So, Are We Ready to Analyze Some Kids’ News?No. Not yet. After our brief journey through these various models of democracy and citizenship, we see that perhaps we began with the wrong question. Or at least too limited of a question. Our question began with a focus on citizenship in relationship to news, with both the idea of citizenship and the idea of news being implicitly understood within the rough framework of a liberal model of democracy. We have explored the restrictive character of that framework for citizenship, but we haven’t yet taken up its implications for the study of news itself, or for that matter, the special case of kids’ news in the the classroom. Rushing to the question of the relationship between citizenship and news, as I hope we have begun to illustrate, may lead us to miss some critical connections between what kind of citizenship we are talking about, what kind of news we are talking about, and what kind of education we are talking about. At the beginning of this presentation, we introduced the standard of evaluation of press practice as advocated by journalists associated with the civic or public journalism movement. Within the liberal model of democracy, the role of the press has been seen to include informing citizens, providing a forum for public debate and discussion and serving as a watchdog over the power of government. Advocates of civic journalism, patriotically responding to the rising tide of political apathy and perhaps also self-interestedly responding to the declining audience and therefore revenues for news, added to these liberal ideas the further responsibility, in the words of Jan Schaffer quoted earlier, to motivate ctitizens to take on the responsbilities of citizenship both in terms of critical thinking and action. In this call to the press to foster civic engagement and participation, we can see the links between the civic journalism movement participatory democracy. In fact, re-examining the Civic Practices Network with its call for a “new citizenship” we find not only do they have a special topics team devoted to issues of the press and democracy, but in reviewing the make-up of the advisory board, the list of affiliates and its funding support we see the direct involvement of a number of press organizations and press oriented foundations. These include: the project Public Life and the Press (a collaboration among the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, American Press Institute, and New York University), the Pew Center for Public Journalism, and the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The civic journalism movement also joins the democratic communitarian movement and even the idea of participatory democracy in stressing the critical value of community and the fundamental role of citizenship, not just to democratic government but to democratic culture. Jay Rosen, another leading spokesperson for civic journalism who directs the Public Life and the Press project quotes democratic communitarian Michael Sandel, "when politics goes well, we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone." (33) The civic journalism movement also takes the sophisticated media literacy position that the truth does not lie in fragmented facts, but in contextualized stories. The job, then of the press, is not simply to inform, but to help create and sustain what something like what Barber calls "civil society" or civic culture. All this is well and good, and it speaks optimistically to the hope that the institution of the press both recognizes the critical issue of rising political apathy and is committed to reunderstanding its role in addressing this apathy and in creating and promoting democratic culture. There are, however, two grave problems. One is that the civic or public journalism movement does not speak for the commercial industry of the press. Certainly it is an influential movement, but it is small by comparison to the entrenched inertia of libertarian values in the industry and in professional journalism education. The other, and perhaps more disturbing problem, is that even this progressive democratic communitarian movement within press culture grows silent as it comes closer and closer to touching on the pivotal issue within participatory democracy of democratic culture verses the market and citizenship verses consumership. Civic journalists may cry foul when the news breaks, as it did in 1999, of a deal at the Los Angeles Times between the editorial office and the Staples Center for a special magazine section promoting the Center as news while being paid for as advertising. (34) But when it comes to the relationship between democracy and the market, the expression of concern comes more from a libertarian than a participatory democratic position. The concern is framed more in terms of advertising or economic interests of the commercial press transgressing the border between the editorial offices and the revenue offices, violating the so-called "firewall" of liberal journalism.But this is not the same thing as questioning the meaningfulness of such an illusory border in the first place. And in the same, way, the civic journalism movement has little if anything to say about the nature and quality of civic culture promoted incessantly by advertising right in the middle of the commercial journalistic enterprise. On the one hand civic journalists believe that the truth lies more in context than in facts. On the other hand the one context they stop short of thinking through is the commercial and advertising context of news itself. Civic journalists simply don't know where to go with results from an investigation by Fairness and Accuracy in the Media which reports:
Perhaps the clearest, recent expression of a strong democratic vision of the press is advanced by Robert McChesney in his book Rich Media, Poor Democracy. (36) PBS's Bill Moyers gives the book his highest praise writing "If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book. If Paul Revere were here, he would spread the word." (37) McChesney begins directly with the conflict between the values of the market and the values of democracy and then discusses the consequences for the press which have developed through the failure to address this conflict. “Capitalism and democracy are not synonymous,” McChesney writes, “nor have they ever been…. Capitalism is innately in conflict with the core tenets of democracy. The core reason is that capitalism is invariably a class society where a very small percentage of the population has most of the society's wealth and a disproportionate share of its income.” (38) And yet, McChesney argues, with the field of journalism, just the opposite, in keeping with a libertarian perspective, has held true. Capitalism has been seen as the foundation of democracy. It is this belief which has been used to justify allowing the democratic institution of the press to be run as a capitalist enterprise. A press that had its own, strong economic base, as the argument went, would be less susceptible to the tyranny of government—it could serve what came to be called in libertarian theories of the press its job as government watchdog. But as McChesney argues, as the corporate press kept an eye on government (even to the point of demonizing government), the logic of capital turned the press itself into an anti-democratic force—not the only force, but a major force:
