The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 9 (1998)

Public Journalism:
Controversies over the Media’s Rolein 1990s America

Hiroshi FUJITA
Sophia University

I

INTRODUCTION

Since the beginning of the 1990s, an increasing number of media organizations in the United States have started to practice what is called
public or civic journalism. They listen intently to the voices of readersand viewers, frame their reporting agenda based on the people’s voices,and cover stories accordingly. They not only report straight facts anduncover hidden problems but also suggest solutions and encourage people to participate actively in community affairs.
There is a premise behind the idea of public journalism. It is that
American journalism is not working well; the media are disconnectedfrom people, not reporting what people want to know, and making
people turn away from community affairs. The media has stopped
functioning as a catalyst engaging people in the process of democracy.
Public journalism, advocates say, is an effort on the part of journalists
to “reconnect” journalism and citizens in order to revive public dialogue among ordinary people, and thus maintain democracy.1
Not all journalists are receptive to the idea. Mainstream journalists
in particular are strongly critical. Some accuse public journalism of
Copyright © 1998 Hiroshi Fujita. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
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violating the principle of objective reporting. Others are wary of tapping into people’s voices for guidance in the construction of a reporting agenda, because they fear that editorial independence may be injeopardy. Some even claim that public journalism could erode citizens’ trust in journalism and undermine democracy.
Can public journalism survive this criticism? Can it really work tosave democracy, as its advocates hope? To answer these questions
deﬁnitively, one will have to wait and see for some time, since ongoing efforts in dozens of cities all over the United States are still in anexperimental phase. There will be more trials and errors before the end
results of the experimentation will become clear. The best one can doat this point is to assess accurately where these controversies camefrom, where proponents and opponents of public journalism stand, andwhere the debates are leading. By doing so, one can perhaps better
understand the issues that American journalism faces today, and havea fair perspective on the future of public journalism.
II

WHAT IS PUBLIC JOURNALISM?

One of the ﬁrst proponents of what came to be known as publicjournalism was Davis Merritt, editor of the Wichita Eagle of Kansas,
who covered the 1990 election in a nontraditional manner. His attempt
was featured in a trade magazine in 1992, but the term “public journalism” or “civic journalism” was not used until sometime in 1993.2 By
1997, the term was being widely used, yet no clear-cut deﬁnition of it
has yet been established. Merritt himself wrote in 1996 that “those ofus thinking and writing about this idea are hardly monolithic; we differ
on many points.”3
The purpose of public journalism, according to Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and another proponent alongwith Merritt, is “to engage people as citizens, to improve public discussion, to help communities solve problems, and to aid in the country’s search for a workable public life.”4 Both Rosen and Merritt intentionally avoid describing concretely what journalists should do topractice public journalism. Merritt sees it rather philosophically as
journalism that involves these “mental shifts”:
It moves beyond the limited mission of ‘telling the news’ to a broader
mission of helping public life go well, and acts out of that imperative.

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

31

It moves from detachment to being a fair-minded participant in publiclife.
It moves from worrying about proper separations to concern with proper
connections.
It moves beyond only describing what is ‘going wrong’ to also imagining what ‘going right’ would be like.
It moves from seeing people as consumers—as readers or nonreaders, as
bystanders to be informed—to seeing them as a public, as potential
actors in arriving at democratic solutions to public problems.5

He expects that journalists “who accept the challenge of the philosophy will, as journalists always have, develop their own rules over time
and through experience.”6
In practice, there now seem to be a few common components inpublic journalism projects currently being experimented with at various levels. First, journalists build their reporting agendas around theconcerns of local citizens, using public opinion polls, interviews, focus
groups and public forums. Second, they not only report factual news
but also encourage people to get involved in solving the problems of
their own community. And third, there are a number of media organizations that carry out their projects in partnership with other news
media. Newspapers share costs with television stations by getting
together with them to conduct polls or to sponsor public hearings.
They also share results of news coverage to enrich stories or programs.
Merritt was driven into public journalism by his deep frustration
with the campaign coverage of the 1988 presidential election, which
was dominated by negative attacks and the abuse of symbols such as
Willie Horton, Boston Harbor, and the Pledge of Allegiance. It was
widely described as one of the worst campaigns in modern history.
The media’s coverage of the campaign turned it into a horse race,characterized by the “who’s-ahead-who’s-behind” type of candidateoriented stories. Citizens’ concerns about their communities or theirinterest in policy issues were more or less ignored by the politicians
and the media.
In the 1990 gubernatorial campaign in Kansas, Merritt changed his
way of covering politics. Pledging to give readers “the opportunity tounderstand in great detail the candidates’ positions on every major
issue Kansans face,” his newspaper tried to take the momentum of thecampaign away from the pollsters and handlers.7 The Wichita Eagle conducted public opinion polls, and based on the polling results, focused

