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A CONVERSATION WITH JAY HARRIS
MARY BITTERMAN, President, The James Irvine Foundation; Former President, KQED
DAVID LYON, President, Public Policy Institute of California
ROBERT ROSENTHAL, Managing Editor, San Francisco Chronicle
Moderated by JAY HARRIS, Wallis Annenberg Chair of Journalism & Communication and Director of the Center for the Study of Journalism & Democracy, USC Annenberg School of Communications; Former Publisher, San Jose Mercury News
Jay Harris: This is an assembly that celebrates something very special in the tradition of California and, moreover, it is that quality of citizens caring about the health of their state, the health of the democratic republic, which we are blessed to be a part of, that this convocation focuses on. The Commonwealth Club embodies that which in many ways is most central to the vitality of our democracy: thoughtful discourse, not shouting at one another, which we see a great deal of on television these days. We come here to learn from one another in a respectful way and develop ideas that will help our community be a better place.
The larger purpose of the assembly on the centennial of the founding of The Commonwealth Club is to evaluate the health of American democracy at a time when the country has a renewed sense of the importance of community but when many societal trends threaten to diminish our ability to sustain a strong civil society. We will look at the question of how journalism generally, and, more specifically, California news organizations, are fulfilling responsibilities to the residents of California and the democratic republic in which we live.
James Madison, known to many as the "Father of the Constitution," wrote in Federalist Paper 39 that this Constitution represented a blueprint for a grand political experiment that would test the capacity of mankind for self-government. It was evident to Madison and many of his peers that the success of the new government the framers had fashioned, in which the people would hold sovereign power, would require that citizens be well-informed about important issues of the day. This new and untested form of government would require that citizens actively engage in ongoing dialogue with one another about such issues and deliberate on what constituted the common good, the continuing pursuit of which would be essential to the vitality and the integrity of the republic. "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance," Madison wrote, "and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives."
Years after he served as our nation's fourth president, a period during which he was frequently savaged by the partisan press, Madison remained steadfast to his commitment to the principle I just outlined. He wrote that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. In our day, journalism and democracy are integrally related pillars of the American ideal of a society in which the people rule. Regrettably, journalism and democracy are less vital today than they have been in our nation's past and need to be in our future. It is an equally regrettable fact today that many Americans are not active participants in the public life of the nation - or the state. Whether they are overwhelmed by the demands of modern life, self-centered and self-indulgent, alienated or apathetic, or they've simply lost faith in the efficacy of democracy in representative government, they either do not understand, or understand but ignore, their responsibilities as citizens and their responsibilities as members of our communities and society.
The responsibilities of citizenship include participating in the dialogue of democracy through which the will of the people emerges as a guide for those who represent them in government. They call on each of us to have an ultimate commitment to the common good, giving it priority over individual or group interest. Journalism is not solely or even primarily responsible for this inadequate understanding of our form of government, or of citizenship and what they both require of all who live in America. But journalism has contributed to these problems. It exacerbates them each day by falling short in its most important mission: ensuring that the people, who are the ultimate sovereigns in our republic, are well and fully informed about the issues and challenges of our time.
The reasons for the relationship between the decline of serious journalism and the declining vitality of our democracy are myriad and complex. The pressures on the marketplace, on news organizations, and the increasing priority given the interest of investors as compared to the interest of citizens contribute to the problem but are not the sole culprits. Compounding the problem is the now prevalent pursuit of the highest audience ratings, the broadest market penetration or the lowest common denominator in content. This is manifested in many ways, not the least of which is the increasing and worrisome tendency, most evident in television, to blend news and entertainment. Even for the serious citizen who wants and appreciates the work of the serious journalist, the journalism they are offered is too frequently prosaic, rather than engaging, or written primarily for an audience of elite insiders. The cumulative effect of these factors and others is the slow starvation of American democracy. It is an unconscious act accomplished by depriving citizens of the informational sustenance they require, and by reflecting and amplifying the declining inclination of Americans, to actively engage in the responsibilities of citizenship.
Tell us what you think the most important issues are for the state of California. Give a letter grade on how good a job you think the news media are doing informing the people about those issues and what the threats and opportunities are that the future holds.
