PARTICIPANTS AND VISITORS:
[Please note: at the request of our long-distance participants, next to each speaker's initials throughout the text we will provide the name of his or her country].
ECEP Faculty: Elzbieta Matynia (EM), Jeff Goldfarb (JG)
ECEP Staff: Ina Breuer (IB), Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni (HD), Karen Underhill (KU)
ECEP Fellows: Malgorzata Gajda, Poland (MG), Magda Iwanska, Poland (MI), Agnes Kende, Hungary (AK), Andrew Klepikov, Ukraine (AK), Rumyana Kolarova, Bulgaria (RK), Boris Kostov, Bulgaria (BK), Anna Laido, Estonia (AL), Michal Vasecka, Slovakia (MV).
Visitors: Martin Plot, Argentina (New School Dept. of Sociology) (MP)
INTRODUCTION BY ELZBIETA MATYNIA:
We are very pleased to have with us Professor Jay Rosen from New York University, who is the Director of the Project on Public Life and the Press and who, since 1990, is leading a reform movement known as 'Public Journalism'. This movement is something that we hope to get acquainted with more today. I wanted to tell you that during the meeting between Jay and Adam Michnik some time ago, they both agreed to hold a public dialogue on the topic of Public Journalism, when Adam returns to New York.
JR: I'm really honored to be here at this particular class, at this particular table, in this particular city; because anybody who lives, or tries to live an intellectual life in New York has a certain feeling about the New School. For me, it begins, of course, with the origins of the institution, and its giving refuge to intellectuals, and thus to thought, at a time when it was very much needed. The tradition of the institution is linked in my mind to the most famous name associated with it at the time, which was Hannah Arendt. Arendt brought her style of thought to America through the New School; and for many people that chord still sounds through our own work and through our ideas about politics, about public life, about the world, about the twentieth century.
That is one reason I'm really glad to be here. Another is that James Miller teaches here, who is the author of "Democracy is in the Streets. " Miller has captured, in that book and in much of his work, a kind of thinking about democracy that falls within a particularly noble American tradition. It is the notion of participatory democracy. A very 1960's notion in the U.S., but also a 1920's notion; and a 1776 notion. Keeping that idea alive--participatory democracy--is quite important to me, and I assume to you.
THE SPIRIT OF 1989
I want to start with the spirit of 1989. Nineteen eighty-nine was a pretty big year. I think in the future it will have its own academic departments -- the Department of 1989 Studies. We'll probably have them about 1968 too, and it will be an interesting little competition between '68 and '89. A lot of good things happened that year. Democracy was in many ways triumphant, and along with that, markets, which many people associate with freedom, were equally triumphant. We were told about the end of history, which meant the end of a certain kind of ideological conflict within history-- typically called the Cold War.
And American democracy was an inspiration to people around the world, which is a very powerful thing. We saw that in Beijing, for example, with the quoting of the language of the Declaration of Independence. We saw it in Havel's words: "You inspire us to be citizens," as he told the U.S. Congress. And this brings us into one moment that Arendt was very interested in. It is the idea that when you've founded a republic and you start something from nothing; when before there wasn't democracy, and then one day in Czechoslovakia there is -- this is in those moments where people get to enact the dream of democracy in its most intense form. The people who live in times of revolution live this experience that all democrats need to understand. Because this is the civic treasure of democracy: starting something new.
So that, too, was 1989. And that was a powerful moment, when Americans' founding ideals were in play around the world, in a variety of ways. Within the spirit of '89, we see immediately two kinds of notions of freedom at work, as well. One associates freedom with open markets, elected government, civil liberties, rule of law, and other certain architectural features that are said to be essential to a democracy. You see such ideas in play when the press writes about an election in a third world country, and the way it U.S. journalists grant legitimacy to some things and not others. There's a certain notion of what democracy is that is embedded in those news stories. This is one view of freedom, then: freedom arises from the building of democratic institutions.
The other view of freedom alive today is the one I called participatory democracy -- the notion, again, that "democracy is in the streets." The notion of "taking over" the institutions, and giving them back to people. "Your country has been returned you," Havel told the people of his country when he assumed office. This the revolutionary idea of freedom. Freedom as public participation, public action.