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HIROSHI FUJITA

their coverage on the issues voters were most concerned about. The
two candidates for governor were asked to make clear where theystood on those issues, and their positions were regularly scrutinized in
the paper. The approach was named the “Voter’s Project.” The newspaper, in partnership with KAKE-TV, a local ABC afﬁliate, also encouraged people to register to vote and urged them to go to the voting
booths on election day.
In 1992, another election year, a few other newspapers followed
suit. One of these papers, the Charlotte Observer of North Carolina,
based its coverage of the election campaign on a “citizens’ agenda”
which it shaped through wide ranging interviews and pollings. The
newspaper also formed a partnership with WSOC-TV, a local television station, which broadcast special programs related to the election
in coordination with a series of feature stories carried by the Charlotte
Observer. The newspaper later extended this new practice to coverareas other than elections. One of the projects, called “Taking Back
Our Neighborhood,” was initiated in the fall of 1993 to focus coverageof problems in a few crime-ridden neighborhoods and to try to ﬁnd
solutions in cooperation with the residents. The newspaper mainly
concentrated its efforts on reporting on those communities, gathered
volunteers with the help of local organizations and urged citizens totake part in the effort to solve problems.8 While some papers like theStar-Tribune in Minneapolis have sponsored neighborhood roundtables in readers’ homes, others like the Wisconsin State Journal established a panel of community leaders to give feedback before stories
were published.9
A different sort of public journalism is also reported. At the
Spokane Spokesman-Review in Washington, the editorial pages underwent a drastic change. In early 1994, declaring a “reinvention” ofopinion pages, the newspaper announced that “we have turned the
majority of the space on these pages over to you [readers]—now dosomething with it.” The paper offered new space for essays by readers,maintained a page a day for readers’ letters or cartoons, cut the number of editorials from thirteen to eight a week, and ran fewer syndicated columns than before. The newspaper even renamed the editorial
page editor the “opinion editor.”10
These are just a few samples of early cases of the public journalism
experiment and do not necessarily represent the movement that followed with much wider scope of thoughts and actions. Due to theCONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

33

ambiguity of the notion and the lack of concrete practical guidelines,
there have been some confusion and excesses among those who tried
to promote public journalism. However, the experiment has taken deeproot in the ﬁeld of American journalism.
To Davis Merritt, public journalism is about something more thanjust a few changes of technique in news reporting. If it had been a matter simply of how newspapers cover stories, the idea would not havecaused such a controversy. “Public journalism is much more than technique,” Merritt writes. “It requires a philosophical journey because it
is a fundamental change in how we conceive of our role in publiclife.”11 What he means, in other words, is that “why” one practices
public journalism is more important than “how” one does it.
III

WHY PUBLIC JOURNALISM NOW?

The fact that dozens of media organizations carry out public journalism in one way or the other in many cities in the United States, only
a few years after Merritt launched his ﬁrst experiment, shows that
there are a considerable number of journalists in the profession who
share Merritt’s view about the media’s role in American society. To
Merritt, “journalism is an integral part of the system of public life,”
and journalists are obliged to do their job “in ways that are calculated
to help public life go well by reengaging people in it.” Public life going well means “that democracy succeeds in answering its core question: What shall we do?” through deliberation. The answer “should befound by informed and engaged citizens,” Merritt says. “Public journalism does not attempt to forge its own answer to the question. Rather, it
actively seeks to help citizens arrive at their answer.”12
It was not only Merritt who was frustrated with the media’s reporting of the 1988 presidential election. David Broder, a prominent political columnist for the Washington Post, expressed concern in hiscolumn in 1990 about the media’s campaign coverage. “It is time forthose of us in the world’s freest press to become activists, not onbehalf of a particular party or politician, but on behalf of the process of
self-government,” he wrote. “We have to help reconnect politics andgovernment—what happens in the campaign and what happens afterward in public policy.”13 This call for “activist” journalism in fact issaid to have inspired Merritt’s adventure in public journalism.
The failure of journalism to engage people in the democratic pro-

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HIROSHI FUJITA

cess is only a part of broader problems faced by the American media.
Two major forces have been at work since the 1970s in American
journalism: infotainment and bottomline journalism. With the technological renovation of electronic news gathering (ENG) and satellite
news gathering (SNG), television news coverage has become moreentertainment-oriented. Presenting news with visually appealing pictures has become more important than presenting substance withoutvisuals. TV has changed politics from a matter of substance to a matterof image. Every four years the presidential election symbolically represents the ﬁght for superﬁcial image selling.
TV has also inﬂuenced how newspapers report news. To competewith television, newspapers now use more color photos and graphics,
enhancing visual quality. They clearly use more soft stories than hard
ones to make newspapers more readable and appealing. These efforts
have simply amounted to making newspapers more like television. As
a result, news reporting in the 1990s is becoming increasingly moreentertaining, reporting gossip and scandal. News reporting along theselines is labeled “infotainment.” Election coverage that focuses on candidate chit-chat and superﬁcial images is only an extension of thisinfotainment trend. Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington
Post, summed up how the media have changed: “Where once newspapers embodied cultural values, they now seem mired in a tabloid culture that gorges itself on sex and sleaze.”14
Infotainment aims to attract more readers and viewers. Newspaper
readership has been declining steadily for some time. Television stations are waging a ﬁerce war for ratings. Battles for survival in thenewspaper business, in many cases, have resulted in chain-ownership
acquiring more independent papers. As of 1996, American dailies
under newspaper chains made up roughly four-ﬁfths of the total number. In the early 1960s it was under one-fourth.15 In the broadcast
media, there were a number of mega-mergers involving all three networks. In the mid-80s ABC was bought by Capital Cities, NBC byGeneral Electric, and in the mid-90s, ABC merged with Disney, anentertainment giant, and CBS was bought by Westinghouse, anotherelectronic giant. More mega-mergers were announced in the past year
involving cable television, digital satellite broadcasting and other communication companies.
Some of these corporations, which have little or no journalistic
background, do not seem to care much about the quality of journalism.

