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Interviews
Questions:
1. What would you say to a foreign journalist who is trying to get a basic understanding of the difference between traditional form of journalism and public journalism?
2. As one of the first editors to experiment with public journalism, what are some of the memorable lessons you have learnt that you might want to share with international journalists who may be considering going the same way?
3. What are some of the conditions that must be present in a newsroom for public journalism projects to succeed?
4. You have spoken to journalists in other countries and are on record as saying the time has come for the public journalism movement to move beyond the borders of the USA. How might public journalism in other countries differ from the model that has emerged in the USA?
5. The last decade has seen the emergence of new democracies in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. How might public journalism nurture these nascent democracies?
Response:
I address your very interesting questions in the context of three traditional models of journalism as I understand them: the government-directed model; the partisan model, and the U.S. model. I recognize that three-level framework is an oversimplification, but it will serve our purposes here, I think.
Thankfully, the government-directed model is gradually fading, though many states, particularly in the Middle East, are only inching toward a truly free press. Most journalists, I believe, oppose that model. Indeed in many places, most recently Yugoslavia, journalists have been in the forefront of democratization of their countries. So I will not deal further with that model in responding to your questions.
Questions 1 and 4:
As journalists around the world begin to move toward a freer press, they will be creating the model that will guide their work. There is a natural inclination on the part of many journalists elsewhere to look at the U.S. model as the gold standard. This is understandable at one level because U.S. journalism has existed in almost total freedom for more than 200 years and clearly underlies the success of democracy in the U.S. But there are reasons why I would counsel foreign journalists not to automatically try to emulate the current U.S. model.
Any form of journalism is, of course, an artifact of its culture. And a theory of journalism that ignores its underlying culture-leaps ahead of it or lags behind it is likely to have great problems. One of the problems of U.S. journalism today, in fact, is that it has lost touch in many ways with U.S. civic culture. That's the ground in which public journalism found its roots.
The prevailing model in many of the world's relatively-free countries is the partisan one, in which publications spring from and reflect philosophical beliefs. The result is, I believe, a rich environment in which several newspapers, for instance, serve the same area and citizens are presented with several points of view on issues. In such situations, the competing newspapers provide the sort of competition of ideas in which democracy thrives. Until the 1930s or so, that was also the U.S. model, and I believe we lost something as a democracy when commercial concerns began to dictate a move toward "centrist" or "nonpartisan" newspapers, with the inevitable result of fewer and fewer journalistic voices.
I believe that public journalism can operate in the partisan culture as well as in the U.S. culture, so the first thing I would say to a foreign journalist interested in public journalism is this: study the principles of public journalism and understand them within the context of your own journalistic culture and adapt them as necessary. That is to say, do not concern yourself very much with the difference between public journalism and traditional U.S. journalism. Rather, construct your own forms of it within your own environment, which will certainly differ from country to country.
The core idea of public journalism is that journalists do their work in ways that help engage citizens in public life, including but not limited to political life. My experiences in a dozen countries ranging from Jordan to Jamaica to Sweden is that public life in each of those countries is unique to that country. So journalists who want to be effective in promoting the goals of public journalism necessarily will create their own models. The one sustaining idea, country to country, is strengthening democracy by beginning where citizens begin. No off-the-shelf imported model can aspire to do that better than one developed within the national culture of a given country.
Questions 2 and 3:
That being said, I'll relate some of my U.S. experiences with the caveat, of course, that local traditions and culture must always be used to filter these ideas.
The first requirement for public journalism to take hold is for journalists to study and come to understand its guiding principles and how they relate to democracy and public life. One reason public journalism became controversial in the U.S. and thus has not moved faster than it has is that journalists were unwilling to do the necessary work to gain that understanding. Many reasons exist for that, among them the following:
--An unwonted arrogance and defensiveness on the part of some journalists. Public journalism was in part a response to the fact that U.S. journalism was under severe and warranted attack from many quarters. Rather than trying to understand the reasons for that alienation from its audience, much of U.S. journalism simply hunkered down.
--The notion of journalistic detachment is deeply engrained in U.S. journalism, which is quite different from the partisan model that prevails in much of the rest of the world. As I have often insisted, there's a difference between detachment (which is a bad thing) and journalistic objectivity (which is a good thing.) However, many journalists were unwilling to do the intellectual work to understand that difference and simply dismissed public journalism as dangerous because of what they saw, incorrectly, as the abandonment of journalistic objectivity.
--A lack of understanding of the principles of true democracy and a narrow view of journalism's connection to it.
--The fact that no living U.S. journalist has tried to operate absent democracy for any length of time. They all grew up in freedom and therefore take it for granted.
So, again, either for individual journalists interested in public journalism or staff leaders interested in it, the process must begin with a deep understanding of the principles involved.
Within newsrooms, among the conditions necessary are:
--A willingness to change based in a recognition that change is needed, and understanding of why it is needed.
--Leadership from the top. The people in charge must be at least benign toward the idea, and, ideally, strongly is favor of it.
--A few "heroes" to carry the torch and demonstrate what public journalism looks like. Even if leadership from the top is not present, a few dedicated reporters and editors can begin planting seeds. It is much preferable, of course, if top leadership recognizes those heroes, but sometimes top leadership must also be shown through example of how it works.
--A desire on the part of journalists to participate in the strengthening of democracy.
Question 5:
I firmly believe that public journalism can nurture nascent democracies provided the journalists in those places want to do that. But, again, I cannot begin to draw a blueprint beyond the basic principles of public journalism because I am not immersed in those cultures. From people like you all over the world that I have heard from, it's clear that the desire exists broadly within our profession. This is particularly true in places where the journalists now working have experienced the absence of democracy.
Without question, if journalism in a given country is done in ways that strengthen citizen participation in resolving issues, democracy in that country will be strengthened because self-determination is a basic human desire that no amount of political and cultural overlay can completely extinguish.
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