Those twin lessons made for an ironic moment in the United States. On the one hand, we thought: "How inspiring for us. This shows that American democracy works. We won the Cold War." A certain triumphalism was felt, which had its basis in fact. At the same time, however, there was an anxiety about American democracy at home. The nation was in a state of civic disrepair, and both of those perceptions shaped Americans' experience of the year 1989.
WHAT ARE JOURNALISTS FOR?
Another interesting thing was happening at that time, which has to do with American journalism. It was a result of the 1988 Presidential campaign, in which Michael Dukakis got on top of a tank to demonstrate that he was tough on defense. Michael Dukakis, who was then Governor of Massachusetts, a liberal state in the Northeast, was the Democratic party's candidate for President in 1988. He waged a horribly incompetent campaign and lost. In the midst of this incompetence, he decided he would demonstrate that he was tough on defense by climbing aboard an M-1 tank and riding around. Everyone who remembers this remembers one thing-- which is the helmet that he was wearing. It made him look like one of these toy dolls in the back of a car, bobbing along on the highway. And everyone saw him instantly as a doll. And you had to ask yourself, do I want a doll for President? So, it was not an encouraging moment for the Dukakis campaign.
But it was also a very discouraging moment for the American press. Why? Because they were there, at the Dukakis media event, taking it seriously. This is what they were supposed to cover. This is what they were supposed to film that day as "news." This is what the system had told them was "politics." They looked at Dukakis, bobbing along in his tank, and they said to themselves, "That can't be politics. But here we are, covering the campaign."
This emptiness, this vacuum at the heart of the profession's public purpose, is then repeated at the Democratic and Republican political conventions, where you have 15,000 media people, and nothing significant to report because the event is totally scripted. Here we see a crisis of professional purpose: what are we doing here? And that too was one of the outcomes of the spirit of 1989. It is one that interests me because I got involved in it. I started to intervene, and I'll tell you how.
HAVEL MEETS THE PRESS
In 1990 a group of American journalists went to Prague to meet up with Vaclav Havel and his press secretary, Michael Zantofsky, together with a bunch of journalists from Central and Eastern Europe -- Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Ukraine. The idea of the conference was, "We'll help you to become a democratic press." And maybe also, "You'll tell us about some of your troubles." But mostly it was, "We're the Americans coming in, telling you how to do journalism the right way."
Well, Havel was there, and he had a few things he wanted to tell the journalists. What erupted was a battle over the meaning of a "free press" in Czechoslovakia. The Americans took the position that anything Havel said that conflicted with their idea of a free press was, on its face, an erosion of freedom in Czechoslovakia -- and therefore to be denounced. And denounce they did. They denounced Havel for being an "enemy of freedom." An interesting move.
So, I wrote about this, as an intellectual event. [Ed. note: Professor Rosen's article, "Cynicism at the Corps, or Havel Meets the Press" was included in the background readings for this workshop session.] One notion of democracy met up with another. One understanding of freedom came up against its alternative. One notion of responsibility was put forward by the American press: "I'll tell you what responsibility is, responsibility means ignoring what you government guys want us to do." The other was Havel's notion of responsibility, which was civic, shared, and had to do with membership in a fragile democracy.
So, for example, Havel and his press secretary argued that journalists should not publish the names of those who had been listed by the previous regime as collaborators because of the sensitive nature of this information and Havel's view that the past could easily strangle the future in its crib. To the Americans this was outrageous and they said so. They got angry. But they were speaking from their experience in a settled and secure republic; they were not entering into Havel's mind or the predicament of his young and fragile nation.
And two notions of politics conflicted here as well: on the one hand politics as a sort of power-play, realpolitik, government vs. the press; against Havel's notion of 'spiritual' politics. Two notions of markets at work. The Americans said markets bring you a free press. To Havel's way of thinking, the market could just as easily wipe you out; so let's talk about that, too. And the Americans had nothing to say about that. So there were two notions of markets at work, as well.
Two notions of citizenship were alive, where the American journalists didn't want to be seen as citizens, while Havel said, "You're citizens, too." All of these things were in play. As well as two views of the media. This I something I want to stress -- that "journalism" is not the "media." The media is a private industry, dedicated to the production of audiences. Journalism is a social practice, created by a society to meet its needs. Just as we can ask, "Is the university fulfilling its role?", well, in the society we can ask whether journalism is fulfilling its role well. But we should be clear that this is not the same thing as asking about the performance of the media; and in fact, increasingly the question is, "Can journalism, as a democratic practice, survive against or despite the media?" If we confuse these two, we can't get anywhere in our discussion.
