THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505210046
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK
SOURCE: Cole C. Campbell, Editor
LENGTH: Long : 110 lines
Over the years, the battle over Lake Gaston became an epic struggle between Virginia Beach and North Carolina.
Now that the two agree that Virginia Beach can tap the lake, a new fight has erupted between the Beach and Norfolk over how surplus drinking water, treated by Norfolk, will be sold.
In today's paper, staff writer Karen Weintraub skillfully analyzes the political landscape behind ``three weeks of backbiting, name-calling, partisan politicking and horse-trading.''
We often frame stories like this in terms of conflict - between communities, between bureaucracies, between political leaders. On Monday, editors and reporters at The Virginian-Pilot will discuss whether other frames can help citizens respond to this latest round in the Lake Gaston fight.
What fundamental values beyond regional political supremacy are in contention? Whose voices are being left out of this round of conversation? How can ordinary citizens be heard?
This discussion will be another step in thinking about how the newspaper can help make public life go well. We believe newspapers are essential to democracy, and democracy is essential to newspapers. There are some signs that both are in trouble, and we think you have a stake in any efforts to revitalize them.
This troubles the guardians of traditional journalism.
In today's New York Times Sunday Magazine, columnist Max Frankel reflects on how various newspapers across the country - including The Virginian-Pilot - are trying to better connect with readers in covering public affairs.
The good news: He spelled our name right.
But Frankel misses the central distinction between traditional journalism and the emerging variety: Traditional journalism is focused on power players, while the newer journalism is focused on citizens.
Frankel's orientation is as plain as the anecdote he uses to open his column.
He tells how one elite - Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger, the daughter, wife and mother of newspaper executives - prevailed upon another elite - the editors and reporters of the nation's most prestigious newspaper - to shame a third elite - college deans - into requiring students to take more American history courses.
This won the approval of a fourth elite, the publishers and editors who award Pulitzer Prizes.
However Frankel intends this anecdote, it is a concise model of the elite-to-elite ideology of much traditional journalism. Power players use the news media to send each other signals about what deserves attention. The news media enhance their status by goading power players into taking action - or at least talking about it.
The elite-to-elite model has produced much fine journalism and many public improvements. It is a necessary, but not sufficient, way for newspapers to do business. But the model has two distinct limitations.
Regular folks increasingly feel left out of any meaningful role in shaping the public agenda - other than serving as raw material for pollsters who advise the elites.
These people lose interest in news, in large part because of ``a growing sense of alienation from the political system, and the belief that the major media are an integral part of that system,'' as Howard Kurtz reported Monday in The Washington Post.
The public doesn't increase its capacity to deal with complex problems. This spring, the Columbia Journalism Review examined dozens of Pulitzer-winning investigations to determine if they prompted lasting change. The article concluded that corrective steps were most likely to follow stories describing obvious threats with clear remedies - such as immediate environmental poisoning.
Corrective steps were much less likely to follow stories documenting social problems or regulatory gaps, because the public lacks the capacity to focus on meaningful solutions.
``Of all the possible press targets,'' contributing editor Bruce Porter reports, ``probably the most resistant to change by journalism is any law that serves the interests of powerful professional and business associations, such as the medical and legal fraternities and the insurance and banking industries.''
The new, emerging approach to journalism begins with the premise that citizens have a place at the table alongside college deans, prominent families, lobbyists, campaign contributors and officials.
It holds that a newspaper should not just raise consciousness about problems - with intensive coverage that fades over time, producing solutions only if elites respond. In addition to consciousness-raising, this view contends, newspapers should encourage ongoing deliberation so that citizens can work through problems and resolve them.
At The Virginian-Pilot, we're still experimenting with how to do this effectively. We are learning to reframe stories to focus less on good guys-versus-bad guys and more on the underlying values-versus-values debates. We are encouraging people to talk to each other, and to us, about such matters as Sen. John Warner's stand on Oliver North and Robert McNamara's re-examination of his Vietnam policies.
We are listening to citizens deepen their understanding of issues as they talk to each other, rather than just capturing top-of-the-head blurtations of opinion.
Max Frankel doesn't know this because he never interviewed anyone at the Pilot nor, as far as we know, looked at any of our coverage.
He is right to worry about newspapers that might pick the wrong issues to cover or form unhealthy alliances with outsiders or ignore competing points of view. But these are evils that can befall traditional journalism as well, as Frankel seems to acknowledge when he returns to his opening anecdote.
``And what if college deans thought mathematics even more neglected than history? The more energetic a newspaper's initial agitation, the more difficult and incredible would be its retreat to trustworthy observation. . .
We couldn't agree more. by CNB