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

35

They care more about making a proﬁt by demanding more efﬁciency
in the newsroom. Inefﬁcient investigative reporting or costly programs
are squeezed out. Even at the three networks whose news divisions are
known for their solid achievements, a downsizing of news staffs has
been carried out. These and other results of so-called bottomline journalism have degraded the quality of U.S. journalism, particularly in
television.16 It is safe to say that the lamentable state of American journalism in the 1990s has certainly functioned as a seedbed for publicjournalism. Here is one of the two premises on which public journalism is based.
The second premise, as Edward M. Fouhy of the Pew Center for
Civic Journalism put it, is that “something is eating at the foundationsof our society.”17 Violent crimes, disintegrated families, and the poor
quality of public schools are some of the factors suggesting that society is far from healthy. People appear to be reluctant to become engaged in community affairs; voter turnout is at its lowest level for postwar presidential elections. There are many people and organizations
who believe that something has to be done.
One of those organizations is Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphiabased foundation which is committed to the cause of restructuring thecommunity and revitalizing democracy. In early 1993, one of the Pewsponsored conferences decided to do something to overcome the alienation of American citizens from their communities and their government. It also determined that the news media had played a role in thedisintegration of public trust. By September that year, Pew had set up
the Center for Civic Journalism to underwrite new experiments.18 The
Center, which provided roughly three million dollars over the next
four years for media organizations applying for funds to carry out public journalism style projects, has quickly become a key factor in promoting the cause of the new idea.19
Pew has no particular interest in how journalism goes about its business, says Rebecca W. Rimel, the president of the Pew Charitable
Trusts. But Pew does “see it as an issue if journalism can be used as atool, as a way to get the public reconnected, reinvigorated, recommitted to democratic values . . . ,”20 Rimel continues. Whatever its intention, there is no doubt that Pew’s commitment has encouraged moreorganizations to jump onto the idea, and has energized the movement.
The fact that this foundation, with no journalism background, has
emerged as a major force championing public journalism shows that

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HIROSHI FUJITA

Davis Merritt’s concern about American journalism today is not limited to those within the media business.
A few other private organizations are also involved in supportingthe cause of public journalism, such as the Kettering Foundation of
Dayton, Ohio, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies of St.
Petersburg, Florida, and the American Press Institute of Reston,
Virginia. The content and level of their commitment varies. But without support from Pew and these other institutions it is doubtful
whether public journalism, which started as the personal effort of one
Mid-Western newspaper editor, would have grown as it did, reachingits current level of prominence.
IV

CROSSING THE LINE

By 1995 public journalism had spread mainly among small andmedium sized media organizations, with more than one hundred andﬁfty news organizations having tried the new practice in one form or
the other.21 Noisy praise and criticism were being exchanged on trademagazines and newspapers. Some of the arguments have been very
ﬁerce; “not since ‘advocacy journalism’ has a new direction in news
aroused such furor.”22 When James Fallows expressed his support for
public journalism in his 1996 book Breaking the News, Howell Raines,
the New York Times editorial page editor, condemned Fallow’s position as poisonous to the values of the newsroom, branding him “afount of dangerous nonsense.”23
One of the most controversial issues is whether journalists should be
detached observers. Merritt and his followers say that simply tellingthe news is not enough. Journalism should encourage citizens to beengaged in public life and help them ﬁnd solutions to community problems. Journalists are unavoidably players, not mere observers, theysay. Critics accuse this of being a gross violation of the basic principleof objective reporting. Under that principle, journalists are required to
be detached, to stay neutral and to report things as they see and hearthem without injecting any subjective observation or opinion into theirstories. Crossing the line that deﬁnes objective reporting means goingover to bias or advocacy, which is an anathema to American journalism.
If journalists repudiate objectivity by getting involved in publicaffairs, they will place the credibility of the news media at risk.

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

37“Political involvements turn observers into actors and ‘news’ columns
into propaganda displays,” says Richard Harwood, a former press
ombudsman of the Washington Post.24 Readers seeing a vested interestin a newspaper’s reporting may suspect that the newspaper has manyother vested interests and imagine that its reporting on those issues islikely to be affected by them. “As a practical matter, can a paper
objectively report on a burning community issue when the editor sitson the commission that is promoting a particular point of view on thematter?” asked William F. Woo, then editor of the St. Louis PostDispatch, in a lecture at the University of California in 1995.25
While maintaining that the press should go beyond merely reporting
factual matters, proponents of public journalism do not totally discard
objectivity principles. They rather appear to separate objectivity fromdetachment, embracing the ideal of impartiality while rejecting theindifference often associated with it. Merritt writes:
One can be objective in looking at the facts and still care about the
implications of those facts. For instance, a scientist seeking a cure for adisease must be objective in evaluating results, but he or she can stillcare very much about whether a cure is found. That’s the difference
between objectivity and detachment.26

Merritt’s position indicates that public journalism is reluctant tocross the line into advocacy journalism. One interpretation of his position is that “if public journalism encourages a commitment to the quality of public life, it does so only if ‘quality’ remains vague or deﬁned
by consensus. If public journalism seems aimed at making the community work, it is not aimed at making it work in any particular way.”27
The line between Merritt’s position and advocacy journalism seems
painfully vague and thin. It can easily be stepped over with innocent
carelessness.
Another issue that has invited heated debate is how much journalism should rely on public opinion in creating its reporting agenda.
Public journalism advocates emphasize the importance of listening to
the voices of citizens. In fact, many journalists today tend to sit behind
their computers, analyze ﬁgures and statistics, call a few experts, andwrite a story without ever hitting the beat. It is clearly valid for publicjournalism proponents to say that media reporting should include moreof the voices of everyday people when the topic affects their community. Critics, however, ﬁnd it too much for a newspaper to sponsor

