Policy from the people’s perspective…
The presidential debates and other news took my focus away from my latest blog essay (see links below) about how the press should cover presidential campaigns. By discussing this now, I’m getting a jump on the flurry of conversation about this topic that will follow the election in the various press review journals and larger newspapers.
One of the wonderful things about journalists is that they are sincere worriers; they truly do worry about their professional practices and how to make them better. But it seems that despite the worry very little changes between election cycles. The bulk of the coverage will be, in the metaphor stew of the profession, horse-race coverage and inside-baseball analysis based on he-said, she-said reporting from official sources.
I’ll attempt to answer the question of why so little changes at the end of this series.
In the first installment of this essay, I suggested seven types of articles that should comprise the bulk of campaign coverage (you may certainly find some examples of them in current coverage). These seven types share at least two traits: 1) each offers a high degree of political utility, and 2) each offers (to varying degrees) a people-centered focus. Today I will briefly discuss article type #2: Explanation of governance from the citizens’ points of view.
Let’s take a definition break: As I am using the terms here, “politics” refers to the ideological struggles involved in making decisions; “governance” refers to the creating and implementing of policy.
Let’s suppose that most political reporters accept Nelson Poynter’s view of the purpose of journalism:
“To inform the public about the public’s business, creating a society that is equipped with the knowledge it needs to make the right civic decisions more often than it makes the wrong civic decisions, and thus helping to perpetuate self-government and democracy.”
I have often argued that most campaign coverage has low political utility, i.e. not very useful in making the civic decisions Poynter mentions. Most campaign coverage is not politically useful because it fails to explain how policy would, might, or did affect citizens. We hear many issues mentioned by name by the press and the candidates. We hear very little people-centered policy analysis that demonstrates and/or speculates about how issues actually affect citizens from the citizens’ points of view.
Most campaign reporting focuses on politicians and how policy affects them and their campaigns from their points of view.
Article type #2 asks reporters to cover governance from the perspective of those governed, to tell a different story about a different protagonist from a different point of view. Such articles could also be far more interesting to write and read because reporters could make excellent use of the narrative bias of journalism.
Previous entries:
How to cover a presidential campaign
Whose story is it?
Look to the past
You have blown me off enough times I should know by now not to ask reality-based questions, but I will ask one more and then if you dodge, I will not ask another. When you say journalists should report on “people-centered policy” and should report “how issues actually affect citizens from the citizens’ point of view”, intellectually I would have to agree with that. I’m not a journalist, but I read a lot of news. I can think of two ways this could be done, one lame and the other far too complex for the average journo to manage. Just say Yes or No to this question: Do you have any idea how this “citizens’ point of view” journalism would look? If so, please describe. If not, I won’t bother you again with reality.
It’ never my intention to blow you off.
My answer: Yes.
Telling the story from the citizen’s point of view would require journalists to seek a number of things for any given policy/political story (in no particular order):
1- Accurate descriptions of policy from performance auditors or other non-partisan, bureaucratic/academic sources. These descriptions must focus on what will/did happen to real citizens.
2- Descriptions of the problem the policy is supposed to solve based on reporting of real problems, i.e. interviews with those the policy is supposed to help and other sources that can describe/quantify the problem.
3- Skillful reporting of anecdotes about salient exemplars (the press does a pretty good job of this already in many cases–especially project reporting).
4- Accurate descriptions of the proposed policy by politicians and candidates without regard to their partisan strategy, i.e. the politics of policy. This also means playing down or ignoring he-said, she-said quotes in order to get “the other side.” In such reporting the “two sides” should be: 1) non-partisan experts, and 2) citizens.
5- Reporting of civic problems based on citizen input primarily and politician input secondarily. What do citizens say needs fixing? Why do they say it? What do they propose? this requires that journalists let go of the status quo bias.
There’s more, but I have to take the dog to the vet
I hope this demonstrates that 1) I do have an idea about how this looks and 2) I’m not blowing you off.
OK, thanks for the info —- I’ll consider myself unblown. Hope Sniffy is OK.
Turns out the dog is allergic to fleas, which, apparently, is something more than just getting itchy. $150 later, I’m armed with chemical WMDs