I believe that there are a number of contributing factors to the incidences of bad behaviour by the Newcastle Knights players in Bathurst on the weekend.
I know that footballers don't ask for this responsibility but whether they like it or not, they are role models to many, especially in the Newcastle community. This bubble of sport and fame that the full time rugby league player lives inside is amplified living in Newcastle. They are treated like gods around this town and it is common knowledge to Novocastrians that they are above reproach. Their actions here in Newcastle are never publicised and this compounds the culture that accepts the denigrating of women, property and the basic rules and laws that Joe Public lives by.
The major consequence is that their behaviour has become socially accepted in rugby league community.
The saddest part is the constant attention the off field behaviour of rugby league players receive, detracts from the fact that they are talented sportsmen playing at the highest level in arguably one of the world's most demanding sports. This does nothing to attract new patrons to a wonderful game or keep the ones who are sticking by their sport and their team through numerous scandals.
I'm sure these players sit there in bewilderment and wonder why people think of them as meatheads because the message that their actions are unacceptable in society certainly doesn't' seem to be sinking in yet.
I don't believe that treating players like children and banning alcohol from road trips and celebrations is the answer, the solution is making them publicly & contractually accountable for their actions
RT On Air
Wednesday, 23 February 2005
Let's Blame the Readers - Is it possible to do great journalism if the public does not care?
Let's Blame the Readers
Is it possible to do great journalism if the public does not care?
By Evan Cornog
What do the managing editors of America?s newspapers talk about when
they get together? Readers, and why there are fewer of them than there
used to be. At the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in
Louisville this fall, Topic A was declining readership. Stuart Wilk, the
past APME president and associate editor of The Dallas Morning News,
delivered a keynote speech that spoke of various ills facing the
business ? falling readership, sliding profits, circulation scandals.
Bennie Ivory, executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal,
warned, "We?re losing a lot of readership right now," and another
speaker, the business consultant Vin Crosbie, diagnosed the industry as
being in "critical condition." The gathering was not, of course, a wake,
and much time was spent discussing what news people could do to turn the
situation around. Yet for all the can-do spirit and guarded optimism
that were in evidence, it was clear that many of the people at the APME
meeting were worried about the future.
It is not hard to see why; the data on readership are consistent and
depressing. Vin Crosbie pointed to statistics that showed that in 1964,
81 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper, while today that figure
hovers around 54 percent. Soon newspaper readers will be a minority of
the population, given the even more distressing figures he cited
concerning the reading habits of younger Americans. As recently as 1997,
39 percent of Americans 18 to 34 were reading newspapers regularly; by
2001 this had dropped to 26 percent. That statistic is even worse than
it seems, because newspaper reading ? or nonreading ? is a habit, like
smoking or a preference for Coke or Pepsi, that once acquired tends to
remain in place. The older Americans who are the mainstay of newspaper
subscriber lists have been reading newspapers since their teens and
twenties, and younger Americans who have not yet picked up the habit are
not likely to develop it later in life.
The problem is not confined to newspapers, either. As the Project for
Excellence in Journalism?s report, "The State of the News Media 2004,"
makes clear, other sources of news are also having trouble attracting
younger customers. The three nightly network newscasts have seen their
ratings plummet 44 percent since 1980.
A new study of the problem by David T. Z. Mindich, a journalism
professor at Saint Michael?s College in Vermont, provides a devastating
survey of the extent of the problem. Ignorance of current events and
indifference to the traditional news media are epidemic. And it is not
only traditional news media that young people avoid; even the Internet,
which some look to as the solution to the problem of a disengaged
younger generation, is not being used as a source of news by most
younger Americans. In his new book, Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40
Don?t Follow the News, Mindich cites a survey showing that "only 11% of
young people cite the Internet as a major source of news." Younger
Americans know plenty about the things that interest them ? they just
don?t follow the news very closely.
This was not always so. In 1966 fully 60 percent of college freshmen
believed that following politics was important, according to a survey by
the University of California at Los Angeles; by 2003 that had fallen to
34 percent. Given the close correlation researchers have found between
newspaper reading and active citizenship, the figures are worrisome for
both the industry and the nation.
The managing editors? meeting was built around finding ways to lure new,
younger readers into buying their papers. Session after session was
organized with this purpose in mind, and to drive the point home the
APME had flown in an assortment of "embedded readers" from around the
country to comment upon the proceedings and give their own views in a
special session of the convention. No one could accuse the newspaper
folks of being indifferent to their customers: "I have been treated like
a celebrity all week," remarked one of these embedded readers, Angela
Gallagher, a college student from Mississippi.
But what if the problem lies not with the newspapers, as the APME
gathering seemed to believe, but with the readers? What if the readers
have changed? If so, the solution to the problem will lie beyond the
power of journalists alone.
Consider some recent history. In 2000, Robert D. Putnam, a political
scientist at Harvard, published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival
of American Community, a best-selling work that examined how Americans
have retreated from all sorts of collective and communal activities in
the past half-century. Putnam observed that organizations ranging from
VFW posts to PTAs to bridge clubs to high-school bands were shutting
down because there were not enough people interested in their goals to
sustain them. What "the greatest generation" had built ? both the spirit
of common enterprise and the institutions that channeled that spirit ?
was disintegrating. Putnam subsequently tried to look on the brighter
side in a book entitled Better Together that examined efforts to reverse
this trend toward alienation and social isolation. Still, over the last
few decades, the public realm has shrunk, and our private worlds have
grown more isolated.