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HIROSHI FUJITA

town-hall meetings, to call in focus groups in search of clues to how
ordinary people feel and think, and then to write reports based on
those ﬁndings. “We are abandoning a piece of our own jobs if what weare doing is asking people what we should do,” Philadelphia Daily
News editorial page editor Richard Aregood has been quoted as saying. If journalists draw up panels of readers and ask them what theywant and put it in the newspaper, he said, “we may as well go into themirror business.”28
The more subtle danger of this practice of listening to people’s
voices is that it may intensify the media’s inclination to pander. If a
newspaper relies on people’s voices heavily for its reporting agenda, itwill be difﬁcult to work against that consensus. And the consensus is
not always right. One of the media’s roles in a democratic society is todefend minority views or to be willing to take unpopular stands. If thisrole is weakened or diminished by listening to the consensus of community opinion, the community will not be served well by the resultingly less diverse views and less active dialogues.
Media partnership is also a subject of controversy. Michael Gartner,
former president of NBC News and editor of the Ames, Iowa, Daily
News, strongly criticized the “media coalition” in North Carolina inwhich six newspapers, ﬁve commercial television stations and thestate’s public television and radio networks took part in joint coverageof the 1996 election. He said the media coalitions “homogenize thenews and reduce the number of voices gathering it.” And, even worse,
Gartner argues, is the negative effect that this type of coalition has on
independent, investigative journalism. “What would reporters and editors be doing,” he asks, “if they weren’t involved in this ‘civic’ effort?
What rocks would get turned over? What issues would be exploredthat didn’t turn up in polling data?”29 To this, Jennie Buckner, editor of
the Charlotte Observer, one of the six newspapers involved, responded that the stories the partners shared were just several of many, andthat the effort did not limit coverage but rather expanded and improved it.30
All through these arguments, one cannot help but feel that thedebate is “like arguing over a Rorschach test.” As Philip Meyer of the
University of North Carolina aptly points out, “each sees in it [publicjournalism] the manifestation of his or her fondest hopes or worst
fears.”31 This is mostly due to the lack of any clear deﬁnition of publicjournalism, its philosophy and its practice. Proponents of the idea have

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

39

intentionally left it vague because it is an idea in development, theysay, and they don’t want it limited or conﬁned. Merritt himself complained at one time that “the fundamental ideas of public journalism
remain largely unexplored by the profession at large.”32 But proponents are perhaps more responsible for the confusion than opponents,
who tend to ﬁnd its ambiguity suspicious.
There has been another, more philosophical, level of argument regarding public journalism and community, mainly among academics.
These debates have been, broadly speaking, between the communitarians and the individualists. Since the early 1980s, communitarianism
has been focused upon as a philosophical alternative to individualistic
liberalism. Responding to the excesses of “Me-ism” in 1980s America,
communitarians emphasize what they call “common goods”—communal values—instead of individual rights. To them, public journalism,
also called community journalism, is a means for preventing fragmentation of community. It assumes that “the community is ontologically(in terms of its being) and axiologically (in terms of values) prior
to person,” says Clifford G. Christians of the University of Illinois,
Urbana.33 The community, not the individual, is the center of value.
Individuals must act morally in ways that strengthen and perpetuate
community. “At a more mundane level,” Louis W. Hodges of
Washington and Lee University writes, “that means that journalists
must function to sustain and build community.”34
Meanwhile, to John C. Merrill, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, this is “a vague rhetorical war” waged by “the newcommunitarians” against individualism and libertarianism. He interprets the communitarians as saying that “we need a more responsible
media system, in which journalists, as members of the society, arewilling to sacriﬁce their own freedom to the good of the whole.” Hecontinues:
The new civic journalism proponents stress media responsibility, notpress freedom. They also stress the public (or social) leadership in press
matters. . . . Listen to the people, they say. Find out what they want andgive it to them. Increasingly, this rhetoric resembles what the old Soviet
media managers meant when they talked of freedom of the press.35

Merrill, an individualist and libertarian, believes that journalism
should be given full autonomy with maximum freedom in decision
making. He says, “libertarians of the press respect free ﬂow of infor-

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HIROSHI FUJITA

mation, the concept of pluralism of information and perspectives, andthe belief that a diversity of ideas and opinions is good for society.”36
Merrill admits freely, however, that the liberal position he prefers is
not ﬂawless. It can bring about social stress in a community. It candisrupt the harmony of a community. Yet he rejects the communitarians’ suggestions that American journalism needs a more monolithic,
responsible restructuring, that individualism is a ﬂawed foundation
for journalism and must be supplanted by a more collectivized, grouporiented and cooperationist theory. Communitarian journalism appears
to him to be “a kind of moral imperialism.”37
Merrill is joined by Ralph D. Barney of Brigham Young University
in criticizing communitarianism and public journalism. Barney, a media ethics expert, worries that community-oriented thinking deprives
journalism of its self-determination. He suggests that “communitarianism ultimately corrupts itself and denies its members their rights todevelop their own moral reasoning.”38
It is undeniable that public journalism and the communitarians’ callfor a new media ethics have a great deal in common; both want to seechanges within journalism in order to improve community and in alarger sense, American society. Some academics specializing in communication and journalism are now discussing public journalism in thecontext of communitarianism vs. individualism. It seems, however,that the idea of public journalism was born not as a result of the theoretical development of communitarianism but through the practicalefforts of journalists to renovate the media’s coverage of politics andcommunity affairs. Few of the articles and books about public journalism written by journalists, including Merritt’s, discuss the subject interms of communitarianism.
A fusion of public journalism and communitarianism appears to be
taking place. Communitarians may need a practical vehicle to implement their value, while public journalists may need a theoretical foundation to press their movement ahead.
V

EVALUATING EXPERIMENTS

How far has public journalism come? What has it achieved in the
numerous experiments attempted so far? It is difﬁcult to grasp a total
picture of the public journalism movement, since there have been atleast two hundred projects involving a wide variety of practices andCONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