McChesney places a significant amount of the blame for the growing political apathy of U.S. citizens, young and old alike, on the commercial media. As he puts it “Capitalism benefits from having a formal democratic system, but capitalism works best when elites make most fundamental decisions and the bulk of the population is depoliticized.” (40) Drawing on McChesney, to consider the implications of participatory democracy for strong democratic journalism, it is necessary to recognize that civic journalism’s call for and claim to be committed to a journalism which re-engages citizens in civic life and strives to re-open the spaces of civic society and commit itself to a public good is naïve, to say the least, if it does not directly address market forces. Market-driven journalism requires that journalism serve the market, either directly as a source of revenue or as a means of attracting advertisers, or indirectly through celebrating the values of the market, creating environments compatible to marketing, and operating as a for-profit enterprise cutting news staffs, operating costs, costs of newsgathering, etc., where ever possible. The media contributes to political apathy, or “depolicitization” in McChesney’s terms, through decreasing the range of social voices heard from an increasingly concentrated corporate media industry, through the replacement of public debate and dialog over divisive issues of public concern with entertainment values encouraging private interests and private consumer pleasures, and through the ever increasing invasion of commercial practices and values into every aspect of social and what used to be public life. Back to the Snickers Ad As we indicated at the beginning of this presentation, there was a subtext to what we were trying to achieve. While we began with a question about news, citizenship, and political apathy, we also believed that as media educators those of us concerned with media and citizenship may share important ground with those concerned with the commercialization of education, even though these two issues tend to be treated separately—and, in fact, have made their way into the schools from two seemingly unrelated movements: The civic education movement and the commercialization of the schools movement. While it is true that within the arguments of groups and organizations raising questions about the commercialization of schools the concern is occasionally voiced about the need to distinguish between education for citizenship verses consumership, the foundation of that concern is left underdeveloped. Within the groups actively encouraging civic education, particularly mainstream political and educational groups and organizations, the link is almost never made. At this point we hope that it is becoming clear that as we expand our
thinking about democracy, citizenship and the news, the issue of commercialization
and the commercialization of education begins to take on a new urgency.
In this sense, we begin to see how a neo-liberal view of democracy, of
citizenship and of the news tends to suppress the contradictions between
democracy and economics, between citizenship and consumership and between
information and critical deliberation. How would we use the participatory democracy model to critique and reframe our question? First we might note the degree to which neo-liberalism through its commitment
to separation fragments the question. In this view then, it comes as little surprise, that the problem of growing political apathy among young people is understood as a discrete problem concerning political scientists and civics or social studies teachers requiring discrete solutions. In fact as our original question stipulated, it is taken as a given. Where apathy comes from and how it grows is of less concern than trying to find a specific prescription that can treat the specific problem. And the prescription of choice will tend to focus on the individual. Teach more facts about government, about the constitution, about one's individual responsibilities as a citizen, and teach more about the individual manners and duties of citizenship such as civility and voting. Perhaps even practice or rehearse these manners and duties in the classroom. The problem of news for kids and citizenship, begins with the standard assumptions of the press within liberal theory: To inform, to provide news about current events and where possible to make it a somewhat more hip version of adult commercial news. In fact, adult commercial network news is taken, without discussion or debate, as the ideal standard of news. The format, the funding structure, the emphasis on breaking news and visual news, often with little historical or social context, are all borrowed. The contribution that video news for kids can make to the problem of apathy is simply getting news to kids at an earlier age to help them develop the news habit. Channel One news is mostly a good thing, or at least a benign event, since it brings video news into the classroom—and video news is increasingly the information source of choice for adults—and even if it brings this news into the classroom along with television ads, this is no different than the structure of adult commercial news. In the liberal view, as long as the commercials don’t influence news content (that is, the firewall between the democratic mission of news and its commercial interests are kept separate), this news helps the cause of education and democracy. And if one is squeamish about bringing television ads into the classroom, there is always the commercial-free alternative of CNN Newsroom. Commercial-free is understood (and obsessively promoted by Cable in the Classroom) as implying that the commercial and libertarian values of programming produced to make a profit (either directly in cable subscription fees or indirectly through the sale of advertisements) can simply be removed by removing the advertisements of making the programming available to educators for “free.” The problems of education itself, whether in terms of its funding crisis, teacher training, student achievement, etc. are all seen as problems and issues distinct from the issues of political apathy and citizenship. They are also assumed to be problems that should be addressed largely from a libertarian perspective on democracy. That is, emphasis is placed on market-based solutions like privatization, vouchers, and increased use of educational technology, and narrowly defined forms of student achievement such as technical knowledge and vocational training. To raise the problem of the commercialization of schools with advocates of the libertarian model of democracy [who may not even realize they are advocates of a particular model of democracy] one is likely to draw only puzzled expressions. What problem? Given the libertarian assumption that business can do the work of government better than government, the fact that Channel One and CNN Newsroom bring news into the classroom