Civic Journalism

History

Civic journalism—also known as public journalism and citizen-based journalism—got its labels after the 1988 presidential campaigns of Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had prompted widespread dissatisfaction over their superficiality. In Wichita, Kansas, the newspaper editor Davis “Buzz” Merritt Jr. (b. 1936), reviewed the election for the Knight Ridder–owned Eagle newspaper and concluded that the campaign's focus on Bush's “Willie Horton” ad (in which Dukakis was portrayed as soft on crime) and Dukakis's tank-driving pseudoevent (in which Dukakis appeared to be strong on national defense) had insulted the intelligence of voters and, worse, demeaned democracy. Dwindling voter participation provided evidence that traditional journalism served the public poorly by passing political superficiality along to readers and viewers without adding social value to it.

Merritt's discontent led him to Jay Rosen, a scholar whose 1986 doctoral dissertation had documented the social history of the American newspaper. Rosen had concluded that the profession of journalism developed in ways that separated citizens, newspapers, and public life. In an effort to improve newspapers' relevance, substance, and community commitments, Merritt, the journalist, and Rosen, the scholar, coined the phrase public journalism. (For consistency, this entry uses the term civic journalism.)

Merritt and Rosen defined public journalism as a reform of professional norms with the aim of reintroducing citizens to the center of political coverage, joining the politicians, their handlers, and other elites. But a broader goal of Merritt, Rosen, and other civic journalism advocates was the renewal of civic engagement in the democratic process.

Declining voter participation was only one measure of a widespread generational withdrawal of citizens from public life, according to research published during the 1990s by the Harvard University professor of public policy Robert Putnam. Demonstrating the decline in public participation in the U.S. political process since the 1970s, Putnam's findings contrasted with those that the French political writer AlexisCharles-Henri de Tocqueville (1805–1859) had gathered while traveling in the United States for nine months in 1831–1832. According to Tocqueville, early nineteenth-century U.S. communities exhibited uncommonly vigorous civic lives, and their most active participants kept abreast of the news as it appeared in print.

Tocqueville's conclusions were no longer applicable by the 1920s, when American philosopher and educator John Dewey (1859–1952) argued that the fate of democracy in an increasingly complex world depended on greater citizen involvement in civic public affairs and that the press was vital to this goal. Dewey's ideas shaped the so-called social responsibility theory of the press, which received its widest airing in the 1947 report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. The commission, funded by Time magazine publisher Henry R. Luce (1898–1967), concluded that only a socially responsible press can remain a free press. The idea of civic journalism shares the same philosophical lineage as social responsibility theory, although in practice scholars tend to consider civic journalism more activist in its emphasis on public deliberation and on community.

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