MV [Slovakia]: The media is also a state enterprise, right? Or the state now turning into private, especially in the countries in transition.
JR: Yes, precisely. In that case the key distinction is between the media as a state apparatus and the media as a civil institution. But eventually the conflict changes: it becomes the "media" as a private, profit-making instiutiuton and "journalism" as a public craft or democratic art.
Now, all of these conflicts were in play once again when Havel came here, to the United States. Another interesting event. "Havel meets the press", but from the other direction -- he's coming here. So, what happened? Well, they saw him first as a hero. He got the hero treatment. Sort of like a baseball hero, you know, he had just won the World Series. And he was an inspiration to American democracy, because he showed the world we were right. So, the encounter got reduced in some ways to applause for Havel. We were applauding him and he was applauding us -- but beyond this there were a lot of other things in it that the American press just couldn't handle.
To put it as simply as possible, they couldn't handle the notion that Havel put forward -- that "consciousness precedes being, and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim." These were words he spoke to the U.S. Congress. With that sentence he was trying to put a very large claim into the world; and the American press had no capacity to receive it. And so it interpreted it in other ways. First, they found it amusing that Havel would try out such a line on the U.S. Congress, which has few intellectuals as members. And then the journalists would slyly admit afterwards, "Of course I didn't understand it either," instead of taking the attitude, "Wow. I better do some reading before I understand what just happened," thereby illustrating the intellectual deficiencies of the press in receiving this man into the culture. Havel is coming, why not find out about him? Read a little.
So, these are what we saw during Havel's visit: the hero theme and the inspiration theme. And this helped to blunt the heart of what Havel had to say. Because what Havel said is, "Look, we are building a democracy. And we get our inspiration from you. But we get our inspiration from your ideals. But we also take a warning from your society, which doesn't seem to us to be necessarily meeting those ideals." But to say that, Havel argued, was simply to say "we are still approaching democracy", as he put it. You have the advantage, he told the United States, because you've been approaching democracy for 200 years. But you're still far from the ideal.
The United States press could not handle this message. And so they took 'responsibility' to mean the sort of thing Havel showed in his own life-- that which made him a hero. But it did not apply to themselves. So, keep that image in mind.
PUBLIC JOURNALISM
Meanwhile, another group of people in American journalism were doing something very different --reacting differently to the spirit of 1989. They had decided that it was their own practices that had failed; just as American society is failing to solve its own problems. And this, you see, was the irony of '89 in American politics. At the moment our ideals were triumphant in some way in the world, American democracy was in disrepair at home. Fewer people voting, public cynicism, a public dialogue conducted through paid advertisements and shouting matches and media events, and less and less participation in civic life. There was a kind of civic crisis in the land, and certain journalists had decided that this was a crisis for them too. It made it harder to practice serious journalism. For business reasons it made it harder to draw readers in.
And finally, it was a crisis for personal reasons, because they no longer played the role in their communities that they thought as journalists they should be able to play. "What am I going to do with the rest of my career?" If you've been on four or five of these Presidential campaigns, for example, you say, "Is this what I'm going to be doing? More of this?"
More and more journalists were quitting journalism for this reason. Interesting people. Leaving their profession at the peak of their career to go do something else because they were disgusted with what they saw. Meanwhile, others began to ask themselves: what can I do to change the situation? In other words, they took responsibility in Havel's sense.
I began to get involved in developing the concept we call "public journalism" when I discovered the existence of some journalists who were trying to play a different role in their communities by, let's say, supporting public discussion, instead of just letting it fall apart like it usually does. I started to correspond with these editors and I began to visit them in their locale and talk with them. In these meetings, I tried to get conversation going about civic priorities in journalism. What should they be? When journalists go out and do what they do, what is it they're trying to create? News or a strong community, a better politics? I'd try to ask a question like that to redirect the conversation away from "Are you giving an accurate portrait?", and toward "What are you trying to make?" This is the question Arendt might ask. How do we create the public world? Rather than, "Are we simply reflecting the public world?"
