly, journalists assume that citizens are too foolish to notice these ploys. We're not; and new media (particularly, blogs) is allowing us to create a discourse free of, or at least less susceptible to, these deceptions. If, as a result of this shameful conduct, old media journalists come to be reviled and ignored by the public, they will have no one to blame but themselves. Mark Posted by: Mark at September 23, 2003 12:25 PM | Permalink In my view, the debate about whether public/civic journalism is good or evil is SO OVER. The good work done by people in that movement has forever changed the way journalists do their work — for the better — whether or not a given journalist publicly chooses to encumber him/herself with title of "public" or "civic" journalist. As a result, it amazes me that people continue to dig up that dead horse so they can beat it (like Allan Wolper did a laughably misinformed piece in Editor & Publisher). But Shafer goes Wolper one better: First he beats the horse, then he drags it over and hitches it to Matt Miller's cart of prescriptions for solving society's ills, apparently because Miller had a misguided, impractical suggestion for newspapers. Then he beats the horse again. I don't know Matt Miller. I don't know if he considers himself to be among the public/civic journalism faithful (I am). And I don't know if he's spent much time in newsrooms. But he asserts that news organizations give insufficient coverage to ongoing social problems and suggests that newspapers start running a strip across the bottom of the front page called "Still True," with statistics about such things as how many people lack health insurance or live in poverty. The assertion is not the problem. News organizations DON'T cover social problems adequately in the crush of daily production demands that are much easier to satisfy with titillating stories about the latest bout between Arianna and Aw-nold. The problem lies with the naivete behind Miller's suggestion as to how that problem should be addressed. Shafer says Miller's proposal to run statistics about those ongoing problems in bottom-of-the-page info strips is too preachy, and I would agree. But in addition, it is impractical. It would require lots of research and design time, and it would be difficult to sustain without dissecting social ills into a succession of increasingly atomized statistics that mean nothing without context. I also smiled, affectionately, when I read Miller's comment: "The art department could make sure this recurring feature was fun and lively." Whew! Fun and lively poverty statistics! Imagine that! To me, Miller's "Still True" proposal is like many naive ideas proposed by well-meaning people who have little or no experience in newspapers. (If you talk to citizens about journalism, you hear ideas like that all the time.) But even Shafer might consider it bad form to get on his high horse about a non-journalist offering journalists a misguided, impractical suggestion, with all good intentions. So he found a horse of another kind and I say ... go to town! Have at it! At the risk of testing some people's patience with the analogy, the debate about public/civic journalism is a horse that served journalism well and honorably, taking us into important new intellectual territory. But I know how hard it is for some people to accept that a good ride is over. And the bottom line is that, when Shafer and Wolper and all the other anti-public-journalism faithful finally wear themselves out, that horse will still be dead. Posted by: Cheryl Gibbs at October 1, 2003 7:56 AM | Permalink |
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