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Public or civic journalism officially blossomed as a concept in the early part of this decade. It was borne out of a frustration some journalists and scholars experienced with the way in which the Fourth Estate reported on public life. Too much emp hasis conflict. Too much political coverage that glorified tactics and personalities over substance.

Public journalism was envisioned as a way to improve the quality of dialogue about politics, health, social services. In short, many issues that affect the lives of citizens. Rather than reporting on the deteriorating state of public discourse, the atrophying of the body politic and the disenchantment of citizens with regards to their institutions -- including the Fourth Estate -- public journalism advocates urged media outlets to think of ways to conquer the corrosive forces responsible for public apathy.

Reluctant to proffer a blueprint, or how-to guide, public journalism advocates simply urged their peers to think hard about the need to improve the quality of public discourse in their communities, in large part by figuring out ways of tapping into public concerns about issues such as crime, health and education, and finding ways to allow citizens to deliberate and arrive at solutions.

Over the years an infrastructure of sorts has been erected that supports various initiatives in public journalism in the United States. (Aside from the odd experiment, there is little awareness or debate about public journalism in Canada.) That inf rastructure has provided technical and financial support for a range of initiatives, everything from arranging townhall meetings to devising ways of making public officials, including politicians, more accountable to the people they serve. As is to be exp ected in any new endeavors, the results have been mixed. Now, with public journalism preparing to enter a new decade, some advocates and critics are assessing a movement that was supposed to change journalism for the better and help re-invigorate democrac y itself.

The Idea of Public Journalism is the latest contribution to this growing body of work. Edited by communication's scholar, Ted Glasser ( author of numerous works on public and investigative journalism), the book, which will be published in May, cont ains a number of essays that reflect on some of the movement's philosophical principles and assumptions.

In his chapter, Michael Schudson, a communications scholar at the University of California who has written extensively on public journalism, attempts to place the movement in a historical context, comparing it with three other models: consumer-orie nted; advocacy and what he calls "Trustee Model Journalism."

The following is an excerpt from that chapter entitled: What Public Journalism Knows About Journalism and Doesn't Know About "Public"

To oversimplify dramatically, there have been three general models in American history of how journalism might serve democracy. These are the market model, in which journalists serve the public best by providing whatever the public demands; the adv ocacy model, in which journalism serves the public by being an agency for the transmission of political party perspectives; and the trustee model, in which professional journalists provide news they believe citizens should have to be informed participants in democracy. I discuss each of these models briefly and try to explain the challenge public journalism poses in urging a revised trustee model on the press.

In market model journalism, journalists should seek to please audiences or, at least, those audiences that advertisers find attractive. Whatever these advertiser-friendly audiences demand, they should receive. Consumer demand is the ultimate arbite r of the news product. Market model ideologists may speak of democracy or at least of consumer sovereignty, but they do not mean it: The consumer is sovereign only as long as the consumer is willing to choose among commercially viable choices, only as lon g as consumer preferences are to be evaluated in the short run, and only as long as consumers with more dollars have more, say, than consumers with less.

Market model journalism is anathema to journalists themselves. They may repair to in apology for what they do, to explain why their best efforts are often thwarted, but they never refer to it as an ideal or aspiration. It is the model of the busine ss office, not the newsroom. This gives it enduring influence; for instance, it almost exclusively governs all local television news. But it is the model that any self-respecting journalist fears and loathes.

In advocacy model journalism, journalism should provide news from the perspective of a political party. The aim of news gathering is to advance the party. Here journalism is a secondary or subsidiary institution deferring to the party rather than a wholly autonomous business enterprise. Advocacy model journalism has most often been party journalism, but advocacy journalists also represent social movements (like the abolitionist press did), churches, or other interests and communities. There are eth nic and community newspapers, magazines of opinion, and hundreds of newsletters that operate in an advocacy mode. But this is rare today for the general circulation press. In the past, however, the advocacy model dominated, from the establishment of the J effersonian opposition press in the 1790s into the early 20th century.

Despite the Founding Fathers' dedication to a political theory that judged parties, factions, and politically-oriented voluntary associations to be dangerous to republican government, proto-parties developed in the 1790s with newspapers as central organs, promoting and disseminating their different viewpoints. By the time the mass political party emerged in the Jacksonian era, party newspapers were well established as the central agents of party organizing and party propaganda. The "party press" do minated American journalism until the end of the 19th century, and of course vestiges of the party press persisted for a long time thereafter. But today scarcely anyone urges a return to the party press and the advocacy model, despite its long service to American democracy, lies on the scrap heap of history as far as the general circulation mass media are concerned.

In trustee model journalism, journalists are to provide news according to what they themselves as a professional group believe citizens should know. The professional journalist's quest for truth and fairness, exercising sound and critical judgment as measured by a jury of his/her peers, should dictate what news should be. Journalists ordinarily accept the trustee model as the only alternative to market-driven journalism. Journalism is understood as a constant battle between the bad guys upholding m arket model news (i.e., the business office, the deal makers, and the Frank Munseys and Rupert Murdochs) and the good guys upholding trustee model news, the dedicated, professional journalists who speak truth to power and follow the story wherever it may lead, whomever it may embarrass, and however few readers it might attract.