Out of that experience, I and other journalists created the notion that we began to call "public journalism," which we approached the way the critic Irving Howe always approached socialism. He called it: "The name of our desire." That's all it was-- public journalism was simply what we were in search of, as we tried to find a way that this institution, the American press, could help revive democracy in its particpatory forms and improve civic life at the local level. Public journalism had nothing to do with socialism, but it was, as Howe said, "the name of our desire."
We created a movement of journalists around the country who worked together to ask themselves, "What is the civic purpose we should be trying to achieve?" And how can we change our journalism to strengthen public life, to make for a healtheir public sphere, to make democracy come alive again for people, to offer people the means to participate. So, what we did is detach journalism as a social practice from the Institutional forms that had become its conventions and ask anew: what are journalists for?
Now the story of that reform movement's struggle to get into the world is a stpry about democracy; and which notion of it should guide American journalism. It's about freedom and what it means to have a "free press." Free to do what? It's about responsibility in the most basic sense. What should I be doing in the world, as a person alive in this historical moment? It's about politics, because there are two notions of the journalist's role in politics alive now. One says "cover politics." The other says, "No, help in whatever way you can to create a better politics than we have now."
This story is about markets, because the question is, what is journalism's fate in a market society if it doesn't get better at drawing people into the public world? It's about citizenship because the role of the citizen in these two models is very different: citizen as consumer or spectator or reader, as against citizen as participant in public life. And it also raises the question of the journalist as citizen. What is that person's role? To put it another way, and this is the title of my book, What are journalists for? What do they stand for? And what are they willing to support? Why do we need them? And again, the whole reason for creating public journalism was simply to say "There's another notion alive in the American press," another way to answer the question: what are journalists for?
THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER: AN EXPERIMENT IN PUBLIC JOURNALISM
JR: Public journalism as an idea had as one of its incubators the Charlotte Observer, a newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina, a fairly small big city. This newspaper decided to change the way it covered elections in 1992. The change was very simple to explain, and difficult to execute and practice. Instead of following the candidates around and reporting on the media events that the politicians themselves stage every day, you do something else. If you are no longer "following the campaign," what else are you going to do? You've need some other rationale for what you're doing. Where are you going to get it? Well, it seemed to the public journalists that the first place to go was to the issues, rather the candidates who may or may not address them.
The first move, then, was to try to understand the important issues rather than the campaign. And how do you do this? Well, you start by >asking people, "What are your issues? What would you like to hear the candidates discussing? What are your deepest concerns?" By trying to understand what they say, you begin to develop an alternative agenda, a kind of "citizen's agenda" for political news. "This is what the campaign should be about," citizens will say, if you bother to ask them. And that's what campaign news can be about, as well. If the campaign fails to touch people's, experience, then it becomes a professional game, a media event, a spectacle that's going on without the participation of those who must make the final decision.
IDENTIFYING A CITIZENS' AGENDA
The Charlotte Observer decided they would start with something very modest. "First, we'll find out what people care about, and then we'll report on the campaign through that lens." THis was considered a bold innovation. And when President Bush came to the state, to talk to North Carolina, The Observer told people what he said, and then compared what he said to the citizens' agenda. This made it possible for people to say, "Ok, here's what Bush said on the issues as we've experienced them."
In addition to reporting what the citizens of North Carolina said was on their minds, the paper went deeply into each of those issues, which was the whole point in the first place -- to start doing another kind of journalism. To actually talk about what's at stake for the people of the area, and how it connected to the election. This means going into detail about what each of the candidates said on those key issues: crime, taxes, schools, jobs, etc.
In this way, you're still reporting on the candidates, but it's through their contributions to a public discussion with citizens of the state. The reporters thus shifted their practices from covering campaigns to trying to create a journalism about issues, which they thought would be a useful addition to their craft. And they found that people in the community liked it. They did not say, "Give me the opinion polls back, please!" When you stop telling them how this advisor was hired and that one fired, and here's how the candidates' staff members are jockeying for position, and here's their strategy for winning and here's who's ahead, people don't miss it. Because it never touched their concerns anyway.
