or,
How The Press - With One Tiny Little Innovation - Could Help Make The World
Safe For The More Adult Political Conversations We Need
42 million uninsured, and no serious effort to address the problem for a decade... millions
of America's neediest children systematically warehoused with our worst teachers,
while both parties pretend to take action... 15 million people living in poverty
despite living in homes headed by full-time workers, yet our "living wage" debate
is a sham... shouldn't the press be reminding us that we're not serious about these
problems -- and that we might do better?
It's The Stenography, Not The Ideology
How do our most influential media outlets contribute to the unseriousness of
public debate today? By faithfully reflecting and choosing not to challenge
the boundaries of debate set by the two major parties.
Many people would say this is exactly what the press
should be doing, especially in its news pages as opposed to its editorial pages.
But when it comes to public problem-solving, this means the usual carping about
the media misses the point. Conservatives say the mainstream media is liberal,
and they're right. But that's not what's interesting. The interesting question
is this: If the media is so liberal, why has America's political center of
gravity shifted so dramatically to the right in the last two decades? The answer
is thatthe news coverage of influential national media outlets is shaped
more by stenography than by ideology.
Some journalists will object to the word "stenography," but I mean it to be
descriptive, not critical. "News" is largely defined as what public officials
say and do. The poles of debate on major issues are thus set by the mainstream
Republican position (today set by the Bush administration) and the mainstream
Democratic position. The national press faithfully reflects these two poles,
and the 50-yard line in American politics is between them.
To illustrate, look
at what's happened in the last decade or so. Before 1994 "the left" was more
to the left, with Democrats talking about such things as universal health coverage,
and with the right opposed. After the Clinton heath fiasco and the Republican
ascent in Congress, the left moved rightward out of political timidity and fear.
The right, emboldened, moved further to the right - aggressively calling for
bigger cuts in marginal tax rates, the elimination of the estate tax, et cetera.
And so as the official poles of debate shifted, so did the political center
of gravity, even though all these events were filtered by the "liberal" media.
While stenography as a news value
may seem preferable to a situation in which top national news outlets pursue
their own untethered agendas, it also brings a clear downside: in times when
neither party is serious about addressing major problems, stenography assures
that public debate remains impoverished. Stenography gave us a 1988 presidential
campaign, for example, without a peep about the burgeoning savings-and-loan
crisis. Since both parties were knee deep in blame, neither wanted to discuss
it. Without candidates bringing it up, the national media didn't pursue the
story either. Yet George H.W. Bush (to his credit) made it his first priority
upon taking office - and so the biggest financial meltdown in U.S. history hit
the front pages and national consciousness like a bolt from the blue. Stenography
explains why Ross Perot had to show up with his charts to get any meaningful
discussion of the budget deficit in the 1992 campaign. In 1996, thanks to the
quixotic candidacy of the magazine heir Steve Forbes, stenography subjected
us to more than anyone should have had to hear about the "flat tax." In 2000,
when no candidates or sitting officials ran with it, stenography meant that
former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman couldn't get much play for their
prescient commission report that stressed how vulnerable the country was to
major terrorist attacks.
To be sure, smaller print outlets - from The Nation
and The American Prospect on the left to The Weekly Standard and
National Review on the right - challenge the official debate every week,
as do online "bloggers" of all stripes. The rise of conservative voices on
talk radio and cable television has also had some impact on the tilt and tenor
of public life. But these outlets have very little influence on what is considered
to be "news" compared to the judgements made by the editors and producers of
The New York Times, The Washington Post and the major television
networks -- and these top outlets do not generally feel it is their proper role
to challenge the official boundaries of discussion. The famously "adversarial"
nature of the press is manifest mostly in the pursuit of scandal or wrongdoing,
not in questioning the major parties' definition of the nation's chief challenges
and their potential solutions.
Is there a way to change this dynamic, so that the press can help create a
society more attuned to our biggest challenges? And can such efforts be squared
with traditional values that govern the responsible exercise of the press's
power?
Introducing: "Still True Today"
In The Two Percent Solution, I develop a page one innovation that seems
to meet both these standards, and shop it with the top editors of the most influential
political outlets in the nation - The Washington Post and The New
York Times (you can read the account of these conversations in chapter 13).
The front page of these two newspapers plays a unique role in our political
culture. They set the agenda for the rest of the nation's print and electronic
media, and put subjects instantly on the lips of every opinion leader in the
country. But, as you'll see if you read the chapter, these editors are uneasy
with their power; they describe themselves as accidental or reluctant agenda-setters,
wielding power over the terms of debate as a by-product of simply "covering
the news." Yet they also feel, as Washington Post editor Len Downie told me,
that "we do have a responsibility to keep trying to find ways to present people
information about [major problems], whether or not the politicians take it up
in public debate."
The idea I asked these editors to consider deals with the systemic problem
they know exists: what's new isn't the same as what's important.
We obviously need our top news outlets to give us the latest, but it would
transform public life if they could also keep us focused on the big things that
matter. This is what people in the focus groups I conducted for the book
were asking for - the part of them that wanted to be good citizens and knew
how central information from the press was to this desire.
I knew the feeling as a news consumer myself. In my business life and then
while serving in the White House, I often felt like screaming, "Why wasn't the
press doing more on x or y?" After I'd been a working journalist for a time,
however, I came to see that as a practical matter, this wasn't a reasonableexpectation on issues where public officials weren't saying or doing anything- that is, when there wasn't "news." Every good outlet could point to the
long feature they'd done last spring on the uninsured, or the two-part series
on the working poor the year before. But if nothing else was happening - no
candidate calling for action, no governor trying something new, no million man
march on the Mall - you couldn't expect them to do a fresh three-part series
on page one every few months. To be sure, the top editors at the Times
and Post told me they should be doing more on big issues that were being
ignored - but they also admitted that "triage" is a fact of newspaper life,
and when there's not "news" on something, it is easily overlooked.
