Missing the Point   

The heated debate over public jour- nalism has focused on the movement’s tactics and ignored its underlying philosophy. It’s time to lower the decibel level and take a closer look at its core.

The reporter on the phone wanted to talk about public journalism.

"Sure, happy to," I said.

"OK, now public journalism is where you write a story and show it to readers to see if it's alright to print, right?"

"Uh, I think we need a longer conversation."

I'm not making this up. The anecdote is an admittedly abberational but approximate indicator of why no useful discussion of public journalism as an idea or philosophy has occurred within our profession. Instead, controversy--often rancorous--over experimental techniques has been at the forefront. To be informed about a controversy is not the same as engaging an idea.

It's time that engagement took place, for there is much within the philosophy of public journalism that warrants close, critical and creative examination by the best minds in our business. I am confident that the core ideas, once considered, will withstand such scrutiny, but as no such examination and engagement have yet occurred, no one really knows if that is so.

Bear in mind that my use of such phrases as "public journalism says.." is a writing convenience and should be preceded by "in Merritt's view" in all cases. There is no Church of Public Journalism and no catechism, to employ the regrettable and seemingly unshakable evangelistic metaphor applied in AJR in the very first national piece on public journalism ("The Gospel of Public Journalism," September 1994). Those of us thinking and writing about this idea are hardly monolithic; we differ on many points. Nor do we claim either the ability or the aspiration to "fix" things--except insofar as citizens can be empowered to fix things themselves. But we do share at least three characteristics:

* Seriousness of purpose.

* Conviction that journalism has an obligation to public life beyond merely telling the news.

* Frustration that the discussion we are trying to induce is drowned out by the Sturm und Drang of debate and angry dismissiveness based not on what we are saying but on what some journalists say we are saying.

A notable if only recent exception was Carl Sessions Stepp's thoughtful book review and essay in the May edition of AJR ("Public Journalism: Balancing the Scales"). That piece, Stepp wrote, "attempts to steer the debate toward a demilitarized zone and probe the underpinnings of this revolution-in-the-making."

What follows is part response to Stepp and part invitation to other thoughtful journalists. It's time for the profession to suspend the tag-team wrestling match over early public journalism experiments--some of which, in my view, have been clearly misguided and have gone too far--and replace it with critical examination of public journalism's intellectual roots. Only in that context can a truly useful and needed debate occur.

A review of public journalism's brief history is instructive in understanding why--despite dozens of panel discussions, many simmering tavern debates and a couple hundred articles and papers in the last two years--the fundamental ideas of public journalism remain largely unexplored by the profession at large.

Start with the fact that journalists, by nature and necessity, are pragmatic, results-driven people. For the most part we say, "Don't bother me with philosophy. Tell me how to do it; I've got a paper to get out." Or, as often, "Just give me a two-graf definition, and I'll decide if I like it or not."

Public journalism isn't that easy; if it were, it wouldn't be potentially important or particularly interesting; it would be merely a different, if controversial, technique. But public journalism is much more than technique. It requires a philosophical journey because it is a fundamental change in how we conceive of our role in public life.

The yearning for a facile definition and the fact that public journalism was first expressed in large projects invited journalists to regard it as a set of practices rather than as a philosophy. Public journalism became "focus groups" and "polling" and "holding forums" and "setting agendas" and "getting involved in the news" and "asking readers." A parallel definitional trap would be to define investigative journalism as "going to the courthouse to look up records." The tools have become identified as the thing itself.

The diversion is understandable given the pragmatic and often mimicking nature of journalists; but as a result, the debate thus far has been limited to techniques and focused on experiments undertaken by some well-intentioned practitioners who hadn't themselves taken the philosophical journey.

The first two steps on the journey are:

* Acceptance of the fact that--whether or not we like it or are comfortable with it--in the media age journalism is an integral part of the system of public life, an active, even if unwilling, participant in it.

Public life is the arena in which democracy is expressed and experienced, including but not limited to formal politics. How we do our journalism has direct and lasting impact on how public life goes, intended or not. In a word, journalists are unavoidably "players"--even though their proper role is not to be partisan or political in the traditional sense.

* Recognition that journalism's integral role in public life imposes an obligation on us.

The obligation is to do our journalism in ways that are calculated to help public life go well by reengaging people in it. Public life "going well" means, most simply put, that democracy succeeds in answering its core question: What shall we do? The answer, in a democracy, should be found by informed and engaged citizens. (Another way to express this is building "civic capital," a residue of knowledge and experience in the art of democracy.) Public journalism does not attempt to forge its own answer to the question. Rather, it actively seeks to help citizens arrive at their answer.