So, the Observer found it had room for more issues coverage. And the bottom line was that they did something that was better than the standard treatment of elections in the American press. They did it again in 1996 during the elections, but they made it a joint effort with other newspapers as partners. The point of the partnership was very simple. How do you get the statewide candidates for office to sit down with you and go into exacting detail about their ideas on key issues? How do you move them beyond the ten-second sound-bite, which they've perfected as their all-purpose answer for every reporter on the campaign trail who shoves a microphone in their face. How do you improve on that? How do you do something better?
They decided that if journalists from several newspapers all get together and said, "Here are the issues we want to discuss with you," the candidates would have to sit with them. And they did, for three and a half hours. All except one, Senator Jessie Helms, who makes a point of running against the news media as much as his opponent. So the candidates sat down for three and a half hours of in-depth conversation with a panel of journalists from across the state of North Carolina. The journalists could never could have done it separately, because no candidate would be able to sit down for that long with twelve different news organizations, which make up the partnership. That was the practical reason for doing it that way.
Because of this they felt that they had to limit the number of issues they would ask about. If they didn't, the candidate could give 360 superficial answers to 360 different questions. So, what should we concentrate on? It seemed pretty simple. What do the people in our state think is important? What do they want the campaign to be about? The journalists used this limited agenda to structure their conversations with the candidates. And also to guide the journalism they were doing and sharing among themselves, thereby making available to people of the smaller communities, greater journalistic resources than their organization as businesses could afford. It was a sharing-the-wealth idea. And the purpose, again, was to find a way of doing political journalism that touched people's lives, when politics often doesn't.
FIX-IT JOURNALISM?
You read for today a piece from Max Frankel of the New York Times called "Fix It Journalism." This was one of the first attempts the Times made at handling the idea of Public Journalism. Frankel dares to say, in what I think is an amazing passage from a prominent journalist, that reporters, editors and publishers, having their hands full, should keep to the job of telling the news and getting it right. They should "leave reform to the reformers," he writes.
First of all, if he means simply to say that American journalism has no interest in the cause of social reform, then Frankel has cut himself off from the history of his own institution. For example, the historical roots of investigative reporting are in progressive social reform. If he means journalists should leave reform of their own institution to the reformers, it says, in effect, that journalism can't reform itself. Getting Max Frankel to say something like that was actually part of the strategy of the idea. You put the question, "what are journalists really for?" into the arena of the press and you get back: "leave reforms to the reformers." As if journalism never had anything to do with social reform, or shouldn't reform itself.
When I went to Philadelphia to debate the editor of The Washington Post, he said American journalists have no business promoting any idea of what a good citizen is. Which I thought was extraordinary. I couldn't imagine a philosophy of journalism that didn't have some notion of citizenship at the heart of it. Nor can I look at The Washington Post and see anything other than a certain idea of citizenship, displayed through the ordinary acts of judgment the editors make as they make up the front page and make for us a picture of the world. Journalism, from Arendt's point of view, helps create the world -- althought it must also faithfully report on it. And therefore to question what journalism is about is to ask "what kind of world do we want?" That was part of public journalism; and it is an idea alive within the American press. That's the good news. The bad news is that some people want to make sure it doesn't get any further. Let's discuss.
DISCUSSION
JG (Jeffrey Goldfarb, Dept. of Sociology, New School): [...] In East and Central Europe and the former Soviet bloc there's a long experience -- practically exclusively an experience -- with a journalism that imagines how to cultivate a good citizenry. Sometimes it was called "helping to build a socialist man." It seems to me -- and I should preface this by saying I am actually quite sympathetic to the movement -- but it seems to me that you have to confront that very important line between imagining a good society, cultivating citizenship -- and propaganda. Inevitably the response of conventional journalists, Frankel included, is that that line is being lost. And inevitably, in the part of the world from which most of our participants come, the most important advance is 'objective American journalism' of the most conventional sort. It is very attractive, and for good reason.
JR: Absolutely. It's a very good point.
