Can we know what voters want; can we deliver?
I promised more anon. This is just a little bit more.
What would happen if journalists approached the coverage of a political campaign from the standpoint of what citizens want to know about politics? (I’m suggesting something quite different from the civic journalism experiments of the past.)
Two thing: 1) When given the opportunity to question candidates, citizens very often ask different than do journalists, and 2) According to recent polling, citizens say they find debates more useful in making voting decisions than journalistic coverage of the campaigns.
Regarding #1, here’s what I wrote in my blog essay about the primary instability paradox (you’ll find an academic treatment here):
I saw an interesting moment on Hardball with Chris Matthews on Friday, 23 May. MSNBC pollster Frank Luntz was questioning a panel of voters. His opening question: “Regardless of who you’re voting for, what characteristic do you want in a Democratic nominee?” After several people responded, Luntz said (with my clarifying remarks):
We’ll [the press] talk about personalities for the Democrats and you [the panel] all keep bringing it back to policy. That’s an interesting dynamic. Up until now, people [who?] were looking for, as you used, bold leadership, honesty, a vision for the future. [Luntz turns to the camera] And yet they’re all talking policy. [To the panel] Is that where the Democratic nominee is going to go, rather than focusing on attributes, they’re going to focus on policy?
Luntz continues to mention, with a sense of wonder, the panel’s interest in policy. Matthews and his guests ignore it. Here is Luntz’s concluding remark that Matthews cuts off to return to his guests:
I asked them to talk about candidates, talk about attributes and they kept coming back to issues. That says to me that there’s no Democrat out there that’s really captured the hearts and mind of the public as an alternative to George Bush. It is early, but there’s no one out there that’s got a clear…
In other words, the panel’s interest in policy, the day-to-day stuff of governance that affects peoples’ lives, is proof that no candidate has a convincing presidential image or master narrative. And the logic in that would be what? I would say this is proof that, at the moment, no narrative created by the campaigns or the press has completely usurped the voters’ abilities to comprehend their own political interests.
Luntz wants them bow to the press’ master narratives. But these citizens realize there is another narrative to be told, a narrative largely ignored during campaign coverage: The story of how policy affects the lives of average Americans.
The panel clearly wanted to know something about policy. What would happen if journalism gave it to them and did it in a way that citizens recognized as useful? How can this be accomplished? Those are questions I’d like to try to answer. I have no idea what the answers are. But I think we have come up with a way to find out.
I’ll deal with #2 tomorrow.