41

materials. A few sporadic assessment reports have been published on
individual projects. One relatively comprehensive evaluation of multiple projects is Civic Lessons; Report on Four Civic Journalism
Projects Funded by The Pew Center for Civic Journalism, publishedin April 1997. Four independent evaluators, including Professor Esther
Thorson of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, examined
four projects in four cities between January and November 1996.
The most signiﬁcant ﬁnding of the evaluation is that “on the whole,
civic journalism is making progress toward its goals.” The reportcontinues:
It beneﬁts both the communities it serves and the overall democratic
process. Most people surveyed who were aware of the four projects chosen for study reported being more knowledgeable and concerned about
their communities as a result and indicated they had a stronger sense of
their civic responsibilities, especially as voters.39

The ﬁndings were not all positive, however. The evaluators found“newsroom responses were frequently ambivalent or even negative.”
Not surprisingly, some journalists opposed news organizations going
beyond solely reporting and analyzing the news. Others believed thatpublic journalism can harm objectivity, and still others, the reportsays, “object[ed] to news organizations accepting even indirect support for such efforts, arguing that if a project is worth doing, it should
be done with internal resources.”40
It is ironic that there is abundant skepticism in the newsrooms despite the fact that readers and viewers are relatively positive in accepting the products of public journalism. The report says that at most of
the media organizations they studied, public journalism has not been
integrated into general news coverage, beyond the speciﬁc projects themselves. The Charlotte Observer has moved to incorporate the principleof public journalism into daily reporting, the report continues, but eventhese efforts are fairly new.41 At the Wisconsin State Journal, and its
partner WISC-TV, the project “We the People/ Wisconsin” was widely perceived in both newsrooms as a management effort. The report“found less sense of ownership or understanding of (public journalism) principles in either newsroom than we’d have expected.”42
There is some evidence, however, to the contrary. A 1997 survey ofjournalists undertaken by the American Society of Newspaper Editors
found that the majority of respondents approved of four of the journal-

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istic approaches most commonly associated with public journalism.
Signiﬁcantly, the survey had not labeled these approaches in any particular way. Ninety-six percent approved of a newspaper reporting on
alternative solutions to community problems. Eighty-eight percent
approved of newspapers developing ‘enterprise stories’ to focus publicattention on a community problem and helping the community movetoward a solution. Seventy-one percent approved of a newspaper polling the public to determine the most pressing community issues, thentrying to get candidates to focus on those issues. And sixty-eight percent approved of a newspaper conducting town meetings to discover
key issues in the community and following up with stories focusing onthese issues and possible solutions.43 It should be noted that the ﬁrst
two approaches could easily be understood within the framework of
traditional journalism rather than public journalism.
Though tentative and limited, these ﬁndings contain signiﬁcant material for our consideration. First, the fact that community residents
generally acknowledged the positive effects of public journalism projects proves that the direction of the experimentation is not totally misguided. The ﬁndings, however, do not indicate if citizens have any
concern about the possibility of public journalism projects being dominated by interests groups, political or otherwise. Neither do they giveany clue regarding the concern of critics of public journalism that media partnerships may narrow choices of information in longer terms. It
will take much longer for people to be able to assess the impact ofpublic journalism in these areas.
Second, it is evident that there are a lot of issues for public journalism proponents to work out with their fellow journalists rather thanwith citizens. Public journalists could reduce the level of misgivings
about their idea if they deﬁne the philosophy and practice better. But
there will remain some hardcore issues regarding which proponents
will ﬁnd it difﬁcult to persuade skeptics and opponents. In addition to
the question of objectivity and editorial independence, ﬁnancial issues,
including outside funding to public journalism projects, will be problematic for their supporters in future.
VI

COMMON GROUND

Whether public journalism gains more practitioners in the rest of the
1990s remains hard to predict. The number of media organizations

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

43

participating in experimental projects is growing. Yet many elite news
organizations are still adamant in staying away from public journalism. The rancor surrounding it has left a deep gulf between its proponents and opponents, at least rhetorically. Neither side shows any signof reconciling with the other. Philip Meyer attributes the source of thecontroversy among journalists over public journalism to “tension
between core values and their current application.” He says that, in thelatter half of the 20th century, “journalism has been tugged at by twocompeting sets of values, libertarian theory on the one hand, and social
responsibility theory on the other.”44
While arguments are confrontational and polarizing at the level oftheory, in practical terms there seems to be some common groundbetween the claims of the two parties. Above all, there is not much difference in their goals for journalistic activity, either of public journalism or of the more traditional form. Leonard Downie, executive editorof the Washington Post and one of the staunchest critics of public journalism, deﬁnes his ideal of journalism as being “to provide citizens
with as much as possible of the information they need to conduct theirlives, private and public, and to hold accountable the increasing number of powerful people and institutions that hold sway in our lives.”45This ideal can easily pass for that of a public journalist. The difference
lies in how this goal is achieved.
Proponents of public journalism claim that traditional journalism is
not functioning well. Proponents for traditional journalism openly admit that journalism today faces serious problems. “Yes, we have been
isolated, detached, arrogant, disconnected, narrow in our deﬁnitions ofwhat’s news and what isn’t. . . . Damn right that we should listen to
the public,” says William F. Woo.46 There are enough reasons for public journalism proponents to be frustrated with the way current journalism handles the news, he believes. Even a critic like Max Frankel ofthe New York Times agrees with them that “American journalism sorely needs improvement.”47
One of the hardest issues to overcome for those looking for common
ground between the two forces is the principle of objective reporting.
Both proponents and opponents tend to believe that there is a line that
divides objectivity from advocacy. And some critics tend to look at thedivision in terms of a good and bad, or right and wrong, accusing public journalism of crossing the line from good to bad. But in real journalistic practice, the line is not so clearly drawn. Rather, objectivity

