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Putting the public first in public radio journalism

The voters should own the campaign, and the press can give it back to them

John DingesJohn Dinges, NPR's editorial director, has been a leader in the network's Election Project. In this article adapted from his remarks at seminars for participating stations, Dinges describes the critique of election coverage that motivates the project.

Originally published in Current, May 9, 1994.

By John Dinges

When California gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Brown was reluctant to provide recorded answers to questions from KQED last month, reporter Sally Eisele reminded campaign staffers that these were questions from Californians selected as part of a systematic process. The candidate came through with the answers.

In Dallas, KERA reporter Traci Tong wanted to find out how citizens are thinking through the ethical questions surrounding the upcoming trial of Kay Bailey Hutchison. She convened a small group of citizens in a church and led them in a deliberative forum. The resulting piece was fresh, engaging radio, and went several positive steps beyond the typical ''vox pop'' method of eliciting people's voices.

Both stations are participants in NPR's Election Project, an experiment in political coverage involving 86 member stations. The project begins with a simple idea: that citizens should have a more active role in affecting the way we cover political campaigns. The stations have four areas of activity: partnerships with local newspapers (and in some cases TV stations), citizen forums, issues polling and citizen-focused reporting.

The NPR project aims to rediscover some of the original values of journalism, while lowering the profile of other elements that now dominate and obscure some of those values.

We are re-emphasizing journalism's role in creating and sustaining a public forum, the place where citizens in a democracy think together, talk together and make up their minds about the most important issues in their individual and community lives.

There is a way to do journalism that, while less glamorous than much of what we see on television, is to my mind also the pinnacle of our profession. It is a kind of journalism that you don't have to be Ted Koppel to practice.

There's the example of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer, one week last winter. The Observer has tried out a new kind of election coverage in 1992--a concerted effort to find out what people wanted the coverage to be about and to build the newspaper's reporting around that citizens' agenda. After the election, the paper's reporters and editors wanted to preserve the journalistic methods and values they had developed. And they quickly got a dramatic story to practice on.

How the Observer did it

Charlotte is a racially divided city, not unlike many others. Citizens in a well-off, mostly white part of town succeeded in persuading the police to block the roads leading into an attractive city park that had become a favorite gathering place on weekends for picnics and parties.

The park users, mostly black, were outraged the first weekend they discovered they were being prevented from using the park in the way they had in the past. The newspaper did what we all would do: report the closing, report the outrage, report the reasons for the closing and the reasons for the outrage in a balanced way. And the paper reported the obvious: as the new week went on, the possibility was rising that the dispute over the park would erupt the following weekend into an ugly, racially tinged, possibly violent clash between police and neighbors on the one side and, on the other side, people from the other parts of town who refused to give up what they saw as their right to use the park.

So far, journalism as usual. Then, midweek, the newspaper went beyond the usual. The editors and reporters said to themselves that their job as journalists was to focus reporting on ways to avoid the destructive impending clash, and to become a forum for possible solutions. The paper used the base of citizen commentary it had developed during the previous election year to solicit views on all sides--not to polarize but to point to compromise and common ground.

The situation was defused, and editors at the paper are convinced that their new approach helped avoid a tragedy.

It is that image of journalism we would like to stress in the activities of the NPR Election Project: a journalism engaged in the community, rejecting indifference and cynicism, focusing on the search for solutions, offering and facilitating a forum for people to move from shouting to dialogue to deliberation to democratic decision-making. In short, journalism that looks for its mission in the ''public'' that is part of our name.

I don't want to go into the many horror stories from the 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns. Suffice it to evoke the memory and images of Willie Horton, the flag factories, the candidate in helmet and tank, Gennifer and Jennifer.

Whatever we may think about how well or how poorly we did our jobs in the media, poll after poll documents the fact that the public trusts us less and less. For example, the Times Mirror Poll in March 1993 found:

I have always thought the basic premise of our profession, a premise enshrined in the First Amendment, is that we reporters represent the public when we ask questions, write stories and hold government and its officials up for scrutiny. That's why our right to write is protected from government interference--because we are doing the public's business, because what we do is part of the democratic process.

I still believe that. The trouble is, most of the public doesn't buy that idea anymore. The media have long since stopped identifying with the public and the public has stopped identifying with us. They don't trust us. They believe us less and less. And hardly anyone thinks we--the press and the citizens--are on the same side when it comes to politics.

We are not seen as part of the solution; we are part of the problem--of the great disillusionment with politics in America.

The context is democracy

What is wrong with our political reporting? It is not that reporters are bad people. We have been following the rules of objectivity and fairness.

I would suggest that part of the problem is that we have stopped judging our professional work in the context of democracy.

What happens when you put journalism in context? The diagram below describes the media, elections and government as three dimensions of the same process.

First, look at the direction of the arrows. We have been delivering information to citizens as a one-way conveyor belt. The candidates and newsmakers have infinitely more to say about the content of our coverage than citizens.

Citizens are passive in all but the second line--when they get to vote in an election. And when they make their electoral choice, we don't cover them except to take snapshot polls to find which candidate is ahead.

We have been focusing on the wrong story, or at least greatly underreporting a major element:

We do the campaign well--we profile the candidates, we report on their contest; we focus on their relationship with the media, by putting reporter/analyst up front; we focus on the outcome of the election.

But we spend precious little time and energy examining how the citizens think through the issues and make up their minds. Except as that relates to the horse race.

David Broder of the Washington Post diagnoses our problem in terms of a combination of arrogance and indifference:

''We (as reporters) disclaim any responsibility, any responsibility for the consequences of elections. ... I've said to our White House reporters, 'My job is to deliver these turkeys; after they're in office, they're your responsibility.'