Perhaps the biggest force driving this change has been television, which
provides easy and cheap entertainment that people can consume at home.
Even though people, when polled, find TV to be a much less satisfying
leisure activity than more active and sociable diversions, the power of
the tube continues to rise. (And even TV watching has become less social
? the family room has emptied out as each family member has acquired a
personal TV set. Mindich points out that in 1970 only 6 percent of sixth
graders had TVs in their rooms; today the figure is 77 percent.) Other
factors have played a role in the decline of community. Suburbanization
has made it less convenient to gather in groups, and the modern
workplace, with its greater pressures and greater number of working
mothers, leaves less time to pursue active leisure interests. More
recent developments such as the Internet, video games, and the
proliferation of gated communities have only intensified the decline.
To be fair, it must also be recognized that "the greatest generation"
had greatness thrust upon them because they had to face the Great
Depression and World War II. It is easier to embrace an ethic of shared
sacrifice for the common good if your alternative is fascist tyranny.
The recent decades of relative peace and prosperity (for many) have made
fewer demands on our ability to act collectively, and it is hardly
surprising that in the absence of such challenges our civic reflexes
have grown rusty.
Newspapers have reflected this change in many ways. Obviously, as
various community institutions fade in importance, so does the amount of
coverage they receive (seen much on the labor-union beat lately?). As
television has grown in importance, so has the space allotted to it in
print media ? not just in listings and reviews, but in coverage of TV
celebrities, even the recently minted varieties that have started to
emerge from reality shows. When news executives are asked why they put
so much effort into covering celebrities, the answer is that "readers
want it."
The editors in Louisville devoted one of their sessions to the subject,
"Celebrity Coverage ? Where?s the Line . . . And Have We Crossed It?"
But in addressing that topic much time was spent discussing how to use
celebrity coverage to attract readers. Lorrie Lynch, who covers
celebrities for USA Weekend, urged the editors to capitalize upon
celebrity coverage to attract new readers. And the gossip columnist for
the Minneapolis Star Tribune, known simply as C. J., offered advice on
how to cover celebrities if you don?t have the good fortune to be in New
York or Los Angeles.
Covering celebrities was just one of the attractions under consideration
for luring new readers. Kim Leserman, president of the Media Insight
Group, a market-research firm, outlined ways to use information about
the interests of younger Americans to attract new readers. Robin
Seymour, the director of research and readership at the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, revealed the results of her research into the top
items of interest for younger, so-called "light" readers. In order, they
are: health/fitness, investigative reports on important issues, the
environment, natural disasters/accidents, and education. It was
repeatedly stressed that marketing efforts should not drive news
judgment, but when there was a story that promised to appeal to a
demographic group that the business folks were trying to reach, it
should be widely promoted. Hank Klibanoff, the managing editor for news
of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced, "I have seen the light.
I have seen the value of research." He discussed ways that his paper was
changing its zoned editions to respond to what they knew about reader
desires. And what he presented was quite impressive.
Clearly, a declining newspaper business must pay attention to its
customers? wants if it is to survive. Good ideas about how to do this
were in abundance at the APME convention. And none of the journalists
were saying that hard news coverage should be abandoned in pursuit of
profits. But profits may be hard to come by if the public does not want
to read the hard news.
At one APME event Michael Getler, ombudsman of The Washington Post, said
the paper had received a lot of hate mail during the Watergate
investigation, "from people who just didn?t want to know what was going
on." One of the embedded readers, a child-welfare worker from Delaware
named John Bates, spoke of people he knew who did not like to read
newspapers because the news is "so sad and depressing." The embedded
readers, who came across as an unusually thoughtful, engaged group,
evidenced this tendency themselves.
At one session the APME attendees and those of the affiliated
meeting of the Associated Press Photo Managers were asked to say whether
they would have published certain grisly photographs on page one ? a
shot of Nicole Brown Simpson?s corpse, the burned bodies of American
civilian contractors hanging from a bridge in Falluja, and so forth.
Electronic voting allowed members of the audience to identify themselves
by job (as editors or photo editors), and the embedded readers were also
asked to vote. One of the photos rated was the iconic Abu Ghraib photo
of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded, with wires attached to each
hand. Of those who identified themselves as photo editors, 96 percent
said that they either ran or would have run the photo on page one. But
71 percent of the embedded readers said it should not have been run on
page one. Asked about the propriety of running photos of terrorists
holding hostages, 60 percent of the photo editors were in favor of
printing the pictures, but 78 percent of the readers were opposed.
Why don?t readers want to see these things? Why are so many people
avoiding the hard task of keeping themselves informed about what is
going on in their government and society? Why is ignorance so widespread
at a time when higher education is more widely pursued than ever before?
So much of the thinking about this in the world of journalism (including
in the pages of this magazine) is done from the perspective of the flaws
of journalism as currently practiced. And so it should be, because such
flaws abound, from the cutbacks in foreign bureaus to the
commercialization of news to the high-profile crimes of a few
journalistic fabricators. But perhaps the problem, and therefore the
solution, has broader and deeper roots. Perhaps we should, to an extent,
blame the readers. Perhaps the old notions of an engaged and virtuous
citizenry, upon which the founding fathers? hopes for the republic were
based, are archaic concepts.