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HIROSHI FUJITA

and advocacy are simply at opposite ends of a continuum.
In principle, news pages should be free from the subjective views ofreporters or editors. Advocacy should belong only to editorial andopinion pages. In practice, however, there is no denying that, in thenews columns of any newspaper today, we have news analyses andfeatures that reﬂect a writer’s or an editor’s personal values, judgment
and even prejudices. Straight news stories are also not totally objective, one can argue, since they are affected by journalists’ values andjudgment in the very process of being selected as newsworthy. Purely
objective reporting is hard, if not impossible, to achieve. While traditionally journalists have been told that objective reporting should betheir ultimate goal, objectivity is just a matter of degree. In that sense,
this issue should not be a barrier to ﬁnding some middle groundbetween the adversarial camps in achieving necessary improvements
in American journalism.
Another issue is whether journalists should listen to the people’s
voices. Public journalists explicitly emphasize the importance of listening to public opinion and being guided by it. To do this they sponsor polls, town-hall meetings and focus groups. While opponents do
not particularly promote the idea of listening to people, no journalist
denies that listening to the voices of those concerned in an issue is oneof the basics of journalism. Obviously, both sides share the idea that
listening to people is an essential part of a journalist’s job. The difference, again, is how. Some opponents say it is too much for a news
organization to hold public hearings or to sponsor focus groups. If a
newspaper’s news coverage is framed and guided by pollings or hearings, it runs the risk of becoming “user-driven” journalism pandering
to its readers. Proponents counter that traditional journalism simply
ignores the voices of ordinary citizens, only reporting those of experts
and politicians.
A real problem here is the question of whether journalists today arelistening to people’s voices adequately. With advanced communication technologies and public relation systems, information is abundantly available in newsrooms, making it possible for journalists to write
stories without going out of their ofﬁces in search of ordinary opinions. “For a journalist to spend time with people on the street or in
their homes is not as common as it once was,” writes David Broder ofthe Washington Post, calling for improving political reporting by covering the news “the old-fashioned way.” He says “there is no substituteCONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

45

for shoe-leather reporting, walking precincts, talking to people in theirliving rooms. . . . If we do our homework—spend enough time withthe voters, early in the campaign—we can and should deﬁne that voters’ agenda clearly on our pages.”48 Mainstream journalists are also
well aware that journalism today is not serving ordinary people andtheir communities well and thus is not fulﬁlling its obligation to them.
There seems to be room for the proponents and the opponents of public journalism to work together in trying to serve the community betterby listening to people more closely.
There are still more areas where the two forces could converge
rather than polarize their positions on public journalism. Proponents’views are certainly not as monolithic as are those of their opponents’.
It is difﬁcult to ﬁnd common ground in extreme views and pristineconcepts. But there are moderates on both sides who could cooperateby sharing their goal of improving journalism. One of these is Davis
Merritt himself. Along with his basic promotion of public journalism,
he has laid out the negative elements of “the reﬂexes” of current journalism, which he describes journalists as having developed “to enable
us to perform, under pressure, our daily and hourly reporting miracles.” The reﬂexes, he says, “no longer serve us—or public life—
well.”49
Those “reﬂexes” include:—The overvaluation of conﬂict as a primary narrative device.
—Framing issues at the extremes, which not only has the disadvantagesof inaccuracy, but which also relentlessly discourages the ambivalent
majority of people from thinking usefully about those issues.
—Indulging in and clearly communicating a snarly adversarialism
toward every person and institution instead of maintaining proper anduseful journalistic skepticism.
—Imagining readers as our audience or as spectators at an event that weare reporting on rather than imagining them as potential participants.
—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.50

One can argue that these “reﬂexes” are still valid and useful.
However, fair-minded journalists are not able to deny that most ofthese points also have negative effects. Even opponents of public journalism agree that these “reﬂexes” sometimes cause journalism to commit the journalistic sins of sensationalism, bias, distortion, misrepre-

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HIROSHI FUJITA

sentation and false reporting. These are the areas that journalists, either
public or otherwise, have to deal with squarely in order to improve thequality of journalism to any signiﬁcant degree.
Rem Rieder, editor of American Journalism Review, says that hehas been “struck by the wide swath of . . . common ground,” between
proponents and opponents of public journalism. He points out a few
areas of overlap, including the perception of the need to “get beyond
the ofﬁcial agenda and the ofﬁcial sources” in addition to other areas
already mentioned above by Merritt.51 James Fallows also sees “abroader ground of hopeful consensus” beneath the apparent gap that
separates public journalism advocates from their mainstream critics.52
Merritt himself simply says that “public journalism and those traditional ideals are neither in conﬂict nor mutually exclusive. Public journalism adds to those ideals an additional imperative; concern forwhether citizens become engaged in public life.”53
As journalism explores common ground in its quest to serve citizens
and society, journalists can perhaps use the principle of independence
as a guide. Independence is the key to journalistic integrity whether ofpublic journalism or the more traditional form. If a news organizationis perceived as a mouthpiece of any political party or interest group, it
will lose public trust. One of the critics’ serious concerns about publicjournalism is the likelihood of its independence being jeopardized byan over-involvement in or an over-commitment to community affairs.
The principle of journalistic independence could serve “as a moral
gyroscope” regarding the role of journalism in society, clarifying its
responsibilities to the public, and to communities.54 There seems to bereason to believe that public journalism, if practiced properly withhigh ethical standards, will produce reporting that will convince its
critics that journalistic independence can be maintained.
VII

GOOD JOURNALISM

There is a broad consensus among journalists that American journalism today is in trouble and that something has to be done. It has lostthe reputation it once had. It does not play the role in the community
which it once played. Many journalists share the view of Herbert
Altschull, journalism professor at Johns Hopkins University, that“something must be done if we are going to salvage the tradition ofjournalism from the cesspool into which it seems headed.”55 But they