''What this means in less facetious terms is that a very large percentage of the information that the American people get about politics comes from people who disclaim any responsibility for the consequences of our politics.

''What people mainly know about politics comes to them through media reporting, or through the messages those campaign consultants shape on behalf of their clients. Whether in the form of 30-second ads or in the speech 'sound bites,' they know that we in the press will pick up and make [these messages] the heart of our campaign coverage.''

The result is what Broder calls a ''double disconnect.'' First, between people and the political campaign--what they see reported about the campaign has very little to do with what they consider important in their lives. Second, between the campaign and the government that results from it. Look at the third line on the chart. How often do we do a reality check, after the election, to see if what we covered in the campaign tracks with what we cover after the campaign when those elected are leading the government?

If we are part of the problem, how do we become part of the solution?

A new ''master narrative''

Jay Rosen is a New York University professor and one of the most insightful observers I've encountered. He points out something about our work that people in the movie business have known for a long time: that there are only so many plots and stories, and we just keep telling them over and over.

If there are only 10 plots in Hollywood, there are only about four stories in an election. Rosen calls these stories the ''master narratives.''

He suggests it is our job, our new job, to make this kind of politics happen, and that we as journalists have a stake in its outcome.

''Politics,'' he continues, ''is seen as a continuing conversation, in which different rhetorics compete for influence, new debates arise and progress, emergent facts are given various interpretations, and arguments interact with events. This ... is how journalists should view the political scene: they should grant privileged status to the metaphor of conversation. Politics as conversation is not the only possible lens on the political world, but it offers journalists the best way of understanding their task. Their job--an important one--is to improve the manner in which the political community converses with itself.''

In this master narrative, people are seen and heard. They walk, they talk, they think, they act. And they appear side by side, shoulder to shoulder with journalists, allies in a common agenda.

We don't need to compromise our adherence to the principles of objectivity and neutrality with regard to candidates and outcomes. Some journalists tried out the notion of ''advocacy journalism'' a decade or so ago. And it was a flop. The valid instinct in that movement was the recognition that journalists are part of the community and must be engaged in its problems, not detached observers coolly describing the mess. The flaw was that by allowing our personal political views to color our reporting, journalists lost credibility and their reports tended to polarize rather than mediate public conflicts.

Broder suggests that we become ''activists ... on behalf of the process of self-government.''

How this translates to our project

The NPR Election Project proceeds from a simple idea--orienting our coverage around the people's agenda rather than the candidates' agendas. And it provides a template for four basic areas of activity at NPR and at stations: polling, forums, newspaper partnerships and reporting.

Polling and forums: These tools are intended to be used to discover the citizens' agenda and to put people on the air in an active role as deliberating citizens.

It turns the old way of covering politics on its head, as Broder suggests:

''We have to set forth an alternative proposition to the idea that a campaign is about the candidates' agenda. It is that the campaign period--the weeks and months before the election--is the part of the whole political process (embracing both elections and government) that uniquely belongs, not to the candidates, but to the voters. It is the time when the voters have a right to have their concerns addressed and their questions answered by the people who have exercised power and who are seeking to exercise power....''

''If we asserted the proposition that the campaign is really the property of the voters, then, instead of hanging out in the offices of those prospective candidates, we would be spending a lot of time with voters. Literally, spending time with voters--walking precincts, knocking on doors, talking to people in their living rooms. We would be asking those voters, 'How do you feel about how things are going in this community and in this country? What are your concerns? What are the things you'd like to hear the candidates talking about when they come seeking your support?' ''

Polling and forums are not new activities to most of us. What is new is how we do them, to allow them to put people and their concerns at the center of our coverage.

Public radio has a unique comparative advantage. No other medium can so easily and authentically (and I should add cheaply) put people's voices on the air. We emphasize the sounds of people talking to each other, reacting to each other, deliberating as citizens. Not, as in so many so-called forums (or even in much of our own ''vox pop''), as props in an event dominated by candidates or experts.

Newspaper partnerships: Just as we have a comparative advantage in presenting people's voices, we join with newspapers to take advantage of their strength: the ability to provide people with background and analysis and to document in retrievable form the candidates' responses to citizens' concerns. We also advocate partnerships with television, although clearly there has been significantly less enthusiasm for this approach among TV journalists than among print and radio journalists.

The partnerships convey an important message to the community, that this is not an exercise in grabbing market share. It is rather a joint venture by news organizations that put aside competitive interests during a campaign in order to devise coordinated coverage with people (listeners, readers, viewers, citizens) in mind.

We are able to achieve a synergy from partnerships that maximizes public radio's scarce resources and allows us to go far beyond what we would normally do with coverage.

The result is mutual promotion, enhanced credibility on all sides, and higher quality, more focus on election coverage.

Reporting: Both for NPR in its national news programs and for local stations, the project is intended to greatly improve our ability to identify story ideas and put them on the air.

For the first time, NPR is actively involved with stations in what they are producing locally. And stations are providing NPR with local eyes and ears.

The Election Project is an experiment. What we learn this year, with our 86 station partners, will be used to plan our coverage for the 1996 presidential campaign. We hope to have, by then, a practical ''how-to'' manual to give stations at the outset so that even more will participate.

In the meantime, we are alert to another kind of change: as we adapt our political coverage to bring it closer to the interests of citizens, we are aware that the campaign organizers will be just as alert in trying to adapt their activities to take advantage to the new journalistic techniques.

 

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''Citizen-Oriented Reporting''

Here are some ideas for reporters to think about as they do political reporting intended to achieve the goals of the Election Project.

 

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To Current's home page

Later news: Later news: Public radio's Election Project said to be the nation's largest public journalism venture.

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