Gourmet?s editor, Ruth Reichl, when she was still the restaurant critic
of The New York Times, once launched a review of Thomas Keller?s Napa
Valley restaurant, the French Laundry, with the observation, "The secret
of the French Laundry is that Mr. Keller is the first American chef to
understand that it takes more than great food and a great location to
make a great restaurant: it also takes great customers." The greatest
danger to American journalism in the coming decades is not commercial
pressures or government regulation but the decline of public interest in
public life, a serious disengagement of citizens from one of the primary
duties of citizenship ? to know what is happening in their government
and society. Americans know a lot about a lot of things, but when only
41 percent of teenagers polled can name the three branches of government
while 59 percent can name the Three Stooges, something is seriously amiss.
It is particularly ironic that this is happening in the United States,
whose revolution and then founding were to a significant extent the
product of debates carried out in pamphlets and newspapers. The greatest
work of political philosophy ever composed in America, the Federalist
Papers, was published serially in New York newspapers to support the
ratification of the Constitution there. In recognition of the role that
the press played in the nation?s founding, and in appreciation of the
crucial role it plays in maintaining a free society, the press was
granted special protections under the First Amendment.
But the founders knew that a free press would be worth little if the
people could not read it, so public education became one of the great
obsessions of the leaders of the early republic. One of the founders of
the New York Free School Society, the precursor of the public-school
system in New York City, wrote that the "fundamental error of Europe"
was restricting education to the wealthy, in the mistaken belief that
"knowledge is the parent of sedition and insurrection." Instead, he
wrote, education was vital to the maintenance of a free society. This
concern with education was widespread in the founding generation, and
Thomas Jefferson famously listed the establishment of the University of
Virginia as one of the three great accomplishments of his life (he
omitted his presidency from the list).
The idea of education as a prerequisite for responsible citizenship
naturally gave rise, after a time, to the idea of citizenship education.
What the historian Richard Hofstadter called the "consensus" society of the
1950s fostered a kind of citizenship education that stressed the
institutions of American democracy, the commonality of all Americans
regardless of background (although how this was actually expressed from
state to state, particularly with regard to African Americans, was
problematic), and the efficacy of citizens acting in groups to pursue
change, whether those groups were political parties effecting changes in
government through legislation or labor unions and corporations
negotiating agreements governing wages and working conditions.
But the notion of citizenship education was always a contested one, with
business groups looking to schools essentially to educate workers for a
complex industrial society while others, particularly educators, favored
more broadly democratic notions of citizenship education that sought to
give students the tools they needed to think critically about their
society and their roles in that society. According to Larry Cuban, a
professor of education at Stanford University, it is "business-inspired
reform coalitions" that have recast public education: "In doing so, the
traditional and primary collective goal of public schools building
literate citizens able to engage in democratic practices" ? the goal of
American?s founders ? "has been replaced by the goal of social
efficiency, that is, preparing students for a competitive labor market
anchored in a swiftly changing economy." Clearly students need to be
prepared to take their places in the work force; and public education
has long sought to achieve that goal along with others. But the balance
has shifted in the last generation. Cuban?s new book, The Blackboard and
the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can?t Be Businesses, traces the rise of the
social efficiency model over the last three decades. The federal "Nation
at Risk" report of 1983 helped to define the nation?s educational
shortcomings in terms of America?s perceived surrender of economic
primacy to the industrial powerhouses of Japan and Germany. Although
those economic threats have receded, if not evaporated, the prescription
arrived at ? more standardized tests of basic skills, and "teaching to
the test" ? has become the orthodox political solution, embraced by both
parties. (Senator Edward Kennedy voted for President Bush?s "No Child
Left Behind" legislation, which the president, in one of the debates,
described as a jobs bill.)
This redefinition of citizenship has been part of a larger push toward
privatizing much that used to be public ? and, in particular,
governmental ? in American society. For decades the Republican Party and
allies in the business community have worked to reduce government?s role
in American life. It is a measure of their success that faith in
democratic government has largely been replaced by faith in the market.
It was the senior President Bush who urged upon the nation a less
expansive model of civic engagement, which the speechwriter Peggy Noonan
memorably expressed as "a thousand points of light." Implicit in this
was the notion that collective action was not the only, or the best, way
to remedy society?s ills. Isolated individuals should try to do good ?
in isolation. Earlier generations had expressed different ideals. In his
inaugural address in 1941, as the threat of world war drew ever closer
to the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that American democracy
was strong "because it is built on the unhampered initiative of
individual men and women joined together in a common enterprise." Sixty
years later, after the September 11 attacks had shaken the nation,
President George W. Bush urged Americans to pull together by going out
and spending money, or taking a trip to Disney World. Consumerism had
become the common cause.
President Bush also declared that younger Americans should be taught to
respond to the September 11 crisis, but his vision of how this should be
done was very narrow. In announcing an effort to strengthen citizenship
education in the wake of the attacks, Bush said the program?s purpose
was to teach that "America is a force for good in the world, bringing
hope and freedom to other people." The goal was to prescribe, not to
explore, what American citizenship is and means. And those who challenge
their students to ask the hard questions are encountering difficulties.
One Florida teacher who asked his class to discuss Benjamin Franklin?s
statement "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" was disciplined by
the school?s principal for his departure from the required curriculum.
Answers are safe; questions are not.