In this model, journalists imagine a public that is often too preoccupied and too distracted to be sovereign of its own citizenship. Citizens then entrust a measure of sovereignty to journalists just as people entrust a measure of control over thei r bodies to doctors. The journalists are professionals who hold our citizenship in trust for citizens and whose expertise or political analysis citizens rely on when they want information about the state of the country.

Trustee model journalism established its commitment to reporting over commentary in the late 19th century and its commitment to an ideology of objectivity, to professional codes of ethics, and to principles of disinterested public service by the 19 20s. These views reached some kind of zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. They came to a curious climax with the reporting of Vietnam and Watergate. Journalism's achievements in Vietnam and Watergate were, in fact, part of an assault on the virtues of autonomo us professionalism held up as the standard in the trustee model. The aggressiveness of The Washington Post in Watergate, for instance, was itself part of a reaction against the complacency of professional "objectivity." The premise that journalists were o r ever could be neutral professionals serving as trustees for the public interest was badly undercut in the Vietnam era. Reporters in the field indeed spoke truth to power, but reporters in Washington too often accepted power as truth. Inside journalism, there was the New Journalism, the entrance of a personal voice in writing, alternative journals, investigative reporting teams, and other developments designed to free up a rigid pattern of reporting that trusted far too naively in the statements of gover nment officials.

Outside journalism, academics began to pepper away at the notion of objectivity itself. Sociologists saw it as a "defensive strategic ritual" and political scientists saw news gathering as a set of rote bureaucratic routines rather than a set of he roic or virtuous professional practices. The authority of professional knowledge -- what might today be termed a professional "discourse" -- was under attack. Journalism was only one of many professional groups whose authority was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s. Critics in and out of journalism agreed that journalists, like any professional group, could become a conspiracy against the public. The critique of conventional journalism changed journalism. News became more sophisticated, more analytical and -- a mixed blessing -- more disillusioned. Critics assaulted journalists again in the 1980s for falling under the spell of Ronald Reagan and, after the 1988 election, for submitting to the Bush campaign strategy of flag-waving and racial innuendo. At the same time, with the downward spiral of newspaper reading, especially among the young, the news business was full of self-doubt and a growing sense of crisis -- its continued profitability and the celebrity of many of its leading practitioners notwithstan ding.

Along comes public journalism. Public journalism is a variant of trustee journalism, that is, a version of the very same ideology that dominates the world of professional journalists today. Where is authority for the news to lie? In public journali sm, as in trustee journalism generally, the answer is: with journalists themselves, not with the marketplace, not with a party. Public journalism advocates sometimes sound as if they mean to empower "the public" relative to journalists. Some elite journal ists have responded hysterically to this notion, as if the public journalists were inviting the mobs into the newsroom, or at least the pollsters and the focus groups (as if they were not already there!). But public journalism does not remove control over the news from journalists themselves.

In this regard, public journalism as a reform movement is conservative. It does not propose new media accountability systems. It does not offer a citizen media review board or a national news council. It does not recommend publicly elected publishe rs or editors. It does not suggest that the press be formally or even informally answerable to a governmental or community body. It does not borrow from Sweden the proposition that government should subsidize news organizations that would enlarge the dive rsity of viewpoints available to the reading public.

Public journalism, in other words, stops short of offering a fourth model of journalism in democracy, one in which authority is vested not in the market, not in a party, and not in the journalist but in the public. Nothing in public journalism remo ves power from the journalists or the corporations they work for. There are ways to grant the public greater authority in journalism -- there are ways, in a sense, to democratize the practice of journalism itself. For instance, the movement of minorities and women to promote diversity in the newsroom is a form of democratization and a serious way to empower disempowered elements of the public by representing them in person among journalists. This does not offer any direct accountability, however, of the n ews institution to the public. Other forms do: The ombudsperson owes loyalty as much to the public as to the news institution. Media critics and media reporters take on their own institutions - at least, they are supposed to -- with professional dispassio n. Local or national news councils, never very popular among journalists, afford legitimacy to community press critics. Publicly owned news institutions such as the Public Broadcasting Service and its affiliated stations are responsible to boards represen ting the public and are sensitive to public criticism in ways that corporately owned news institutions can never be.

These are all ways in which a true fourth model might arrive, but this is not what public journalism proposes. Public journalism begins inside the trustee model. It urges that journalists themselves re-imagine their work not as informing the public but as opening up democratic deliberation and discussion. Communication scholar Daniel Hallin put it this way:

"Journalists need to move from conceiving their role in terms of mediating between political authorities and the mass public, to thinking of it also as a task of opening up political discussion in civil society...it might be time for journalists themse lves to rejoin civil society, and to start talking to their readers and viewers as one citizen to another, rather than as experts claiming to be above politics.

Public journalism exhorts journalists to put citizens first, to bring new voices into the newspapers, even to share setting the news agenda with individuals and groups in the community -- but always authority about what to write and whether to prin t stays with the professionals. Even so, conventional journalists have responded to public journalism as a dangerous threat. Public journalists have risked ridicule and scathing criticism inside their newsroom. Although an outsider may detect the conserva tism of public journalism, many newspaper insiders experience it differently. Perhaps what seems to me the cautious reformism of public journalism can be more fully understood if compared to Progressive Era reforms to which I think it bears kinship.

The excerpt is taken from an upcoming book entitled The Idea of Public Journalism. It will be published in May. Look for a review of the book in the next edition of Media. Back to Table of Contents

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