Mary Bitterman: We at the Irvine Foundation, in partnership with PPIC and other institutions throughout the state, have been taking a fresh look at who are the people of California, where are they residing, what are their prospects? We've come back with information which is not startling, but when taken together - whether it is that 24 out of 100 Californians are illiterate, 24 out of 100 Californians have no health insurance, 26 out of 100 Californians were born outside of the United States - that I think one of the great challenges before us as we want to rekindle and make an evermore robust and engaged and responsible society, that we really need to look at ways in which we can expand opportunity: in education and in the preparation of people for full participation in citizenship and in the conduct of the affairs of our day.
When we look at the educational facilities throughout the state of California, we see many institutions that provide great opportunity for students and many institutions where the physical plant is in such disrepair that the students find it really very difficult to utilize the basic facilities. One of the things I like about what Rosey has introduced at the Chronicle, the "Chronicle Watch," is that you can now bring some very mundane but very important issues to the right people: you've got their name, their phone number, you even have their photograph.
When I look at a scorecard, I would give various report cards to different players. I underscore the tremendous influence of the market; the shareholders of some media operations are very intent to be very successful as shareholders, and sometimes money is taken out from things that were done before, whether it's in the print or the electronic media. I want to compliment the fact that people are beginning, in the world of journalism, to be a little more alert to the concerns of the public. Part of it is stimulated by surveys and reports and engagements of PPIC and others, programs that Jay and his colleagues are conducting at the Annenberg School at USC. Part of it is just a public that's saying, "We cannot allow the growing bifurcation among our people to continue." Part of it is giving voice to the voiceless, which is what the surveys at PPIC do, and part of giving voice to those people who have not been heard for a long time.
Sandy Close, who will be on your panel later, has done an incredible thing by creating New California Media and bringing the ethnic presses into concert with public broadcasters and commercial broadcasters. The more we have everyone sitting at the table, helping to contribute to the kind of future we want to have, the better that future is going to be.
Maybe a B minus, but moving up.
David Lyon: There are three key issues that California faces. California's population growth is number one, the most complicated, most demanding and most important topic for us to come to grips with. The scale of California population growth is unheard of in American history. We, during the 1980s, added six million people, and the effects of that are going to be rippling through our public and private sectors for decades to come. We continued to add people in the '90s at a somewhat slower but still extraordinarily rapid rate. The consequence of that growth that is most immediate and most troubling for those of us who do the research side of this equation is that this growth has resulted in unprecedented disparity between the rich and the poor. That disparity is a challenge we face, not because it's innately wrong to have it because people are coming into it with very low education and very low job experience levels; but it's a challenge because we have got to look to the future and say, "Do we have the resources in place to handle the educational demands that that growth means for today and for the future here?"
I'm going to give the media the highest marks on that topic. The media has covered growth well.
Second most important for the state is the challenge population growth presents for our public sector. In spite of the huge growth in the state's budget in the last decade, we are unable to keep up with population growth in quality of service. We don't have sophisticated measures at this point of service delivery, but it's safe to assume that during the last ten to 15 years, in many areas across the board, the ability of our public sector to deliver the goods has suffered - particularly K-12 education, but also the whole array of social services, including police, fire and other municipal services.
We tried hard in the '90s to keep up. We tried in some ways too hard, because there was so much pressure on the part of the public to have politicians spend extra money for these problems, and we've now got ourselves in a situation where we're overstretched, and now we're going to face a crisis in the state where we have a very socially liberal state but a fiscally conservative population. That tension has never gone away and won't - that's a historical reality for California.
I would give that not as good marks as population coverage, but coverage that's happened recently with the state budget crisis has begun to lay out some of these issues in a pretty clear way. But I will qualify that by saying you would have to be pretty well up-to-speed on a lot of technical language to understand what the fiscal crisis is all about. It's easy to be overwhelmed by that technical language. As hard as the media tries, they get caught up in it, too.
The third major crisis area is the rise of direct democracy in California. Call it citizen democracy, call it what you will, the tension between the role that the voter plays in setting policy and the role our representatives have and responsibilities they have in Sacramento, or at the local level, has grown in intensity. The folks who are representatives see the voters as getting in the way of making decisions, and the voters look at the representatives and say, "What are you doing to solve our problems? If you don't do something, we will do it ourselves." That has been the course that we've taken in the last 20 years.