In a recent study of citizenship education published in PS: Political
Science and Politics, the scholars Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne
described three different varieties of citizenship: the "personally
responsible citizen," the "participatory citizen," and the
"justice-oriented citizen." To make clear the differences, they
described sample actions for each: the first "contributes food to a food
drive," the second "helps to organize a food drive," while the third
"explores why people are hungry and acts to solve root causes."
(Interestingly, David Mindich?s study found that volunteerism has been
rising among the young, even as they are becoming "less and less engaged
politically.")
While each kind of action might be covered in the pages of a local
newspaper, clearly it is the world of the justice-oriented citizen that
intersects most clearly with the world of journalism, since "root
causes" of problems are what journalists seek to identify, and
uncovering injustices is one of the raisons d?être of reporters. And
such a "justice-oriented" approach was common in the citizenship
education of previous generations. This shift toward defining the
citizen as consumer is a change that some, at least, saw coming.
One thing that "everyone knows" is that Jimmy Carter made a fool of
himself in the summer of 1979 by giving the famous "malaise speech,"
which is caricatured as a touchy-feely effort to avoid personal
responsibility for the country?s woes during the stagflation years of
the late 1970s. Yet Carter?s speech is a much more impressive document
than such facile impressions convey, and in it he identified a trend
central to the matter at hand. The nation, he said then, was at a fork
in the road, and had to choose between a "path that leads to
fragmentation and self-interest" and "the path of common purpose and the
restoration of American values." To choose the first, Carter said, was
to embrace a world in which "human identity is no longer defined by what
one does, but by what one owns." We appear to have arrived at that
destination. When George W. Bush, at his party?s 2004 convention, laid
out his vision of America?s future, it was of an "ownership society,"
where people would not only own their own homes but also "own their own
health plans and have the confidence of owning a piece of their
retirement." This "ownership society" is many things, and one of them is
a premeditated privatization of responsibilities that government had
taken on during the New Deal and Great Society epochs. Without debating
the merits of the actual proposals, it is clear that a different role
for government is envisaged, as is a different conception of
citizenship. Looking after oneself, rather than sharing the burden, is
the model.
It is a common lament of newsrooms that readers often skip over the
long, thoughtful series on important topics in their haste to read the
latest on the Hilton sisters or the specs on the best high-end
cappuccino makers. Still, why not include some of that fluff? The
occasional confection is fine as long as one eats a healthy, balanced
diet. The problem is that Americans have grown too fond of sweets, both
on their tables and in their newspapers. And the new tabloids, such as
the Tribune Company?s RedEye, that are aimed at the youth market seem
geared to the attention span of a mayfly.
The editors at the APME convention probably cared more about hard news
than celebrity coverage, and even if they may use the latter to hook
younger readers, they are still trying to fulfill the traditional
mission of a newspaper. But that may not be enough. One of the embedded
readers, an Eckerd College professor of anthropology and American
studies named Catherine M. Griggs, cautioned them that she was "not sure
you can do it alone ? educators have to take the first steps." Put
another way, schools need to play a role in forming the "great
customers" who will ensure the future of first-class journalism.
But journalism has a role to play, too. Some of that role will be
carried out through the sort of soul-searching and self-examination that
characterized the APME convention. But the change in the definition of
citizenship, and in citizenship education, has not arisen out of thin
air. Interest groups, acting in public forums, have helped push the
country along the path Jimmy Carter decried. And as Cuban pointed out in
an interview with cjr, "Most newspapers have supported the standards and
testing movement editorially," which has contributed to the decline of
emphasis on civics education. With the best of motives, journalists have
contributed to the very forces that undermine journalism?s future.
Journalism does have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate.
One attempt to deal with this set of issues was "civic journalism,"
which has faced serious opposition, and even mockery, within the
journalistic community because it seemed to ask reporters and editors to
lay aside their concerns with objectivity and balance in order to effect
change in society. As the journalism scholar James W. Carey, who teaches
at Columbia, once pointed out, journalists do their best work simply "by
encouraging the conditions of public discourse and life." They can do
this within the accepted norms of the profession by covering the stories
that are out there, and by recognizing that some of the stories they
need to cover have to do with ideas ? such as changing ideas of
citizenship. And they need to explore how such ideas alter their own
profession. When journalists think of their readers, viewers, and
listeners primarily as market segments, not citizens, they risk
surrendering their unique role. Yes, news organizations are businesses,
and need to make money; but they are also a public trust. The more
journalists accept, and play by, the rules of the market, the more they
are likely to confirm President Bush?s conception of the press as just
another special-interest group.
Journalistic attempts to follow readers in their changing interests may
lead down a rabbit-hole of ever-diminishing returns. As journalism tries
its best to chase this increasingly recalcitrant public, it risks losing
sight of its own fundamental purpose. And making news more entertaining
is not the answer, either. The news can?t compete with the diversions
put forth by Hollywood in films and on television. Jerry Bruckheimer is
better at doing explosions than Andrew Heyward, and Angelina Jolie is
more pleasing to gaze upon than Diane Sawyer. Even O. J. Simpson?s white
Ford Bronco is no match for The Fast and the Furious.
