NAIIOW C n z REVIEI

David Mathus

f the job of the press is to inform the public, and the I public has become too fragmented for information to be useful, then the role of the journalist has to be restated - not necessarily changed, mind you, but elaborated. “Informing the public” is too limited, too narrow.

Journalists cannot create a “public” where it does not exist. Publics are diverse groups of citizens who are joined together to work on common problems. Only citizens can create publics, but journalists can ask themselves the following question: How do we align our practices with the ways that citizens form publics so that there are more publics and a stronger public life? Public journalism is an effort to answer that question.

And for a very good reason. The people who are most likely to become serious readers of the press are those who are in the business of doing public work, or more specikally, those who are invested in making decisions about how to deal with common problems. When people are in the business of making choices, they are going to look for information to inform their choices. Some of that information is available from the press. If people aren’t makmg choices, they don’t need infomation about public issues. The same is true of people who aren’t gardening; they have little reason to read the gardening column.

One term that can be substituted for the long and cumbersome phrase “the business of making public choices” is “deliberation.” While it isn’t the only word, it has the advantage of getting at the heart of “choice work,” which is carefully weighing the pros and cons of all our options against what is truly valuable to us. The root of the word deliberation goes back to “weighing,” as on scales that have goods on one tray and a stone of a certain weight on the other.

Public Journalism and Public Deliberation

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Public journalism is dependent on public delib- eration. So the press needs to align its practices to prompt a more deliberative form of dialogue. The news media can do that by the way they cover issues - by laying out a real range of options, not the usual two that are presented, usually as “liberal” and “conserv- ative” alternatives; *and by explaining the conse- quences of various options. These trade-offs also should be discussed in terms of what is truly valuable to people, rather than just in technical terms. The press also has to be clear about what deliberation is, as distinct from civic discussion and partisan debate.

Theoretically, that shouldn’t be too difficult in a country that was, to a large extent, created by the pub- lic deliberation of its earliest town meetings. But it is! I am struck by the irony: today the deliberation of cit- izens is virtudy invisible in a country shaped by pub- lic deliberation. And the fault is not all in the press.

One of the reasons for our inability to see the deliberative public is not that we don’t understand deliberation; elites deliberate among themselves all the time. The reason is that we don’t think the public is capable of deliberation. Oddly, our political culture doesn’t encourage a very high opinion of the public, and the press often falls into a dismissive habit. Headlines are coming across my desk these days reacting to citizens who have “disrupted” politics with referenda, term Limits, and surprises at the ballot box. A few recent examples:

The criticisms of “the people” implied in those headlines go something like this: Citizens are at fault; their anger at the political system is misplaced because they elect “the rascals” then complain about them as though they themselves were blameless. Most of the time the American people don’t know what they are talking about; they’re poorly informed and easily swayed by symbols that turn on their emotions ,and turn off their minds. They are uncritically fond of dem- agogues and hypercritical of anybody who presumes to know anything about anything. People irresponsibly bypass the legislative process through ill-conceived referenda that result in poor public policy. The prob- lem is not that the government doesn’t listen to the people. It listens too much. People won’t let the gov- ernment govern.

Unfortunately, the only counter-image the press provides to this caricature of the irresponsible, ill- informed citizen is the dedicated volunteer, the good person who rallies neighbors to deal with some local crisis, to prevent something disastrous from happen- ing. Maybe it is stopping a new garbage dump from being put on top of the city’s water supply or protect- ing wetlands. Recently a number of news stories have reassured us that there are indeed good individuals in America, doing good things. Old fashioned civic activism is alive and well. We aren’t all “bowling alone,’’ to borrow a much-used phrase from an essay by Robert Putnam of Harvard University. Stories of good people doing good things, however, don’t really respond to charges that, if left to “we the people,” America would be in trouble, that the public is a dan- gerous master.