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

47

are not in agreement on what should be done. Here, the idea of publicjournalism has arrived.
Although there are serious reservations, public journalism is anearnest attempt to restore journalism’s reputation and its original role.
In the words of Carl Sessions Stepp, it is “a thoughtful effort to jumpstart a tired industry and to reassert social responsibility in increasingly mercenary times.” An important point is that “it offers not just complaints, but a positive program for change.”56 It is a challenge to
traditional journalism.
The advocates of traditional journalism, meanwhile, have notoffered much to counter the proposition except criticism. It is time forthese critics to come up with their own suggestions for the signiﬁcant
improvement, if not reinvention, of journalism. There have been a few
mainstream journalists who have called for a conscious effort to reinvigorate journalism, David Broder being one of them. Gene Roberts,
managing editor of the New York Times, is another. He deplores thetrend among newspapers to raise proﬁts by squeezing newsroom
staffs, budgets and news hole. He says:[T]he obligation of the press is, at its heart, very simple: supplying
voters with the information they need to make decisions in our democracy. Substantive news coverage is not only vital to democracy; it isvital to the survival of newspapers.57
Davis Merritt could have written these sentences. What Roberts is
calling for is more talk of increasing coverage, or space for news
reports on newspapers, or staff in editorial rooms, rather than ofincreasing proﬁts and of increasing accountability to shareholders. It issimply good journalism. Howard Schneider, managing editor ofNewsday, said, “It’s the most traditional thing that any newspaper
worth anything has always done. This is not a radical new notion thatyou also report on what the public cares about.”58 To Schneider as wellas to Roberts, what public journalism is striving at is nothing new.
This is where the common ground explored in previous pages comes
into play.
Yet, no detailed steps towards public journalism have been deﬁned
by its proponents. No roadmap to good journalism has been clearlydrawn by its opponents either. Their goals are more or less the same—
to serve the community and to maintain democracy. The process
seems to overlap here and there. If journalists in America are to

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HIROSHI FUJITA

improve the quality of journalism, the most practical way to achieve it
is to start working together on some of the areas where proponents andopponents share similar views. And if their efforts are fruitful, they
could ﬁnd ways to clear away distrust and doubt on both sides.
Meanwhile, experimental projects within public journalism will go
on. The results of those individual projects will show in time the goodand bad points of those experiments. Public journalism will becomedeﬁned through this process.
In the ﬁnal analysis, there is another issue to be examined in evaluating the fate of public journalism. It is a fact that most of the news
organizations participating in public journalism are small and mediumsized and that none of elite newspapers or major television networks
with national inﬂuence has taken part. Most of the proponents represent local and regional media, while most of the opponents are associated with mainstream media organizations. And, perhaps not by coincidence, many of the early practitioners of public journalism werenewspapers within the Knight-Ridder chain, including the Wichita
Eagle and the Charlotte Observer.
Two assumptions can be made. One is that smaller, regional media
organizations have closer contacts with their own communities thanlarger ones do. They are more sensitive and must be more responsive
to the wishes of their communities. The journalists of smaller media
organizations are expected to play a more interactive role with readersand viewers. Another assumption is that journalists at smaller media
organizations may feel more acutely some of the problems that American journalism faces. Infotainment trends, the downsizing of news
staff, and the cutting back of news budgets are some of the problems
that have caused public journalism to come onto the scene. Big time
media organizations are strong enough to cope with the pressure ofthis professional malaise, and their editors and reporters have not yet
been forced to come to terms with the hard times that their counterparts at smaller organizations are already experiencing.
If these assumptions are valid, the battle over public journalism will
not remain limited to being a matter of philosophy or the practice ofreporting news. It will also involve the ﬁnancial health of the media
business as a whole. With the emergence of a variety of electronic media, traditional media businesses are being required to fundamentally
review their future strategies. Public journalism could be interpreted as
an indirect result of the struggle for survival of smaller organizations.

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

49

The fact that some critics of public journalism call it a ‘management
gimmick’ shows that it could be used as a ploy to cut costs and expand
proﬁts.
So far the ﬁnancial implications of public journalism have not beena focus of the debate surrounding the idea. Some of the approaches ofpublic journalism, polls or town-hall meetings for example, costmoney. While many of the major projects have been supported, atleast in part, by outside funds, this support will not last indeﬁnitely. It
may be questioned whether the management of media organizations
practicing public journalism would continue to support the trend even
if outside funds cease to be available, and even if public journalism
cost more money. If they are willing to do so in order to improve thequality of American journalism, public journalism will have a betterchance to survive.
VIII

PROSPECT

Public journalism is intended to cure the malaise of current journalism. But it has not proved to be decisively effective in experimental
application in the past few years, and in the future it may even proveto have negative side-effects. The consensus among journalists is thatsomething has to be done about the malaise. They cannot let it get
worse. The appearance of public journalism has caused considerable
controversy among journalists as well as academics, and has had theeffect of encouraging journalists in particular to tackle the malaise
seriously, which is unquestionably a signiﬁcant contribution by publicjournalism to American journalism.
Marvin Kalb, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, recently said in aninterview that public journalism “peaked in 1996 and is now on the
decline,” while admitting “it was at its very best an effort to reconnect
journalism perceived to be elitist to the American people.” Kalb ﬁnds
it a serious problem of public journalism that it “obliged the journalist
to become a Pied Piper and to lead a parade down the main street.”59
Meanwhile, Jay Rosen has said that the future of public journalism
is “still open.” He is optimistic that the public journalism experimentwill continue and that those who participated in the experiment “willeventually merge what they have learned into traditional journalism
and come up with something better.”60 Rosen seems not to rule out the

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HIROSHI FUJITA

possibility that public journalists may ﬁnd common ground with those
who have refused to go along with them so far, and so be able to work
together to improve journalistic standards in the future.
It is hard to predict where these controversies will lead and what theoutcome will be. But whatever the outcome, the current experiment inpublic journalism is one of the most signiﬁcant movements in
American journalism in a long time. Its impact will be felt in
American journalism in many years to come.