Still, I'd always thought, wasn't there some way that
the most important daily bulletin boards in our public life - page one of the
Post and the Times -- could institutionalize regular attention
for things that are important even though there's not "news" on them? Some
device that would be consistent with these editors' sense that they should not
be directing an agenda, but which would nonetheless perform a public service
by mitigating the gap left when officials prefer not to address important issues.
My answer is to introduce a feature called "Still True Today." (Click for mockup.)
This would be a small but visible line or two across the bottom of
the front page; a kind of tickertape, nothing that would interfere with 98 percent
of the usual front page, where the big news of the day would always appear.
But, in addition, in this small daily feature, these papers would highlight
facts that were, well, still true today. My own list would include things like
"42 million Americans uninsured - 80% in family with full time worker,"
"2 million teachers need to be recruited in the next decade, while average teacher
salary is $40,000," and so on. You might go with a different subject each day
-- say, health on Monday, education on Tuesday, the working poor on Wednesdays
-- but repeat the same facts each time. Obviously there are countless permutations.
The exercise would require our top papers to put forward what they think
are the most important things citizens need to remain aware of even as the news
changes each day. It might help set the agenda for the papers' in-depth
reporting projects. The art department could make sure this recurring feature
was fun and lively. Who knows? If the Times or the Post started
such a feature, the ripple effect might be huge. After all, the Times
invented the op-ed page 30 years ago; today it's a national staple.
Imagine.
Imagine what might happen were this feature adopted and you'll
see why I'm convinced it's so powerful. Say the Post and Times
started running Still True Today or its equivalent at the bottom of page one
every day, with facts about the uninsured, poor schools, and more. Conservative
outlets, like The New York Post and The Washington Times, would
instantly note it and slam the effort in their pages. Rush Limbaugh and other
right-wing radio hosts would attack it as proof of the media's liberal "bias."
The Post and Times would reply that they had merely decided to
keep readers regularly informed about some basic facts on our biggest problems
- and would these critics please explain why repetition of the fact that,
say, 42 million Americans are uninsured bothers them? Or do they not agree
it is a problem? The cable news networks, ever hungry to fill their 24-hour
appetite for material, would find the controversy and the new practice wonderful
grist, and before you know it the political culture would be filled with two
debates. The first would be over the "legitimacy" of what the Post and
Times were doing. The second debate would be about what are, in fact,
the nation's biggest problems.
The Washington Times, New York Post, and like-minded
papers around the country might start running their own similar features, but
stressing facts on marginal tax rates, government spending increases, or the
number of annual abortions, much in the way The Wall Street Journal's
conservative editorial page does today. The Journal's editorial page
itself would slam the innovation as being highly revelatory about "the liberal
mind." But when the dust settled from this initial wave of controversy, the
notion that our top news outlets would regularly and prominently hammer home
facts about the big problems they saw would take hold - especially if reader
surveys showed the feature to be popular. Network news divisions and outlets
like NPR would then find it easy to do something similar on their broadcasts.
Once the morning shows and evening newscasts started billboarding (say, in a
brief Still True Today graphic while cutting to a commercial break) how many
full time workers live in poverty and how many poor children are taught by people
who don't know the subjects they're teaching, these facts would become topics
for kitchen table conversation. Before long they would become emblazoned on
public consciousness. And once public attention to these facts becomes routine,
the battle is half won. As I explain in the book, I was stunned when my
pollsters told me as we prepared the poll on the Two Percent Agenda that using
the fact "40 million" uninsured was verboten in a survey question, because people
will want to do something. In polling, when people know the dimensions
of a problem, it produces unacceptable bias; in real life, it inspires good
citizenship. And note that this is good citizenship promoted without any "spin."
Just the repetition of important facts.
I'm convinced that if the Times or Post adopted such a feature,
it would shoot through our political culture and quickly transform public debate
in ways that no other tiny innovation could. It's worth remembering that the
alternative to our top press outlets devoting, say, two percent of the front
page to an idea like this is to allow America's political agenda to be defined
almost solely by those aiming to win elections. As we've seen, this is usually
a very different exercise from trying to solve public problems.
* * *
A feature like "Still True Today," plus user-friendly injections by the press
of the basic public finance literacy covered throughout The Two Percent Solution,
can begin to make America safe for the more adult political conversations a
Two Percent Society requires. Nurturing this climate should be one of the press's
overriding goals. After all, suppose we reach the year 2015 or 2020 and have
60 million uninsured, the worst teachers still serving the neediest children,
and growing ranks of full-time workers in poverty? If we don't address these
problems, it stands to reason that every institution that has power in our society
should feel complicit in the failure. Any definition of "powerful institutions"
has to include our most influential media. And those with power have a responsibility
to help shape public discourse in ways that give serious problem-solving a fighting
chance.
Well, Don't Just Sit There!
If you like this idea, help make
it happen. Tell the editors at the New York Times and Washington Post you want
to see a feature like Still True Today. While you're at it, tell CNN, NPR,
and other outlets. Tell the editors at your local paper to do something like
this locally. You can sign up to stay connected as our growing community pursues
this and related agendas.
Also --
your ideas for things
that should be featured as Still True Today - I'll try to post some of the best
as this site rotates through the list of morally unacceptable facts that are
Still True Today......
Coming soon..
What You're Upset Is "Still True
Today"..
A changing list of morally unacceptable
facts sent in by readers
