Theoretical Foundations
Community and Media: Seeing a Civic Landscape
By Ed Arnone
Aug 17, 2002, 3:34am

What would happen in a town if a news organization and a large number of citizens shared a similar sense of democracy? What would happen if they shared the view that for a democratic community to work well, it takes an active, engaged citizenry that deliberates about important issues? What if the news outfit could do its part by helping frame the issue in public terms instead of expert and partisan terms? What if news media worked with citizens to create space for that deliberation to happen and reported the news based on this new understanding of how citizens see the issue?
How would it change the landscape? How would it change the ability of the community to tackle its own problems?
Those questions have been at the center of the Kettering Foundation’s work on Media and Democracy for the past five years. We’ve been learning a few things along the way by studying what some journalists and some citizens have been doing around the country when they work together on common problems and goals.
For instance, we have seen people in some towns learn that under the right conditions, newspapers or broadcast news operations can work with groups of citizens on issues without anyone violating their professional ethics and practices. We have seen them make their way past obstacles of tenuous trust, loss of control, “ownership” of an issue, fears of favoritism, worries that they were compromising their ability to act independently and other stumbling blocks. We’ve seen them reach the point of believing it would be risky to frame important issues and take them to public discussion without making every effort to do it in a public way. From Norfolk to Dayton, to Rapid City to Los Angeles, we’ve seen groups work out new, realistic definitions of “partnership” that allow a fuller relationship between newsfolk and citizens in their communities.
At the same time, citizens have learned to have realistic expectations of the journalists who must insist on the ability to report fully, and sometimes critically, on any group in town.
Much of the mutual learning has come during series of workshops under the label of “Community Media,” where teams from around the country have come together to talk about their work at home. Their experiments and inventiveness have produced innovative ways of approaching public affairs reporting, community listening, outlining issues for public discussion and deliberation, engaging citizens in the life of their communities, interviewing officeholders and candidates for public office, and understanding citizens’ views.
In the next phase of this work, teams from a half-dozen cities will be confronting a crucial problem that loomed large in the earlier series of workshops–––one that participants said must be addressed if the work is to have real meaning and practical use. All of us must develop a better way of gauging progress when an entire community makes a concerted effort on an issue. We must have fuller answers to the overarching question: What difference did it make?
So, over the next two years, we’ll be studying what happens in places like Cincinnati, where there is an ambitious, important effort under way to convene citizen forums in the city and four adjoining counties to talk about racial tensions. News media, including the Cincinnati Enquirer, are part of a coalition called “Neighbor-to-Neighbor,” that also includes moderators. In Salem, Oregon, the effects of recent waves of immigration have prompted the Statesman-Journal newspaper to join with the Pacific Northwest Public Policy Institute and NIF convenors there to frame the issue and report on the actions that follow. Teams from four other cities will be taking on issues that are equally tough.
During that time, they’ll be figuring out better ways of “taking a snapshot” or “drawing a map” of how their community is currently working on the public problem, how those people and organizations connect to each other (and how they don’t) and how much work is taking place. They will be looking at the usual indicators but they’ll also be trying to devise an improved and additional list of questions that give a better picture of the social fabric of their town and whether it is tightly woven on that issue.
Each team will devise its own plan for engaging citizens in the work and making the effort a form of “public work.” Each will decide who, in its community, should be invited to participate in the various stages of mapping the issue, framing it for public deliberation, and following the public actions that emerge. Each will decide the roles that the various partners will play. And each will decide how it will report on results of that two-year effort.
We’re hoping that the mutual learning that takes place and the publishing of their reports will represent a real leap forward in understanding the ripples and reverberations that come from a deliberative public doing the work of democracy.
In this way, the Community and Media research gives us another window into research questions that are also being closely studied in each of the Kettering Foundation’s other program areas, especially Community Politics; Citizens and Public Choice; the International and the Civil; as well as all the related research on professions and the public. It takes us beyond the hypothesis of learning how real people in real communities deliberate about their problems and act on them; how they connect those action to others in the town who weren’t directly part of the forums; how their efforts can inform the decisions and change the actions of everyone working on a complicated problem such as racism and how they can do a better job of evaluating the progress they’ve made.

Ed Arnone is the director of communications for the Kettering Foundation.

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