NPR Election Project puts the people's voice on air

Originally published in Current, Oct. 31, 1994

By Jacqueline Conciatore

How many voters, during how many election seasons, have longed to tell candidates running nasty campaigns that obliterate the important issues--''Just cut it out?''

Well, they've been doing it--in Texas, in Kansas, in New Hampshire, during citizen's forums and candidate debates sponsored by stations participating in NPR's Election Project. At a forum in Kansas earlier this year, a participant accused bickering candidates of behaving like children. In Texas last week, on a stage before 900 people, a social worker scolded Gov. Anne Richards and would-be governor George Bush Jr. for tussling and asked them to get to the issues. In New Hampshire, a man summed up the candidates' fight over each other's records: ''political mumbo jumbo.''

The rebukes seem to pack more punch when they come from ''regular'' citizens, a reminder of just how much power the voter has. Re-investing the power of the democratic process in the voter is the primary goal of the ''public journalism'' that the Election Project promotes.

Since the project kicked off about a year ago, six public radio stations in five cities--WBUR, Boston; KERA, Dallas; KQED, San Francisco; KPLU and KUOW, Seattle, and KMUW, Wichita--have established partnerships with major daily newspapers in their cities. In some cases, the partnerships also include local television stations. Combining resources, the partners commissioned polls to determine what issues were of primary concern to citizens. The news organizations then reported on those issues, attempting to offer realistic solutions in coverage as well as detailing the problems at hand. Stations also:

• organized small forums in which citizens deliberated over the issues with each other and candidates,
• co-sponsored ''town meetings'' or debates with other community organizations, and
• incorporated citizens' issues and insights into election coverage.

Although the fledgling project has had kinks to work out, and participating stations will do some things differently during the 1996 presidential Election Project, those interviewed were generally positive about the project; some news directors are quite enthusiastic.

Reaction to 1988 campaign

Most everyone agrees that the public journalism movement began with election coverage conducted in 1990 by the Wichita Eagle and in 1992 by the Charlotte Observer. Both newspapers worked to keeps citizens' issues front-and-center in their campaign coverage. As word spread about their success, many journalists seized on the idea of having citizens drive the news agenda, says Jay Rosen, a New York University journalism professor who advocates public journalism. The public's disillusionment with the 1988 presidential campaign--which perhaps sunk to its lowest point with the Willie Horton ads--''was very much an enabling condition,'' he says.

Today, NPR's Election Project is the single biggest public journalism effort in the country. It involves the five flagship projects as well as those of at least 50 other stations, says NPR Editorial Director John Dinges, who heads the project for the network. Other participants include the Poynter Institute in Florida, which helped develop the project, and the Kettering Foundation, which has trained project participants in moderating citizen forums.

For this electoral round, the project has a $350,000 budget--grant money from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Carnegie Corp. of New York. About $50,000 of that went to the six flagship stations.

Citizens whose paths never met

Some of the most noticeable consequences of the project are its ripple effects; several stations have elaborated upon the Election Project blueprint with new ideas. In an attempt to hold candidates' feet to the fire, KLCC in Eugene, Ore., and KQED have given them citizens' questions and then gone back to the citizens for their reaction. One Chronicle story on candidates' comments about immigration offered this citizen response: ''If I gave an answer like they did in a test that I had in college or even high school, I would have flunked the test.''

Responding to an all-time low voter turnout in a June 7 primary, KQED also undertook a large-scale outreach project, which included publishing flyers in Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese as well as English about its ''Voice of the Voter'' election project, and distributing more than 500,000 voter registration application forms through the San Francisco Chronicle in late September. In Seattle, a group of citizens got together and mulled over the state's budget, making cuts and amendments they saw fit, while in Carbondale, Ill., WSIU asked high school students to write essays that completed the thought, ''If I had my government representative here in front of me, I would tell him/her to . . .'' So far, one of the biggest lessons of the Election Project is that ''when you set goals, it tends to incubate a set of ideas,'' says Dinges.

For some stations, participation in the Election Project has meant an unprecedented level of cooperation with media organizations they normally compete against. KMUW, Wichita, and a local commercial radio station, for example, will join forces Nov. 3 to simulcast a forum on a controversial gun control ordinance.

Such alliances, including the radio-newspaper partnerships, ''are very fruitful and very important because they give people ... a sense that the journalism community ... is working together'' on their behalf, says Rosen. ''And that's important'' to a jaded citizenry that now thinks of journalists as political insiders rather than allies of the average person, he says. This is not to say that stations have given up all competitive habits. When commercial TV station WBZ wanted to brings its AM sister station into its Election Project partnerships with WBUR, the public station said, ''no way,'' according to Dinges.

