Fouhy: Civic journalism is really good journalism, and I sort of hate the fact that I had to invent a name for it. But it's a way of getting journalists to focus on the need, the necessity to get the citizen voice back into news coverage -- particularly into political news coverage. There's been a tendency over the last 20 years or so, as the political consultants have become such important players, for the news media to play an increasingly intrusive role in politics. I don't think that's served the country well. I don't think that's served democracy well. It's led to these negative soundbites and attack ads, which I think are the HIV virus of American democracy. I think they've driven many, many people to a sort of unearned cynicism about politics as an arena that's populated by very nasty people who are egged on by a news media that's increasingly seen as disconnected and somewhat irresponsible.
JB: Did you coin the term Civic Journalism?
Fouhy: I plead guilty to that.
JB: When?
Fouhy: Oh, in 1993. I had gone through the two presidential cycles as executive producer of the Presidential Debates, and had seen close up the role the press was playing in the presidential selection process. Now bear in mind, I had been a political reporter, myself, through five election cycles, and had always looked on it as a great horse race and great fun and a wonderful way to get somebody to pay for me to see the country every four years. But, of course, it's about a whole lot more than that. I began to see that the press' impact was a very negative impact. Increasingly, it was driving the process. Citizens -- voters -- were left out. They were on the sidelines while the two teams were scrimmaging out on the field and the citizens didn't even bother to come out of the stands on election day. And that's really not what this ought to be about.
JB: What's the relationship between Civic Journalism and this event?
Fouhy: Well, this is an excellent example of getting the citizen voice into the dialogue of a democracy, which is where it belongs. An election is not about a debate between Richard Lugar and Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan. An election is a country talking among itself over the water fountain, in the workplace, and now, in this experiment, in a demographically-selected sample coming together over a weekend on a university campus to talk about how they differ and how they are alike and how they see some major issues.
JB: What do you hope the country will learn from this experiment?
Fouhy: That citizens belong in the political dialogue, that citizens are at the center of the political dialogue, and their concerns ought to be what the campaign is about. The campaign shouldn't be about manufactured issues that these campaign consultants conjure up out of thin air and use as clubs to bat their opponents over the head.
JB: I've talked with reporters covering this event who seem to have trouble with it. 'What is the story? Where's the conflict? How do I put this in terms of who's winning and who's losing?' They really seem to struggle to get their hands around the story.
Fouhy: Yeah. It is hard for conventional journalism to come to grips with this because we've all had our thinking so conditioned for so long that politics is about two people fighting. And we in the press say, 'Why don't you guys really fight and we'll hold your coat, and at the end we'll write about the winner and we'll shoot the loser.' Well that isn't really what politics is about. Politics is about the aspirations and the hopes and dreams and the future of the country, and the dreams that ordinary people have. When ordinary people talk, it takes them a while to work through their differences, to work through their shyness, to see that somebody is really listening to them, and they often come to know what you and I would say is a concrete conclusion. So, it is hard to write about it. There isn't much conflict [here], actually. I was talking to a delegate and asked him about the conversations of the last few days, and he said how little differences there are in his group, of the eleven people, how much they're really moderate. We hear on attack radio the extremists shouting at one another, and we come to think that the country is like that, that it's divided between lefties and righties who are screaming at one another on the radio. And that's not it at all.
JB: Or on Crossfire...
Fouhy: Or on Crossfire, or the MacLaughlin Group, where journalists as surrogates for the public are shouting at one another. Most Americans understand that if you're going to reach resolution on a conflict, you're going to have to compromise. That's what we do, in our marriages, in our families, in our workplace, and that's what happens in any democracy. It's not shouting. It's not a war. The press uses words like blitzkreig and war and crossfire and all those war words, when everybody who's ever participated, everybody who's over the age of 21 who's ever participated in a self-governing body, whether it's a student government or a city council, knows that the art is one of compromise.
JB: How do we transfer this kind of civilized discussion in which people seem to be able to talk without acrimony and look for common ground, and don't get in this kind of polarized "you're an idiot, I'm right" kind of mode into the political debate? Is it primarily a problem of the media's treatment of the debate?
Fouhy: No, it's not. The press defines the ring, and then the politicians climb into the ring and proceed to beat each other up, according the rules, as they understand it, of the folks who created the ring. I think this [forum] is much different in that it says this is about citizens and this is about their hopes, their dreams, their concerns, their definition of the issues. Professional political handlers, we have a good deal of experience with experiments that have been going on around the country before this. And what we've seen when journalists who are using the principles of civic journalism to cover an election, when they first talk to political consultants, the political consultants hate this. Because the old game they understood very well, they knew the rules, and they could manipulate the press. They're very good at manipulating the press. Just look at the fact that about a hundred million dollars has already been spent in this campaign, without a vote being cast. Now what is that for? That's to manipulate public opinion, for the most part -- whether through attack ads, or through public relations. So this is a totally different way of looking at politics, of approaching politics, and putting voters first.
JB: What's your hope for how a prototype like [the NIC] could be replicated and how large a role it could play in American politics?
Fouhy: I'd say it's too soon to judge that, and I'm not sure I'd be qualified to judge that. But if this is as successful as it appears to be at this point, what I hope would happen is people would say, number one, "Oh, OK, as a citizen I really do have the authority and the responsibility to come forward and talk about my views in a civilized way with other people who are similarly inclined to do that. Secondly, you could have forums like this on the state level, on the municipal level, as people grope through the ways that are presently so frustrating to them toward a common way of solving problems. I think this is about coming to new ways of getting past the gridlock that has certainly enveloped Washington, and to a lesser degree has enveloped other places where public policy decisions have to be made.
Ed Fouhy, Executive Director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. For
Democracy Place, I'm John Biewen in Austin, Texas.
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