EM (Elzbieta Matynia, ECEP Director): Public journalism is a constructive idea. My only immediate anxiety came from the very same territory that Jeff's did. It was at the 1936 or '34 Congress of Soviet writers, that one of their major activists presented the idea of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism meant to write with full responsibility about how things should be, not necessarily how they are. In other words, to express the image of an ideal. He gave an example. Imagine an apple. You are writing about the apple the way an apple should be; an ideal apple. And the consequences of that Congress were incredible; because in fact all other ideas, which presented negative aspects of the society, were not allowed -- only the constructive was to take place. Obviously we are talking about an extreme, a kind of grotesque. We know what happened during the forties in Russia and the Soviet Union, and in the fifties and early sixties in central Europe until Stalin died. That is what struck me. It is actually going back to a tradition about which I am very uneasy and very uncomfortable, which set out the culture as propaganda, and was instrumental in creating a political system which was to repress freedom.
JR: I agree with the warnings about that language of idealism, coming out of your experience; but we put forward this language in a particular cultural context -- a "culture of cynicism" that had become the norm within the press in the U.S. Simply by introducing another language of obligation, we had to draw on some image of a better democracy, a better world. You're right, that can become a dangerously utopian notion, and some vague language about civic purpose could very easily be hijacked into dangerous circumstances.
All of those dangers are in there, sure; along with a lot of promise, too . This project is aimed at a certain space within the American press where journalists do consider and debate questions of professional purpose. In the context of a developing nation in Eastern Europe, the imperative or goal for journalism may be completely different. It might be just getting enough paper at one stage; getting a press law passed at another, and getting a newspaper founded in another. But as I see it these are all different responses to the same problem: how to rescue journalism as a social practice from both the Media and the State. To give it some place with a civic or "third sphere".
KU [Karen Underhill, ECEP staff, USA]: I wanted to go back to what Jeff was talking about. Jeff, when you first said that in Eastern Europe there's a tradition of the press or journalism being connected with promoting some sort of ideal citizen, my first thought was that you were referring to the underground press or Samizdat -- and for example Michnik's own involvement in the Solidarity press. What came to mind was the imperative at that time to make people be active as real citizens -- "living in truth" -- and not fake citizens. So I initially misinterpreted your comment; but it does bring up the fact that both the official and the underground presses were clearly politicized, and politically active. In fact when Adam Michnik spoke, he mentioned that one of the biggest problems Gazeta Wyborcza faced after 1989 was making the transition from a press specifically directed towards making people politically active (toward those who maybe could be inspired to be politically active) to a paper which must focus daily on providing information.
EM: From the role of playing an advocate for change, with a certain vision of democracy, to [...] whatever it means to report objectively on reality.
KU: My question then is, What would you warn people who are trying to become real, 'objective' reporters of information? What would you warn them could be the danger in that, and what happened to us in the American press?
JR: Well, that's not an notion that I try to quarrel with. Adam Michnik is right. His newspaper was born in one set of circumstances and it has to survive in another. Unless the idea behind the paper changes, there's no way it can manage that transition. So Michnik says, Look, we played a role in the rise of Solidarity, and obviously we have to play a new role in a hundred different ways. Among them we have to take positions toward the people that used to be our friends. So, in every way you are repositioning the journalism you're doing. You're changing it as circumstances change. In fact this is what I really wanted to say to you today. It is the question of that shifting relationship: how do we change our journalism and our aims, based on how the society is producing -- or failing to produce -- a democratic way of life?
As that answer changes journalism has to change. Now, in that evolution, the notion of providing objective information, I think, has a great deal of value -- in the sense that it points journalists toward certain virtues: being accurate, getting your facts right, knowing what you're talking about, being fair to people, being legal, getting their ages right, telling us about the world in some documentable, verifiable way, telling the truth. That's all to the good, because we need that to get in touch with what's happening in the world. The thing is, we need a lot else too. And journalism has always recognized this.
It is true that the news is said to be objective. It is also true that journalists "advocate" on the opinion page. Well, if the people who advocate and the people who report are the same people, then obviously this institution is engaged in trying to change the world, and also to report on the world. It doesn't think this is impossible, because it does both. Everybody knows that newspapers have priorities, they're big players in town, they have power, and they have a principle at work to govern the use of that power. Our intervention as public journalists is simply to state the fact that objectivity is only one half of a philosophy, the other half of which is speaking out, having a voice, a vision. And being a player in democracy. And journalists seek this. A lot of them go into journalism to change the world, do some good, be part of the solution, etc.