NOTES* denotes materials acquired through internet, thereby page number unspeciﬁed.
1
Basic readings are: Arthur Charity, Doing Public Journalism (New York: The
Guilford Press, 1995); Davis “Buzz” Merritt, Public Journalism & Public Life: Why
Telling the News Is Not Enough (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1995); Jay Rosen, Getting the Connections Right: Public Journalism and the Troubles
in the Press (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996).
2
Rosen, Getting the Connections Right, 49.
3
Merritt, “Missing the Point,” American Journalism Review, July/August 1996, 29.
4
Rosen, Getting the Connections Right, 2.
5
Merritt, Public Journalism & Public Life, 113–114.
6
Ibid., 124.
7
Rosen, Getting the Connections Right, 35.
8Ibid., 43–48.
9
Alicia C. Shepard, “The Gospel of Public Journalism,” American Journalism
Review, September 1994, 30.
10Judith Sheppard, “Climbing Down From the Ivory Tower,” American Journalism
Review, May 1995, 21.
11
Merritt, “Missing the Point,” 30.
12
Ibid., 30.
13David S. Broder, “Democracy and the Press,” Washington Post, 3 January 1990.
14
Howard Kurtz, Media Circus: The Trouble with American Newspapers (NewYork: Times Books, 1993), 6–7.
15
Loren Ghiglione, “The Price of Independence,” Presstime, July/August 1996, 39.
16
Penn Kimball, Downsizing the News: Network Cutbacks in the Nation’s Capital(Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), 25–34.
17
Edward M. Fouhy, “Civic Journalism: Rebuilding the Foundations of
Democracy,” Civic Partners, Spring 1996, http://www.pewcenter.org/publications/*
18
Alicia C. Shepard, “The Pew Connection,” American Journalism Review, April
1996, 25–27.
19
Author’s interview with Jan Schaffer, Deputy Director of the Pew Center for
Civic Journalism, 17 September 1997, in Washington.
20
Shepard, “The Pew Connection,” 26.
21
Rosen, Getting the Connections Right, 51.
22Carl Sessions Stepp, “Public Journalism: Balancing the Scales,” American

CONTROVERSIES OVER THE MEDIA’S ROLE IN 1990S AMERICA

51

Journalism Review, May 1996, 38.
23
Howell Raines, “The Fallows Fallacy,” New York Times, 25 February 1996.
24
Richard Harwood, “Civic Journalism 101,” Washington Post, 17 January 1995.
25
M. L. Stein, “Beware of Public Journalism,” Editor & Publisher, 6 May 1995, 18.
26
Merritt, Public Journalism & Public Life, 80.
27
Theodore L. Glasser and Stephanie Craft, “Public Journalism and the Prospects
for Press Accountability,” Mixed News: The Public/Civic/Communitarian Journalism
Debate, Ed. Jay Black (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 123.
28
Tony Case, “Public Journalism Denounced,” Editor & Publisher, 12 November
1994, 14.
29
Michael Gartner, “Public Journalism—Seeing Through the Gimmicks,” Media
Studies Journal, Winter 1997.
30
Ibid.
31
Philip Meyer, “Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity,” http://www.
ire.org/pubjour.html*
32
Merritt, “Missing the Point,” 30.
33
Clifford G. Christians, “The Common Good and Universal Values,” Mixed News,
19.
34
Louis W. Hodges, “Ruminations About the Communitarian Debate,” Mixed
News, 43.
35
John C. Merrill, “Communitarianism’s Rhetorical War Against Enlightenment
Liberalism,” Mixed News, 55.
36
Ibid., 57.
37
Ibid., 60.
38
Ralph D. Barney, “A Dangerous Drift? The Sirens’ Call to Collectivism,” Mixed
News, 89.
39
Civic Lessons: Report on Four Civic Journalism Projects Funded by The Pew
Center for Civic Journalism (Philadelphia: The Pew Charitable Trusts, 1997), 1.
40
Ibid., 2.
41
Ibid., 9.
42
Ibid., 24.
43
Jan Schaffer, “The Best or Worst?” Quill, May 1997, 28.
44
Meyer, “Public Journalism and the Problem of Objectivity.”*45
Case, “Public Journalism Denounced,” 14.
46
Stein, “Beware of Public Journalism,” 19.
47
Max Frankel, “Fix-It Journalism,” The New York Times Magazine, 21 May 1995,
29.
48
Broder, “Five Ways To Put Some Sanity Back In Elections,” Washington Post, 14January 1990.
49
Merritt, “Missing the Point,” 31.
50
Ibid.
51
Rem Rieder, “Public Journalism: Stop the Shooting,” American Journalism
Review, December 1995, 6.
52James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American
Democracy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 265.
53
Merritt, “Missing the Point,” 30.
54
Robert Steele, “The Ethics of Civic Journalism: Independence as the Guide,”
Mixed News, 172.
55
J. Herbert Altschull, “A Crisis of Conﬁdence: Is Community Journalism theAnswer?” Mixed News, 143.

52
56

HIROSHI FUJITA

Stepp, “Public Journalism,” 39.
Gene Roberts, “Corporate Journalism and Community Service,” Media Studies
Journal, Spring/Summer 1996, http://www.mediastudies.org/mediamergers/roberts.
html*
58
Shepard, “The Gospel of Public Journalism,” 33.
59
Author’s interview with Marvin Kalb, 15 September 1997, in Cambridge, Mass.
60
Author’s interview with Jay Rosen, 12 September 1997, in New York.
57