We can’t say there isn’t a responsible, deliberative public out there to be seen, because there is. In addi- tion to activists who are leading the charge to correct some immediate problems, other citizens are working to build or rebuild their communities, to change the way the political system works. They are doing it by reintroducing public deliberation in order to increase the chances that people will think before they act, rea- son together before they vote. They are getting toge- ther in forums, study groups, neighborhood meetings, and literacy programs to deliberate long and serious- ly on issues both local and national. They aren’t expert$, but they are knowledgeable and eager to get more information. While they have strong emotions,

they both think and feel. They may not like politics as usual, but they don’t just blame their elected repre- sentatives for everything. In fact, they see officeholders as trapped by a system where elections are determined more by large ‘amounts of special interest money than the votes of citizens or the records of legislators.

These quintessential public citizens aren’t in the stories the critics of populism write, and they aren’t in the stories about the good citizens who blocked a garbage dump or w e d wetlands. The press finds it difficult to write about these citizens. Maybe it is because they aren’t so much trying to fix an immedi- ate problem as to create a different way of relating to their fellow citizens, a different way of approaching issues by making choices together. For whatever red- son, they are largely invisible. So is the practice of deliberative democracy that they represent.

Yet we have seen thousands of these deliberative citizens because many use the National Issues Forums (NIF) books, which are designed to promote deliber- ation or “choice work.” Some of these forum leaders were the moderators for the deliberations at the recent National Issues Convention in Austin, Texas. It was televised on PBS, and discussion guides for the event were drawn from NIF books. The promise of the Convention - and the reason the moderators gave their time -was the hope that the event would expand the country’s understanding of deliberation as well as increase the amount of it during the ’96 election and beyond.

Will that happen? It remains to be seen. At this point, the people I am talking about are still a “phan- tom public,” though not in the way Walter Lippmann used the term. Deliberative citizens are like those characters in science fiction movies who see them- selves, but no one else can see them.

The rason why this public remains invisible becomes clearer if we look at the mind-sets behind criticisms of the citizenry, I don’t have in mind mount- ing a counterattack to refute the charges; I’d rather engage the criticisms by understanding what is behind them, by looking at their unspoken assumptions.

You may have noticed right off that critics make no distinction between, on the one hand, a mass of

NAIIWL CMC REVIEW

people - a populace - the individuals who support one referendum or anoth- er and, on the other hand, a public - an inclusive, deliberate body of citizens who have struggled with issues and have come to more reflective and shared judgments. Today’s headlines are prob- ably not unlike what we would have seen a hundred years ago reacting to the original Populist movement. And if there had been a newspaper in Athens

7he b d f o r the Amerimn Revolution and the US. Constitution was in what A&ms called “bodies politic, ’’ that ?j, public mem blia in which “senti- men&” (we Wouldproba- bly say ‘bpinim;” today) w e firmed

D report on Plato’s criticism of democracy, the headline would have looked strangely modern. Criticisms of the pub- lic - and of democracy - follow a predictable pattern and can be grouped into three categories:

As we know, framers of the Constitution wanted to avoid popular democracy or direct rule. So they cre- ated a system of representative government that pro- tected against self-interests and relied on the people’s representatives - not the people themselves -to guard the true public interest. The framers created what amounts to a “family portrait” of American democra- cy that defined and continues to define what belongs in our political system. The picture most critics have in their minds when they think of politics is the fmners’ picture of representative government. The leaders of the republic today - which now include not just elect- ed officials but also the standard setters in the media - use this “family portrait” to judge what is signi6cant and acceptable political practice and what isn’t. The politics of representative government, as interpreted by established leaders, is the measure, the standard, for all politics. Failure to conform to this precept of

democracy, or fadure to be recognized by these leaders, is the kiss of death.

There is nothing wrong with a rep- resentative democracy. Actually, I think it is a rather good form of government. However, the picture we have of it is incomplete. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson knew this. They knew the basis for the American Revolution and the

U.S. Constitution was in what Adams called “bodies politic,” that is, public assemblies in which “senti- ments” (we would probably say “opinions” today) were formed. Public deliberation began in 1633 in the first town meetings that played a critical role in the Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution. Because this means of constituting ourselves wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution, Jefferson tried to get this part of the picture recognized through a system of public forums he called the ward system. He worried that the Constitution’s recognition of the people’s sov- ereignty would become an abstraction if people had no opportunity to exercise that sovereignty. Jefferson encouraged the spread of town meetings, arguing that “the voice of the whole people would be thus fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and decid- ed by the common reason of the society”

Jefferson didn’t succeed. Town meetings contin- ued in other forms; in the Chautauqua programs of the 1880s, in the “Town Meetings of the Air” before World War 11, and in countless local discussions. However, the political significance of these gatherings was often lost so that the picture that was handed down to us of what and who is important in politics has a missing section.