I talk to a lot of journalists about why they went into journalism. They never tell me, "I wanted to be objective. I'm sort of a neutral person at heart, that's just me; I'm neutral about everything. And I thought this would be a good profession for me because I'm neutral toward everything. That's the kind of guy I am." Or they don't say, "Yeah, information is my thing; I'm in love with information." They say things like, "I want to write." I want to communicate with people. Or, "I am fascinated by power." Or, "I wanted to see the world!" I've had journalists tell me that journalism is a "magic carpet ride"-- a means to get away from little towns in Kansas. A good motivation for entering journalism, but hardly "objective."
So, this question of public purpose has to be complicated. Public journalism doesn't try to get rid of the notion of neutrality at the heart of American journalism. We're saying in this context, it can still work. But it has to be re-thought. And that's what we've experimented with. How can you be neutral and still contribute to a less cynical society and a stronger democracy?
JR: We need to get some more people involved in the conversation. [to participants:] From your perspective, how do these questions look?
EM [NY]: Michal, in Slovakia do you think there would be such a positive conspiracy of journalists? And that kind of care to let people speak through the media or take part in the discussion of what Slovakia should look like? Do you think that that kind of attitude would somewhat heal the uncomfortable situation in your country, which is very one-sided on all levels, including the reporting?
MV [Slovakia]: Well, there is not such a gap between journalists on one side and the public on the other. People are very much involved in getting contact with journalists from both sides of a very much divided society. And all problems are reflected through these journalists.
JG [NY]: How many newspapers does an average citizen -- of the intelligentsia -- in Bratislava read each day?
MV: Two daily newspapers. One could probably be Sme, which is right-wing oriented or Pravda, which is left wing oriented, or Narodna Obroda, which is liberally oriented. And the second one is probably Slovenska Republika, which is full of Meciar's propaganda. So, if you really would like to be well-informed you have to check it every day as well -- because if you are informed every day about what Republika is writing, you know what Meciar may do next week.
JG: That's the reason why the systems are so different.
EM: Yes; I wonder whether the very concept of public journalism can be somewhat helpful in an East European context -- to engage more people in the countries in which they are not currently engaged, like Slovakia, because of the specific makeup of their regime right now.
JR: Yes, of course. The question would be, how can the society reach its journalists with questions of civic purpose? Whatever situation those journalists may be in right now. That's the question raised for each one of your home societies. How can you speak to the people who do the work of journalism? In whatever context. In yours it's a partisan, ideological context, to a large degree.
But within each one of those worlds, you have people who are journalists. Do they talk to each other? Who in society is talking to them? Who is talking to them about what they're doing as journalists? Are they professionalized? Do they have a public ethic that you can begin to try and shape?
These kinds of questions, of course, raise all the old spirits of state control -- propaganda. That danger is also in there, but my argument would be that this is part of the work of building a free press. You have to anchor that press to some sort of social purpose, and finding out what that is and how it works is an individual affair for each culture involved. That's why I found the Havel event so interesting. The American press assumed that the way to find press freedom was the American way. Which was a surprising notion.
MP [Argentina]: I want to come back to the idea of the public, and the Soviet writers' meeting. Because I think there's a very interesting point in it relating to the idea of institutional freedom in the new democracies, and not in the old. The issue I am interested in is how to fight against this example of the idea upheld in the Soviet writers' discussion, without in the same movement losing the future -- for example, without losing the possiblity of an actually existent public sphere.
New democracies have to break with the past journalism -- that is, the propaganda journalism. How can one break with that journalism, knowing at the same time that there is not only a narrative, an objectivist aspect of journalism practice, but a second kind of social practice, as presented in the public journalist movement?
JR: Thank you very much-- that's a wonderful way of putting it, because I heard two things. One is how do we keep alive the potential of journalism in any society where it is threatened, which means all societies. How do you do that? How do you protect that function? How do you keep that alive for yourselves as a republic? And if I understand what you're saying, from the perspective of a country like Argentina, the mere existence of two models coming from America helps complicate the question. It immediately forces people in Argentina to say, which direction should we go?