But don?t forget the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?s research on stories of
most interest to younger readers ? on its top-five list were stories on
education. Readers do care about what happens in their children?s
schools. And so, even, do nonreaders. There is contention and bitter
division here ? the very stuff of good news stories. And the
diminishment of the commons has become a topic for some journalists in
recent years, particularly since the publication of Bowling Alone. Bill
McKibben wrote acutely on the subject last year in Mother Jones, and
David Shaw has described the force of this trend in journalism in the
Los Angeles Times. There is plenty of room for more attention. By
covering this ongoing effort to define ? or redefine ? American
citizenship, journalists can move the debate beyond their own
profession, heeding Professor Griggs?s admonition that journalists
"can?t do it alone." Fortunately, journalism does have the power to
examine any aspect of society, and can in this way set in motion a
debate that may help it put its own house in better order.
Is it possible to do great journalism if the public does not care?
By Evan Cornog
What do the managing editors of America?s newspapers talk about when
they get together? Readers, and why there are fewer of them than there
used to be. At the Associated Press Managing Editors convention in
Louisville this fall, Topic A was declining readership. Stuart Wilk, the
past APME president and associate editor of The Dallas Morning News,
delivered a keynote speech that spoke of various ills facing the
business ? falling readership, sliding profits, circulation scandals.
Bennie Ivory, executive editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal,
warned, "We?re losing a lot of readership right now," and another
speaker, the business consultant Vin Crosbie, diagnosed the industry as
being in "critical condition." The gathering was not, of course, a wake,
and much time was spent discussing what news people could do to turn the
situation around. Yet for all the can-do spirit and guarded optimism
that were in evidence, it was clear that many of the people at the APME
meeting were worried about the future.
It is not hard to see why; the data on readership are consistent and
depressing. Vin Crosbie pointed to statistics that showed that in 1964,
81 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper, while today that figure
hovers around 54 percent. Soon newspaper readers will be a minority of
the population, given the even more distressing figures he cited
concerning the reading habits of younger Americans. As recently as 1997,
39 percent of Americans 18 to 34 were reading newspapers regularly; by
2001 this had dropped to 26 percent. That statistic is even worse than
it seems, because newspaper reading ? or nonreading ? is a habit, like
smoking or a preference for Coke or Pepsi, that once acquired tends to
remain in place. The older Americans who are the mainstay of newspaper
subscriber lists have been reading newspapers since their teens and
twenties, and younger Americans who have not yet picked up the habit are
not likely to develop it later in life.
The problem is not confined to newspapers, either. As the Project for
Excellence in Journalism?s report, "The State of the News Media 2004,"
makes clear, other sources of news are also having trouble attracting
younger customers. The three nightly network newscasts have seen their
ratings plummet 44 percent since 1980.
A new study of the problem by David T. Z. Mindich, a journalism
professor at Saint Michael?s College in Vermont, provides a devastating
survey of the extent of the problem. Ignorance of current events and
indifference to the traditional news media are epidemic. And it is not
only traditional news media that young people avoid; even the Internet,
which some look to as the solution to the problem of a disengaged
younger generation, is not being used as a source of news by most
younger Americans. In his new book, Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40
Don?t Follow the News, Mindich cites a survey showing that "only 11% of
young people cite the Internet as a major source of news." Younger
Americans know plenty about the things that interest them ? they just
don?t follow the news very closely.
This was not always so. In 1966 fully 60 percent of college freshmen
believed that following politics was important, according to a survey by
the University of California at Los Angeles; by 2003 that had fallen to
34 percent. Given the close correlation researchers have found between
newspaper reading and active citizenship, the figures are worrisome for
both the industry and the nation.
The managing editors? meeting was built around finding ways to lure new,
younger readers into buying their papers. Session after session was
organized with this purpose in mind, and to drive the point home the
APME had flown in an assortment of "embedded readers" from around the
country to comment upon the proceedings and give their own views in a
special session of the convention. No one could accuse the newspaper
folks of being indifferent to their customers: "I have been treated like
a celebrity all week," remarked one of these embedded readers, Angela
Gallagher, a college student from Mississippi.
But what if the problem lies not with the newspapers, as the APME
gathering seemed to believe, but with the readers? What if the readers
have changed? If so, the solution to the problem will lie beyond the
power of journalists alone.
Consider some recent history. In 2000, Robert D. Putnam, a political
scientist at Harvard, published Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival
of American Community, a best-selling work that examined how Americans
have retreated from all sorts of collective and communal activities in
the past half-century. Putnam observed that organizations ranging from
VFW posts to PTAs to bridge clubs to high-school bands were shutting
down because there were not enough people interested in their goals to
sustain them. What "the greatest generation" had built ? both the spirit
of common enterprise and the institutions that channeled that spirit ?
was disintegrating. Putnam subsequently tried to look on the brighter
side in a book entitled Better Together that examined efforts to reverse
this trend toward alienation and social isolation. Still, over the last
few decades, the public realm has shrunk, and our private worlds have
grown more isolated.
Perhaps the biggest force driving this change has been television, which
provides easy and cheap entertainment that people can consume at home.
Even though people, when polled, find TV to be a much less satisfying
leisure activity than more active and sociable diversions, the power of
the tube continues to rise. (And even TV watching has become less social
? the family room has emptied out as each family member has acquired a
personal TV set. Mindich points out that in 1970 only 6 percent of sixth
graders had TVs in their rooms; today the figure is 77 percent.) Other
factors have played a role in the decline of community. Suburbanization
has made it less convenient to gather in groups, and the modern
workplace, with its greater pressures and greater number of working
mothers, leaves less time to pursue active leisure interests. More
recent developments such as the Internet, video games, and the
proliferation of gated communities have only intensified the decline.
