Last Updated: December 01, 1998
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On journalism
Is civic journalism an answer?
Look at civic journalism’s goals: keeping public discourse
alive, talking to and listening to people, reporting on the middle; given
our current path, isn’t it worth a try?
By Hodding Carter III
This is excerpted from a speech Carter gave at the October Public
Journalism Conference at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.
Civic journalism says that journalists need to rediscover the total
community, listen to the total community, cover the total community and
advocate for the total community.
It says that the people who live in a neighborhood know as much, and
probably more, about what is wrong with it and what might be done to fix
it than city officials and certified experts.
It says that good reporting only begins with databases and phone calls;
it is made more accurate and relevant by person-to-person contact with
those whose lives you impinge upon and alter with your coverage.
It says that asking people to tell you what they think matters to their
community, and adding those opinions to the mix that guides your coverage
is at least as useful as polling them about their political preferences.
It maintains that such surveys are more relevant to a newspaper’s basic
mission than those that measure our consumers’ tastes in horoscopes, comic
strips and canned editorial features — or their preferences among local,
state, national and international news.
It says that what any damn fool knows about events in and around his
own life is equally true about public issues: that the armies of polar
opposition do not encompass all the possible points of view or solutions
to those issues. That indeed, since total victory in our form of government
is as highly unlikely as it is undesirable, most outcomes will be outcomes
of the middle. And that helping to find that compromised, compromising
muddle of a middle is not a dishonorable task and indeed is a worthy one.
Forget the critics, who have never seemed to grasp even the most rudimentary
of civic journalism’s basics. This is not the same thing as mindlessly
throwing away news judgment to give the people what they say they want.
That form of patronizing contempt for the public and the public interest
is unforgivable, and journalism, like politicians, already patronizes the
public too frequently.
Instead, civic journalism rests its case on the contention that our
system of government and its underlying principles are too valuable to
be allowed to atrophy — for reasons of self-interest as well as for the
common good.
It says that here there are neither peons nor kings, and that what the
man in the bowling alley or the woman in front of the computer has to say
can be as insightful as the words of the officially anointed.
By itself, public journalism won’t reverse a single fundamental negative
trend afflicting American media today. Rupert Murdoch will still practice
slasher tabloid journalism. Major media corporations will still emphasize
their profit margins more than their news holes. All the forces of division
at work in the land will still be abroad, given added weight by the new
communications technologies. The contemptible performance by much of the
Washington-New York media axis throughout this wretched year will not be
undone, nor even prevented from recurring.
Civic journalism does not — and must not — promise a quick fix or a
sudden explosion in civic participation, circulation, love between our
brothers and our sisters — or ethical journalism.
What it should emphatically insist is that it took daily journalism
and American communities about a half century to get into their present
fix, and nothing is going to extricate them overnight.
It should say to the nay-sayers in the business and in the academy that
if instant analysis is your bag, there’s always room on television for
one more talking head. But if you’re interested in finding out whether
civic journalism can produce results of value to both journalism and community,
give it a decade or two before pronouncing final judgment.
For a man who loved and loves daily print journalism more than any other
vocation and still thinks of his years in Mississippi as the most significant
of his life, civic journalism’s chief attraction is that it offers a chance
for journalists to reclaim their central place in the community — and in
the process to help the people refashion healthier communities for themselves.
That’s not a half-bad mission for journalism, today and in the years
to come. It sure as the devil beats the path we’re today
Carter is president of the Knight Foundation.