Incidentally, the public journalism conversation has been brought to Buenos Aires with American intellectuals and American journalists and editors making the trip. The USIA sponsored trips to speak to journalists in Argentina about their situation and which way to go. How do we organize a press? And what can we learn from you? In effect, to replay Prague, 1990. To do it again, but this time with journalists who understand the problem of creating a civic society, and are trying to do that in their own sphere.
Now, you run into tremendous problems with the comparability of the situations. How relevant is it to us? Where are you at, where are we at? That's the life of the conference. That's why the American journalists go to Buenos Aires and help figure that out. But that's public journalism. In whatever name it happens to take in Argentina, it could be something completely different. But it is the notion of an alternative way to go. Not just "freedom from," but "freedom for." But for what? That's a question of purpose.
BK [Bulgaria]: The real problem about this new form of journalism is that one side of its mission is to have a firm say in following an agenda, whether in politics, economy or in other fields of the society, or the social life. And here comes the big question. Once the journalists claim their right to have a say in forming the agenda, how do they make a compromise between representing the views of the public, and the personal view of the journalist? Once you miss finding the right balance, you tend to be undemocratic. How do you feel you can solve this problem?
JR: It's a perfect question.
The things that we think public journalists can stand for are not simply political expressions of the mass on one hand, or personal ideas of the journalist on the other. They are rather notions that draw from the language of the public sphere or the civic order, which needs to operate well if citizens out there are going to make democracy work, and make public discussion work.
The question then becomes, what kinds of habits and democratic practices in journalism might help the public have the kinds of discussions it needs to have? If it's actually going to be a public and not just a population of people. Not just a market, not just an audience, but a discoursing public. What we ask journalists to support is not their personal views, and not the political priorities of the public or parties, but this third category of concerns. These include:
- better discussion in the public sphere; - a more open system of participation; - a journalism that connects more to people's public concerns; - better instructions on how to get involved if you want to; - a more optimistic civil tale, a story that evades the cynical society in some way, putting forth something more constructive.
These are the things that public journalist's try to offer, not as their personal agenda and not necessarily as the demands of the audience either. It is the demands of a particular form of politics: participatory, deliberative democracy within a strong civic culture.
I also want to respond to the way you describe the problem. We are not arguing that journalists should STOP being neutral and START achieving some constructive purpose. We're saying that journalists are ALREADY players in the system. They were already involved in American politics --before the concept of public journalism arose -- in a variety of ways.
They are not involved as partisans, they're not ideologically driven; but there are many ways in which they cooperate with the state, in which they reinforce the rule of the two major parties. They take certain people seriously, and not others; they shape virtually everything that gets said during an election campaign, because their priorities become the priorities of the candidates.
Our argument, then, is that "civic purpose" is not being brought onto the stage by public journalism. On the contrary, there's a huge civic purpose being served right now by the press, in the way it does its daily work. And we're saying, that's not the only way to do it. There's a better, more civic way of accomplishing those goals, and so we try to put the idea out there, and we get certain reactions. Usually we get criticized by the elite press each time we do it. Which is getting to be fun, actually.
EM [NY]: Do public journalists know better what is best for the public? Or is it rather the situation that public journalism facilitates the discourse?
JR: Exactly. It's a facilitating role. It's the role of the host. It's the role of the referee. It's the role of the moderator. It's the role of the person who invites people to the table, and decides who is at the table. It is the old eighteenth century role of publicists, of amplifying things others are saying. All of these are involved. The idea is to accomplish those things in a way that, for lack of a better description, builds the public sphere -- in whatever meaning this has where you are. It is necessarily a very local project in that sense. What the public sphere requires varies from one context to the next. It could simply be information, such as listings of where to go. It could mean answering the phones -- just getting people in the newsroom to answer phone calls from readers, so they have some idea what these people are like out there, and have contact with them in their professional routines. These simple things, too, can be public journalism. It is every attempt to reform the practice of journalism by making it better connected to citizens.
EM: I dare say we will be coming back to the issue of public journalism in our meetings again and again. I have many, many questions. And we'll see you in February. Possibly then we will have that confrontation [proposed dialogue between Adam Michnik and Jay Rosen] on public journalism and what kind of public journalism. What should be this corrective in the countries that we are coming from? -- given that the different contexts, as you are saying,differently frame the possible mission of public journalism in both parts of the world. So, thank you, thank you very much.
JR: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
[end of transcript]