To be fair, it must also be recognized that "the greatest generation"
had greatness thrust upon them because they had to face the Great
Depression and World War II. It is easier to embrace an ethic of shared
sacrifice for the common good if your alternative is fascist tyranny.
The recent decades of relative peace and prosperity (for many) have made
fewer demands on our ability to act collectively, and it is hardly
surprising that in the absence of such challenges our civic reflexes
have grown rusty.
Newspapers have reflected this change in many ways. Obviously, as
various community institutions fade in importance, so does the amount of
coverage they receive (seen much on the labor-union beat lately?). As
television has grown in importance, so has the space allotted to it in
print media ? not just in listings and reviews, but in coverage of TV
celebrities, even the recently minted varieties that have started to
emerge from reality shows. When news executives are asked why they put
so much effort into covering celebrities, the answer is that "readers
want it."
The editors in Louisville devoted one of their sessions to the subject,
"Celebrity Coverage ? Where?s the Line . . . And Have We Crossed It?"
But in addressing that topic much time was spent discussing how to use
celebrity coverage to attract readers. Lorrie Lynch, who covers
celebrities for USA Weekend, urged the editors to capitalize upon
celebrity coverage to attract new readers. And the gossip columnist for
the Minneapolis Star Tribune, known simply as C. J., offered advice on
how to cover celebrities if you don?t have the good fortune to be in New
York or Los Angeles.
Covering celebrities was just one of the attractions under consideration
for luring new readers. Kim Leserman, president of the Media Insight
Group, a market-research firm, outlined ways to use information about
the interests of younger Americans to attract new readers. Robin
Seymour, the director of research and readership at the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, revealed the results of her research into the top
items of interest for younger, so-called "light" readers. In order, they
are: health/fitness, investigative reports on important issues, the
environment, natural disasters/accidents, and education. It was
repeatedly stressed that marketing efforts should not drive news
judgment, but when there was a story that promised to appeal to a
demographic group that the business folks were trying to reach, it
should be widely promoted. Hank Klibanoff, the managing editor for news
of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced, "I have seen the light.
I have seen the value of research." He discussed ways that his paper was
changing its zoned editions to respond to what they knew about reader
desires. And what he presented was quite impressive.
Clearly, a declining newspaper business must pay attention to its
customers? wants if it is to survive. Good ideas about how to do this
were in abundance at the APME convention. And none of the journalists
were saying that hard news coverage should be abandoned in pursuit of
profits. But profits may be hard to come by if the public does not want
to read the hard news.
At one APME event Michael Getler, ombudsman of The Washington Post, said
the paper had received a lot of hate mail during the Watergate
investigation, "from people who just didn?t want to know what was going
on." One of the embedded readers, a child-welfare worker from Delaware
named John Bates, spoke of people he knew who did not like to read
newspapers because the news is "so sad and depressing." The embedded
readers, who came across as an unusually thoughtful, engaged group,
evidenced this tendency themselves.
At one session the APME attendees and those of the affiliated
meeting of the Associated Press Photo Managers were asked to say whether
they would have published certain grisly photographs on page one ? a
shot of Nicole Brown Simpson?s corpse, the burned bodies of American
civilian contractors hanging from a bridge in Falluja, and so forth.
Electronic voting allowed members of the audience to identify themselves
by job (as editors or photo editors), and the embedded readers were also
asked to vote. One of the photos rated was the iconic Abu Ghraib photo
of a prisoner standing on a box, hooded, with wires attached to each
hand. Of those who identified themselves as photo editors, 96 percent
said that they either ran or would have run the photo on page one. But
71 percent of the embedded readers said it should not have been run on
page one. Asked about the propriety of running photos of terrorists
holding hostages, 60 percent of the photo editors were in favor of
printing the pictures, but 78 percent of the readers were opposed.
Why don?t readers want to see these things? Why are so many people
avoiding the hard task of keeping themselves informed about what is
going on in their government and society? Why is ignorance so widespread
at a time when higher education is more widely pursued than ever before?
So much of the thinking about this in the world of journalism (including
in the pages of this magazine) is done from the perspective of the flaws
of journalism as currently practiced. And so it should be, because such
flaws abound, from the cutbacks in foreign bureaus to the
commercialization of news to the high-profile crimes of a few
journalistic fabricators. But perhaps the problem, and therefore the
solution, has broader and deeper roots. Perhaps we should, to an extent,
blame the readers. Perhaps the old notions of an engaged and virtuous
citizenry, upon which the founding fathers? hopes for the republic were
based, are archaic concepts.
Gourmet?s editor, Ruth Reichl, when she was still the restaurant critic
of The New York Times, once launched a review of Thomas Keller?s Napa
Valley restaurant, the French Laundry, with the observation, "The secret
of the French Laundry is that Mr. Keller is the first American chef to
understand that it takes more than great food and a great location to
make a great restaurant: it also takes great customers." The greatest
danger to American journalism in the coming decades is not commercial
pressures or government regulation but the decline of public interest in
public life, a serious disengagement of citizens from one of the primary
duties of citizenship ? to know what is happening in their government
and society. Americans know a lot about a lot of things, but when only
41 percent of teenagers polled can name the three branches of government
while 59 percent can name the Three Stooges, something is seriously amiss.