It makes sense that journalistic efforts with chest-swelling names like ''Voice of the Voter,'' ''The People's Agenda'' and ''Your Vote Counts,'' would capture some good PR. Says Erick Nycklemoe, news and information programming manager for New Hampshire Public Radio: ''You can't buy this kind of attention. We've gotten incredible media coverage.'' Several political cartoonists around the state, for example, ridiculed incumbent Gov. Steve Merrill and Rep. Bill Zeliff for refusing to participate in debates the station held anyway. And, the Associated Press did a piece on one of the station's interview sessions with citizens, Nycklemoe says. Though it didn't get any seed money from NPR, NHPR undertook a full-scale Election Project.

With their town meetings and forums, stations are sparking discussions of sometimes deeply emotional issues among citizens whose paths might not ordinarily cross.

During a forum aired by WAMU in Washington, when the conversation turned to the racial segregation of the city schools, an African-American woman told a fellow participant: ''You know, I think this is the first discussion I've had with a white person in 10 years.''

In such cases, ''what's neat is it's so civilized,'' says Jeff McCrehan, news director at KERA. ''It puts a positive spin on the media. The fact that we could be so interested in bringing people together to talk about these issues. And they hang around afterwards and talk and talk and talk.''

A swift kick?

What are the results of giving the public a greater say in the news agenda? Public journalism, says Rosen, ''is partly about having faith in citizens and their willingness to be citizens.'' A frustration for some journalists, however, is that despite their Election Project efforts, many people remain ill-informed about issues and unengaged in the political process. ''When you go out on the street, you find an enormous void. People just have no clue,'' says Vance Hiner, news director at KANU in Lawrence, Kan., a partner in the Election Project with KMUW, Wichita. ''I doubt if there is a wide-ranging effect we're having on politics in the state. We earned points with fellow journalists and politicians, but I don't know if we accomplished the goal of pulling more people into the process.''

Paradoxically, while Kansas polls revealed that citizens understand the complexity of issues, they don't seem receptive to campaigns that embrace and address the realities. ''As soon as politicians start giving complex answers, [peoples'] eyes glaze over and they lose interest,'' says Hiner. ''I think we're turning full circle and finding the public is playing a blame game ... I think the public needs a good kick in the ass.''

This is not true of citizens selected to partake in the forums, he notes. ''I think it has changed them. I think they're more aware and thoughtful. But, golly, if we have to do it five at a time ...''

The project has not succeeded in subverting politics-as-usual in Kansas either. Polling revealed that crime is of top concern to Kansans, but politicians are using that information to run ''one-tone'' races, Hiner says. The candidates for attorney general, for example, are putting out continuous rhetoric about how tough they'll be on crime: one is even promising to put criminals on parole in orange jumpsuits, according to Hiner.

Some say it is too soon to start looking for changes in citizen attitudes. Reporters ''are working against really ferocious conditions out there in the public at large,'' offers Rosen. ''There are high levels of alienation. The point is for journalists to feel they're responding to it somehow, not just reporting on it.''

Dinges responds by focusing on the project's immediate goal: moving citizens' voices and concerns into the center of debate. ''We're trying to reinvigorate our own journalism, first of all. I'll leave it to the political scientists to determine whether we reinvigorated the political process in America.''

NPR is committed to the Election Project for 1996, although currently has no funding in hand. Dinges says they'll need to raise about $1 million. What the project will look like next time around is unclear, but Dinges and Project Director Jude Doherty's ideas about forums have taken a new shape since they launched the project. While both laud the forums that KERA and other big stations produced, they have concerns about some other forums' on-air sound; Doherty says some of the events have ''lags,'' and that citizen opinion can be a little ''thin'' for relatively sophisticated public radio audiences. Generally, the forums worked best when edited down (instead of running live), or when incorporated into reported pieces, she says.

Doherty also worries that the project can divert precious station resources away from reporting. ''If a station is big enough to handle both, I'll stay out of it,'' she says. ''If a station says, 'What should I do? Devote resources into forums or stories?', we'll side with the latter. ... We live on pieces and want members stations to produce,'' she says.

Journalists at the station level say the forums provide an important public service and most of those interviewed said they will continue organizing them in 1996. In focus group research, KERA found that listeners found forums thought-provoking. Respondents said the felt they were being talked to instead of talked at, and often heard the participants expressing their own opinions on issues.

That sense of being represented helped make the recent debate between Texas gubernatorial candidates a success as well, McCrehan says. Without the citizens on stage questioning candidates, the debate would have proceeded along familiar lines: ''Journalists going for the gut, going for the throat, trying to throw candidates off-guard.''

''A lot of it becomes 'inside baseball,' they get into subjects voters don't know anything about, and end up feeling alienated from the process. That's the whole reason the Election Project came about in the first place.''

 

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Earlier news: NPR's editorial director describes how journalists can help bolster citizens' (and reporters') roles in the electoral process.

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