I believe the first point is inarguable, for to deny it is to deny that journalism is of any consequence whatsoever, which in turn would raise, unavoidably, the question of "Why do it?"

The second point is one of departure, for it requires taking a step away from traditional journalistic detachment. It calls for purposefulness and declared intent as we go about our work.

And it is precisely at this point that much concern and some confusion arises. Most journalists hear the critique of detachment and take not a step but a mental leap: If we're not talking about detachment, they say, then we must be talking about attachment; and if we're talking about attachment, then we must be talking about abandoning such indisputably important and useful roles as watchdog, outsider from government, independent observer, uninvolved-and-thus-credible source of information.

Some recent experiments under the name of public journalism, unfortunately and avoidably, have left themselves open to criticism because they have abandoned one or more of those ideals. But that need not be the case.

Public journalism and those traditional ideals are neither in conflict nor mutually exclusive. Public journalism adds to those ideals an additional imperative: concern for whether citizens become engaged in public life. For if people are not engaged, democracy fails. And--a lesser but important point for us--if people are not engaged in public life they have no need for journalists or journalism.

Public journalism is not aimed at solving problems; it is aimed at reengaging citizens in solving problems. It does not seek to join with or substitute itself for government (in either case an outrageous and impossible aspiration); it seeks to keep citizens in effective contact with the governing process. Its goal is not to better connect journalists with their communities, but to better connect the people in communities with one another. So public journalism is as much or more about public life than it is about journalism, a fact universally overlooked in the wild thrust and parry over technique and sacred, uncrossable lines.

In this respect, it's regrettable that public journalism was first expressed in large-scale projects (starting with the 1990 Voter Project and 1992 People Project at my newspaper, the Wichita Eagle). Those early projects gained some considerable attention, which led to wrong questions being asked. The question from ever-pragmatic journalists was always "How did you do it?" rather than "Why did you do it?"

The "how" answers focused the attention on technique, leading to mimicking of the "how" without regard for the critically important "why." For better or worse, "doing public journalism" became the objective and, in some precincts, a mandate, despite no grasp of underlying purpose. Let's be clear about this: It's silly--and dangerous--to set out to "do public journalism" simply because that's what some people are doing, or that's what the boss said, or that's one of our newsroom goals this year. If you don't "get it" philosophically, you won't get it right.

The project-oriented beginning, while perhaps unavoidable (and, at any rate, a fact), masked the underlying principles and delayed the idea's maturation. The useful future of public journalism is not in major projects, media combines, public forums or the simplistic airing of the views of underinformed citizens. Its useful future lies in our learning to do daily and weekly journalism in ways that reengage people with public life. The way we now do "routine" reporting systematically discourages people about public life, including politics. "Learning" is an important word here, because no one really knows how to do that yet; it's an unfulfilled intellectual and occupational challenge.

This much is clear: Doing public journalism on a daily and weekly basis requires us to reexamine and modify some of our reflexes. We developed the reflexes to enable us to perform, under pressure, our daily and hourly reporting miracles. But they no longer serve us--or public life--well.

Those reflexes include:

* The overvaluation of conflict as a primary narrative device. (No, refining this reflex doesn't mean ignoring conflict, for conflict is the lifeblood of democracy.)

* Framing issues at the extremes, which not only has the disadvantages of inaccuracy, but which also relentlessly discourages the ambivalent majority of people from thinking usefully about those issues. (No, this doesn't mandate dull ambiguity; it permits more people to see themselves as included in the discussion.)

* Indulging in and clearly communicating a snarly adversarialism toward every person and institution instead of maintaining proper and useful journalistic skepticism. (No, this doesn't drug the watchdog; it keeps him from consuming his owner.)

* Imagining readers as our audience or as spectators at an event that we are reporting on rather than imagining them as potential participants. (No, adjusting this reflex doesn't mean exhorting people to "get involved," it means allowing them to see ways to do so.)

* Insisting that our credibility arises from our detachment, despite strong arguments to the contrary. This leads us into the trap of publicly claiming to be value-neutral when every person alive knows better. (No, this doesn't mean espousing personal values in print; it means declaring the core value that we have a stake in public life going well.)

These and related reflexes are deeply ingrained and not comfortably challenged. But public journalism is cultural, generational change, and neither its practice nor a useful discussion of it can be centered on shortcuts, gimmicks and superficial understanding of its principles. It's past time for a useful discussion. Let's begin with the question democracy always comes to: What shall we do?