It is particularly ironic that this is happening in the United States,
whose revolution and then founding were to a significant extent the
product of debates carried out in pamphlets and newspapers. The greatest
work of political philosophy ever composed in America, the Federalist
Papers, was published serially in New York newspapers to support the
ratification of the Constitution there. In recognition of the role that
the press played in the nation?s founding, and in appreciation of the
crucial role it plays in maintaining a free society, the press was
granted special protections under the First Amendment.
But the founders knew that a free press would be worth little if the
people could not read it, so public education became one of the great
obsessions of the leaders of the early republic. One of the founders of
the New York Free School Society, the precursor of the public-school
system in New York City, wrote that the "fundamental error of Europe"
was restricting education to the wealthy, in the mistaken belief that
"knowledge is the parent of sedition and insurrection." Instead, he
wrote, education was vital to the maintenance of a free society. This
concern with education was widespread in the founding generation, and
Thomas Jefferson famously listed the establishment of the University of
Virginia as one of the three great accomplishments of his life (he
omitted his presidency from the list).
The idea of education as a prerequisite for responsible citizenship
naturally gave rise, after a time, to the idea of citizenship education.
What the historian Richard Hofstadter called the "consensus" society of the
1950s fostered a kind of citizenship education that stressed the
institutions of American democracy, the commonality of all Americans
regardless of background (although how this was actually expressed from
state to state, particularly with regard to African Americans, was
problematic), and the efficacy of citizens acting in groups to pursue
change, whether those groups were political parties effecting changes in
government through legislation or labor unions and corporations
negotiating agreements governing wages and working conditions.
But the notion of citizenship education was always a contested one, with
business groups looking to schools essentially to educate workers for a
complex industrial society while others, particularly educators, favored
more broadly democratic notions of citizenship education that sought to
give students the tools they needed to think critically about their
society and their roles in that society. According to Larry Cuban, a
professor of education at Stanford University, it is "business-inspired
reform coalitions" that have recast public education: "In doing so, the
traditional and primary collective goal of public schools building
literate citizens able to engage in democratic practices" ? the goal of
American?s founders ? "has been replaced by the goal of social
efficiency, that is, preparing students for a competitive labor market
anchored in a swiftly changing economy." Clearly students need to be
prepared to take their places in the work force; and public education
has long sought to achieve that goal along with others. But the balance
has shifted in the last generation. Cuban?s new book, The Blackboard and
the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can?t Be Businesses, traces the rise of the
social efficiency model over the last three decades. The federal "Nation
at Risk" report of 1983 helped to define the nation?s educational
shortcomings in terms of America?s perceived surrender of economic
primacy to the industrial powerhouses of Japan and Germany. Although
those economic threats have receded, if not evaporated, the prescription
arrived at ? more standardized tests of basic skills, and "teaching to
the test" ? has become the orthodox political solution, embraced by both
parties. (Senator Edward Kennedy voted for President Bush?s "No Child
Left Behind" legislation, which the president, in one of the debates,
described as a jobs bill.)
This redefinition of citizenship has been part of a larger push toward
privatizing much that used to be public ? and, in particular,
governmental ? in American society. For decades the Republican Party and
allies in the business community have worked to reduce government?s role
in American life. It is a measure of their success that faith in
democratic government has largely been replaced by faith in the market.
It was the senior President Bush who urged upon the nation a less
expansive model of civic engagement, which the speechwriter Peggy Noonan
memorably expressed as "a thousand points of light." Implicit in this
was the notion that collective action was not the only, or the best, way
to remedy society?s ills. Isolated individuals should try to do good ?
in isolation. Earlier generations had expressed different ideals. In his
inaugural address in 1941, as the threat of world war drew ever closer
to the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that American democracy
was strong "because it is built on the unhampered initiative of
individual men and women joined together in a common enterprise." Sixty
years later, after the September 11 attacks had shaken the nation,
President George W. Bush urged Americans to pull together by going out
and spending money, or taking a trip to Disney World. Consumerism had
become the common cause.
President Bush also declared that younger Americans should be taught to
respond to the September 11 crisis, but his vision of how this should be
done was very narrow. In announcing an effort to strengthen citizenship
education in the wake of the attacks, Bush said the program?s purpose
was to teach that "America is a force for good in the world, bringing
hope and freedom to other people." The goal was to prescribe, not to
explore, what American citizenship is and means. And those who challenge
their students to ask the hard questions are encountering difficulties.
One Florida teacher who asked his class to discuss Benjamin Franklin?s
statement "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" was disciplined by
the school?s principal for his departure from the required curriculum.
Answers are safe; questions are not.
In a recent study of citizenship education published in PS: Political
Science and Politics, the scholars Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne
described three different varieties of citizenship: the "personally
responsible citizen," the "participatory citizen," and the
"justice-oriented citizen." To make clear the differences, they
described sample actions for each: the first "contributes food to a food
drive," the second "helps to organize a food drive," while the third
"explores why people are hungry and acts to solve root causes."
(Interestingly, David Mindich?s study found that volunteerism has been
rising among the young, even as they are becoming "less and less engaged
politically.")