Americans who are still deliberating in bodies politic to shape public sentiments are in the part of the picture that was lost. Getting back in the picture is extremely difficult. The gatekeepers can’t see deliber- ative citizens in the family portrait. They don’t look like members of special interest groups because they aren’t partisans trying to elect someone or pass a spe- cific piece of legislation. They look to some like the champions of direct democracy that the framers wrote out of the Constitution.

Unfortunately, if you pursue deliberative politics, wlWEU-~l iUi~YG 19% 41

PiwcJoimw AM) PisBoc DELIMRATJOV

you are neither seen as acceptable nor unacceptable; you are considered insignificant. At most, you are helping to inform citizens, which is seen as a margin- al consideration. You don’t meet the test that deter- mines what is really important politically.

Worst of all, you are even held responsible for your own invisibility. If you just had a better press agent or if you would be a little more like what the offi- cial famdy portrait depicts, all would be h e . But that would dirmnish your unique and essential contribu- tion to American democracy

Let me describe how the invisibility of the delib- erative public plays itself out in current politics. Recently, the people of Cahfornia voted in favor of a referendum that would restrict services to immigrants who are in the state illegally. Some people saw this as an indication that the public exercises poor judgment. It so happened that the NIF books on immigration were used in California this past year, just after the ref- erendum was passed. In listening to the forums, you could hear what the public was really saying, behind the vote. After careful deliberation, weighing all the pros and cons, citizens did indeed accept the pro- posed change, even though it was restrictive. However, the deliberations revealed a public that would proba- bly not have written the kind of policy that appeared on the ballot. Citizens at the forums were clearly con- cerned about not being able to take care of everyone, yet impelled by a strong desire to keep alive the “American Dream” because of what it offers to (and calls forth from) immigrants. They wanted to balance these two imperatives. The referendum passed because it reacted to this ddemma, but it did not address it. That distinction was not reported. The deliberative public remained invisible.

To add a note of encouragement, however, for those who want to put public deliberation back at the center of our democracy, as Jefferson insisted it should be: some Californians are determined to delib- erne publicly before their next referendum, which will be on affirmative action. The lesson they think the state should learn is that it is dangerous for people to vote before they talk - and dangerous for them not to keep talking after they vote. So the SanJose Mercuty News is collaborating with the NIF program of the state libraries to encourage forums before the statewide

vote on affirmative action. In addition to its coverage on the news and opinion pages, the Mercury News has prepared an issue guide that lays out a range of policy options, which reflect different aspects of the public’s take on the issue. The purpose of the project is to increase the chances that people uprll have faced up to the hard choices on the issue and considered the con- sequences before the referendum. By working with community organizations, the newspaper is also encouraging continuing forums. After all, issues that touch on race will not be resolved in one election. Stimulating deliberation and creating ways for people to face up to their choices help build a stronger pub- lic. People don’t always change their positions on an issue as a result of deliberation but they often change their opinion of someone else’s opinion. And that increases the prospects for working together.

It will be interesting to see whether public delib- eration breaks the visibility bamer in this experiment in California. That will require more than announcing the dates of forums or reporting on interesting com- ments from the meetings. It will require reporting on the effects of deliberation on people as well as explain- ing what deliberation is all about. It will require putting public deliberation back into our picture of American democracy.

The press, as a whole, isn’t likely to change its reporting, however, until we change the family portrait of democracy and recognize our long lost relatives. By the same logic, the supply of public journalism isn’t likely to increase unless we increase the demand for it, that is, increase the number of people doing serious choice work by increasing the opportunities for real deliberation.

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