is a good thing and probably a much better alternative than what quickly leaps to mind as the only alternative in the libertarian world view—would we rather have government-sponsored news? If advertising sponsored learning materials make materials and resources available that schools otherwise couldn't afford, what’s wrong with that? Commercialism is everywhere, so why not in the schools? For that matter, advertising is the one of the key engines of our economy, so why get skittish over it being introduced into schools? Given the tendency of the libertarian world view to see society in categories and pieces, the problem of commercialism in the schools is distinct from the problem of school funding which is distinct from the problems of political apathy and citizenship. Further, for each of these distinct problems, the obvious solution is to rely on individual solutions, whether in the form of individual initiative, individual choice or individual responsibility. Historical perspective and context give way to defining problems and solutions in the narrow terms. If one is disenchanted, confused or even demoralized by this fragmented way of understanding society and one’s role in that society, libertarianism does describe one compelling force that pulls everything together: the free market. If this still leaves one feeling disenchanted and perhaps even more demoralized, compassionate conservatism adds one more compelling force to neo-liberalism to turn to in one’s bewilderment, “God.” In neo-liberalism’s turn to compassionate conservatism, we can see a kind of accommodation to the rising tide of radical communitarianism, a kind of celebration of both the free-market and a kind of religious tribalism at the same time. This turn was well represented in what some news commentators called the “holy war” that emerged in early 2000 between then Republican Party presidential candidates John McCain and George W. Bush, with McCain accusing Bush of pandering to Christian Conservatives. (41) How would we, using the ideals of participatory democracy, reconsider the question of political apathy, news for kids, education and citizenship? First, we would place the question into a historical context foregrounding the issues of critical/participatory citizenship, public space and civil society. In these terms, a number of observations come quickly to light. Public
education and media (including news media) can both be viewed as critical
dimensions of public space and civil society. And both are under siege. Bringing education into the picture, we can see the same pattern of attack and cutbacks in federal funding throughout the 1980's. At the same time turning to news, what we see is a profound change in commercial network policy toward news beginning in the late 1970s and intensifying throughout the 1980s. Up until the late 1970s news was seen by the commercial networks as primarily a public service obligation of the corporation, perennially losing money, but establishing public service credibility and prestige. By the early 1980s, the networks had come to see the news as another potential profit center, especially given that news or news-like shows could be produced for relatively low costs and drew substantial audiences. From a participatory democracy perspective, what becomes visible is that a massive assault was launched on public space and civil society in news, education, and the media during the 1980s under the banner of Reaganism and neo-liberalism. And this assault was driven by and lead to, in part, a significant ideological transformation of the idea of democracy in relationship to the market. What also can be noted, is that during the 1960s few people were talking about the political apathy of youth. However, by the early 1970s, a significant number of corporate leaders had formed the Trilateral Commission to begin talking about the excesses of democracy. (42) It wasn't until nearly a decade into the Reagan-Bush political era that widespread popular outcries about political apathy among youth were heard. Even from this extremely rough historical sketch, the strong democracy perspective leads us to view our original question in very different terms. A participatory democracy perspective on citizenship and education makes clear that l989, the year when Channel One was launched in the schools, was also a time of growing fiscal crisis for public education, anxiety about the availability of new technologies to schools in the “information age,” continuing cuts in state and federal funding for public broadcasting and the time of the first major reports on the civic disengagement of youth. Within this historical context, Channel One did not enter the schools first and foremost as a civic-minded effort committed to the regeneration of civic life, but as a neo-liberal marketing effort preying on growing weaknesses in the public sector. While there was a substantial debate around Channel One when it first appeared, this debate subsided as other educational crises surfaced and as the fiscal crisis and information hysteria that created the opening for Channel One not only did not recede, but deepened. (43) Nineteen eighty-nine was also the year in which the Cable in the Classroom initiative was launched by the cable industry to offer free cable access and commercial-free cable programming to schools. CNN Newsroom was developed and offered under this program. In an interesting liberal turn of libertarian thinking, one can see both a recognition that there might be something valuable to offer children by excluding commercials, but at the same time failing to consider that if the programming were initially developed for commercial purposes, or to explicitly carry commercial messages, that the logic of this motive might be imprinted on the programming itself. Further, in considering that the Cable in the Classroom initiative is more than just civic generousity, it must also be taken into account that it serves as a critical dimension of marketing through the creation of brand awareness and positive brand associations. Further still, it needs to be considered that the Cable in the Classroom initiative grew out of, in part, strategic efforts on the part of the cable industry to ensure that there was no regulatory backlash to the 1984 Cable Act that largely expanded the scope of private enterprise in the field of cable. These dimensions of Cable in the Classroom seemed to be lost on many early critics of Channel One, who regularly pointed to CNN Newsroom as the commercial-free alternative. Participatory democracy, in taking up the question of news in the classroom and citizenship, then, begins a historical contextualization of the terms of news, citizenship and education by themselves and in relationship to one another, foregrounding the tensions and contradictions that emerge in treating democracy and the market as synonymous and in assuming that the starting point for both democracy and the market begins with radically separate individuals committed to maximizing their own private interests. The story of citizenship told by news in the classroom cannot be understood without attending to the historical context of the telling. |