While each kind of action might be covered in the pages of a local
newspaper, clearly it is the world of the justice-oriented citizen that
intersects most clearly with the world of journalism, since "root
causes" of problems are what journalists seek to identify, and
uncovering injustices is one of the raisons d?être of reporters. And
such a "justice-oriented" approach was common in the citizenship
education of previous generations. This shift toward defining the
citizen as consumer is a change that some, at least, saw coming.
One thing that "everyone knows" is that Jimmy Carter made a fool of
himself in the summer of 1979 by giving the famous "malaise speech,"
which is caricatured as a touchy-feely effort to avoid personal
responsibility for the country?s woes during the stagflation years of
the late 1970s. Yet Carter?s speech is a much more impressive document
than such facile impressions convey, and in it he identified a trend
central to the matter at hand. The nation, he said then, was at a fork
in the road, and had to choose between a "path that leads to
fragmentation and self-interest" and "the path of common purpose and the
restoration of American values." To choose the first, Carter said, was
to embrace a world in which "human identity is no longer defined by what
one does, but by what one owns." We appear to have arrived at that
destination. When George W. Bush, at his party?s 2004 convention, laid
out his vision of America?s future, it was of an "ownership society,"
where people would not only own their own homes but also "own their own
health plans and have the confidence of owning a piece of their
retirement." This "ownership society" is many things, and one of them is
a premeditated privatization of responsibilities that government had
taken on during the New Deal and Great Society epochs. Without debating
the merits of the actual proposals, it is clear that a different role
for government is envisaged, as is a different conception of
citizenship. Looking after oneself, rather than sharing the burden, is
the model.
It is a common lament of newsrooms that readers often skip over the
long, thoughtful series on important topics in their haste to read the
latest on the Hilton sisters or the specs on the best high-end
cappuccino makers. Still, why not include some of that fluff? The
occasional confection is fine as long as one eats a healthy, balanced
diet. The problem is that Americans have grown too fond of sweets, both
on their tables and in their newspapers. And the new tabloids, such as
the Tribune Company?s RedEye, that are aimed at the youth market seem
geared to the attention span of a mayfly.
The editors at the APME convention probably cared more about hard news
than celebrity coverage, and even if they may use the latter to hook
younger readers, they are still trying to fulfill the traditional
mission of a newspaper. But that may not be enough. One of the embedded
readers, an Eckerd College professor of anthropology and American
studies named Catherine M. Griggs, cautioned them that she was "not sure
you can do it alone ? educators have to take the first steps." Put
another way, schools need to play a role in forming the "great
customers" who will ensure the future of first-class journalism.
But journalism has a role to play, too. Some of that role will be
carried out through the sort of soul-searching and self-examination that
characterized the APME convention. But the change in the definition of
citizenship, and in citizenship education, has not arisen out of thin
air. Interest groups, acting in public forums, have helped push the
country along the path Jimmy Carter decried. And as Cuban pointed out in
an interview with cjr, "Most newspapers have supported the standards and
testing movement editorially," which has contributed to the decline of
emphasis on civics education. With the best of motives, journalists have
contributed to the very forces that undermine journalism?s future.
Journalism does have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate.
One attempt to deal with this set of issues was "civic journalism,"
which has faced serious opposition, and even mockery, within the
journalistic community because it seemed to ask reporters and editors to
lay aside their concerns with objectivity and balance in order to effect
change in society. As the journalism scholar James W. Carey, who teaches
at Columbia, once pointed out, journalists do their best work simply "by
encouraging the conditions of public discourse and life." They can do
this within the accepted norms of the profession by covering the stories
that are out there, and by recognizing that some of the stories they
need to cover have to do with ideas ? such as changing ideas of
citizenship. And they need to explore how such ideas alter their own
profession. When journalists think of their readers, viewers, and
listeners primarily as market segments, not citizens, they risk
surrendering their unique role. Yes, news organizations are businesses,
and need to make money; but they are also a public trust. The more
journalists accept, and play by, the rules of the market, the more they
are likely to confirm President Bush?s conception of the press as just
another special-interest group.
Journalistic attempts to follow readers in their changing interests may
lead down a rabbit-hole of ever-diminishing returns. As journalism tries
its best to chase this increasingly recalcitrant public, it risks losing
sight of its own fundamental purpose. And making news more entertaining
is not the answer, either. The news can?t compete with the diversions
put forth by Hollywood in films and on television. Jerry Bruckheimer is
better at doing explosions than Andrew Heyward, and Angelina Jolie is
more pleasing to gaze upon than Diane Sawyer. Even O. J. Simpson?s white
Ford Bronco is no match for The Fast and the Furious.
But don?t forget the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel?s research on stories of
most interest to younger readers ? on its top-five list were stories on
education. Readers do care about what happens in their children?s
schools. And so, even, do nonreaders. There is contention and bitter
division here ? the very stuff of good news stories. And the
diminishment of the commons has become a topic for some journalists in
recent years, particularly since the publication of Bowling Alone. Bill
McKibben wrote acutely on the subject last year in Mother Jones, and
David Shaw has described the force of this trend in journalism in the
Los Angeles Times. There is plenty of room for more attention. By
covering this ongoing effort to define ? or redefine ? American
citizenship, journalists can move the debate beyond their own
profession, heeding Professor Griggs?s admonition that journalists
"can?t do it alone." Fortunately, journalism does have the power to
examine any aspect of society, and can in this way set in motion a
debate that may help it put its own house in better order.
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