On this issue I'm going give the media the lowest score of the three, in large part because there's a general feeling in the media and amongst the elite political and policy leaders in California that the initiative is evil, troublesome; it creates bad policy, and, therefore, there's a going-in bias on the part of the media that this is the case. We found very few articles that present a balanced view of this debate. Rating in terms of ABC, I would go right down: A-B-C in that order.
Harris: What is the imbalance that you see in the coverage with direct democracy and the referendum process? What would make it better?
Lyon: In the PPIC statewide survey we interviewed 2,000 people statewide monthly over the course of the last five years. We periodically asked, "On important public policy questions in California, would you prefer to have those decisions resolved in Sacramento, or would you prefer to have those decisions resolved at the ballot box?" A resounding majority - in the range of 70 percent - consistently say that important public policy decisions should be resolved at the ballot box. There is a tension between the preference of the voter and the resident of California who sees them to be in a position of having to make these tough calls, because they can't rely on representative government to do it. That's the asymmetry we don't really see properly covered in the media: giving credit where credit is due to the fact that the public has a view of it that is not commonly portrayed.
Harris: That's a situation obviously exacerbated by term limits. Rosey, talk about this period in which domestic and international policy is unusually important, and we have a new role for America in the world emerging and a lack of clarity about what that is and differing views on whether it is a proper role. Overshadowed by that in many ways is a troubling domestic economic situation and a legislative branch that is so equally divided it seems difficult to get things done. What is your sense of the audience you're putting the Chronicle out for every day, and what are you trying to give them?
Robert Rosenthal: I do want to say one thing, "Chronicle Watch" is very popular, but I had nothing to do with it. That was Phil Bronstein's idea, and it's an interesting example of how to change a newsroom's thinking, because it was completely resisted by nearly everyone in the newsroom; all the reporters and editors thought it was too small to do. It's very popular, and it gets results on very small things. We actually get a lot of things fixed that we never even put in the paper, because when we start making calls, people say they don't want their picture in the paper, and they immediately get it fixed.
I don't think there's been a more complicated time in my lifetime as a journalist than right now. I came to the Chronicle to be part of a group of people who want to make it better. I'm not at all satisfied with what we do every day, and I'm here to raise the bar very high and to change the whole culture of the newspaper. That's why they asked me to come here, and why I accepted the challenge. I had a lot of opportunities, and I think you'll see the paper change. One of the exciting things to me is that there are a lot of first-class journalists who are really interested in coming here now to meet the challenge.
That said, I think the paper is much better than the perception of it, and one of the things we try and do every day is try to get people to think outside of what is relevant to you; what matters to you. What can we do for the reader that's going to illuminate and give you insights into this complicated world we live in? And when you throw that together with the idea of actually covering the news and breaking news and surprising you and entertaining you and giving you consistent high-quality information - if you think about that, and do it in about ten hours every day and then produce the paper and get it on your doorstep or in your driveway, it's quite a job.
The key question to me is, What is relevant to our readers? What can we do to explain things? It's no longer the simple job of reporting the news. With all the information you receive, many of you know the headline, you've heard the news, and you want to know, What does it mean? What does it mean to me? It means something completely different to people. What a newspaper has to do - and what we're trying to do - is pick the subjects that are of most broad interest to people. It is the economy, education, the looming potential war. You have finite resources in a newsroom, and you have a huge range of skills. If everybody played at the same level, in terms of being a reporter or an editor, it would be a lot easier. The level should be very high, but the skill set really ranges.
Education is absolutely crucial. We don't do a good enough job getting into the schools and telling people what's happening, and with the budget cuts pending, I don't think we were doing a good enough job laying out what the issues are. These are huge things that affect all of us. The environment. Go across the board. If I went through this room and asked each of you, "What are the five key areas you want to know more about?" we might get 200 items that we're supposed to reflect and get in the paper. We need to sort these things and create priorities. A newspaper as big as the Chronicle - and it's a fairly big newspaper, as big as The New York Times - cannot meet all the demands of the readers. Part of our job is to make priorities. The bottom line for me is always, What's the most important issue for the readers, what has the most relevance, what is going to make a difference in their lives?
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers