Remember these comments?
“… the first question in presidential debate history to not come from a moderator …”
“The YouTube debates could fundamentally change the dynamics of politics in America …”
The hoopla surrounding CNN’s YouTube debate left me wondering what my former colleague, Chris Satullo, was thinking back in Philadelphia. Satullo, who is stepping down as editorial page editor of the Inquirer after seven years to become a columnist and the paper’s director of civic engagement, has been working since 1996 to give voice to that region’s voters.
This year he’s at it again.
His most recent project, “Great Expectations,” is the latest collaboration between the Inquirer and the University of Pennsylvania’s Project on Civic Engagement. Over the years, the partnership has brought people together during campaigns for president, mayor, U.S. senator and members of Congress. This time the occasion is an important mayoral election year in Philadelphia.
Great Expectations is a year-long, region-wide dialogue among leaders and ordinary citizens about Philadelphia’s aspirations and what it will take to realize them. It will culminate in January 2008 when participants in the project present the new mayor and city council with an agenda for the city’s future and seek their responses and commitments.
How’s that for an ambitious agenda?
At the heart of “Great Expectations” and the other Citizens Voices projects is Satullo’s belief that ordinary citizens — not just political professionals and other “experts” — need to be at the center of a newsroom’s election year coverage. He’s not the first to suggest that; in fact, Satullo references Davis “Buzz” Merritt, former editor of The Wichita Eagle, when he explains his approach to election coverage.
“Buzz used to say two things happen in every election year,” Satullo said. “The first is a campaign, an effort by candidates to get voters to support them. Newspapers are good at covering campaigns.
“The second thing that happens is the election — and that’s something voters do. They decide what matters to them, what kind of community or what kind of nation they want, and then they sort out how the things candidates are saying compare with their sense of what matters. Then, with their hearts as much as their minds, they make their decisions. That’s the election.
“We’re not so good at covering elections.”
To cover elections well, Satullo believes, reporters need to watch and listen as citizens go through that internal process, that “deliberation.”
- Expressing the issues that matter most to them, in their words
- Discovering what more they need to know about the issue
- Coming up with questions for experts and the candidates for learning what they need to know
- Applying that knowledge to their decision: How to vote
Had reporters watched and listened to that process in 2004, Satullo suggests, they would have known about the power of the “values” vote long before the exit polls.
So where do reporters go to watch voters deliberate?
The Inquirer-Penn projects are built around public forums, moderated conversations held throughout the campaign at locations around Philadelphia. Satullo says experience showed that the conversations are most productive when moderated; otherwise, they risk being unfocused and unproductive.
Some forums are for civic leaders, some are for ordinary citizens. Some bring the two groups together. One goal of the forums is to help the groups frame the issues they care about the most in ways that can lead to success.
In American politics, Satullo suggests, problems often get named and issues framed in limited, distorting ways. Two of the common errors are defining a problem in terms of one preferred solution to the exclusion of all others. Consider these examples: “The problem with public schools is they need more money,” or, in terms of blame, “The problem is lazy kids” or “greedy teachers” or “that damn No Child Left Behind Law.”
“Naming and talking about problems that way has the effect of excluding new or different ideas,” Satullo said, “as well as stakeholders who clearly need to part of any good solution.
“Political candidates and their consultants usually have no self-interest in defining problems more clearly; they just try to exploit whatever limited, off-base frame gets put on an issue. Think of the current immigration debate.”
So why, he asked, should journalists settle for the list of issues, and the framing of those issues, presented to them by candidates? Why not find out how ordinary citizens see the issues, help them put those desires and ideas into a more useful framework, then report on the issues using that framework?
“Our process tries to get people to imagine what success looks like, and then to define the problem in terms of the distance to success. For example, with education, in one project we did, the group came up with this broader, more creative definition: ‘The problem in schools is that we don’t graduate enough students who are ready for work, college and citizenship.’ “
After listening to those citizens discuss the city’s public schools, the paper was able to tell candidates in a mayoral election to stop harping on one question — whether the mayor should have more power to appoint the school board:
“We could say, with some authority, that issue ranks about 187th out of voters’ 187 concerns about the schools. Instead, tell us what you’re going to about the lack of new textbooks, the crack vials in the playground, the way school personnel treat the public.”
Talk with each other. Listen to each other. Discover the gaps in our understanding of each other and the issues. Learn. Make better decisions.
It seems logical, and according to Satullo, it’s a process that can produce a number of valuable outcomes:
- The public learns. Participants in the forums — both leaders and ordinary citizens — discover that their understanding of an issue and the other group’s perspective are not always complete. Each side — grassroots and elite — learns that understanding the other perspective helps them close that knowledge gap.
- The public can express itself — without reporters. Forums almost always attract people who, with guidance and editing, can express their positions on issues in print. At a time of diminishing newsroom resources, Satullo points out, this is huge. Instead of devoting a reporter’s time to getting voters’ voices in the paper, let the voters get their own voices into print. And devote the reporters’ time to explaining complicated issues or policy proposals in depth — something the public cannot do as well.
- Coverage improves. Journalists observing the public in deliberation can learn what really matters to the people they serve. They hear voices they might not hear in the course of traditional campaign coverage. They hear questions they would not think to ask — because the public sees issues, according to Satullo, through a “values lens.”
Satullo recalled one particular forum where the values lens played a key role.
“We were discussing family-related issues like abortion, adoption, gay marriage. And this person looks across the room and says to another participant, ‘I haven’t agreed with a single thing you’ve said all night. But I like you. You’re logical and reasonable. And what I’ve finally realized is that the reason we don’t agree is that we have a different definition of family.’
“And so,” Satullo said, “the group decided that was a question they needed to ask the candidates:
‘What’s your definition of family?’
“That’s a question,” he said, “I don’t think you’d generally hear a journalist ask.”
Which is not to say that the type of questions that journalists tend to ask are not important and useful, too. Satullo stressed that a public dialogue process is not meant to supplant the journalist, but to help them do better the jobs only they can do. In fact, he argues to involve more reporters in election coverage.
“Many of our newsrooms have their political writers do the issue stories,” he said. “Why shouldn’t the education writer do the issue story on education? The transportation writer do the issue story about mass transit? These are the experts in the newsroom, but we often don’t involve them.”
Two other lessons that Satullo has learned from his years of involving and covering the public:
- Citizens have enormous trouble disabusing themselves of the notion that if you just ask the right question, in just the right way, politicians will have to tell the truth. No matter how good the question, politicians don’t throw up a white flag. (Satullo says Jon Stewart suffers from the same delusion.)
- Citizens often have an inaccurate notion of what’s going on, and journalists often respond by saying the public is stupid. “We’ve written six stories about that issue,” they say. “Why can’t they understand?” Perhaps, Satullo suggests, the journalists need to find a more effective way to tell the story; one that allows the citizen to view the issue their own lens — the value lens.
It has taken resources to underwrite “Great Expectations,” which is funded by a major grant from the Lenfest Foundation, and support from the Inquirer, Penn and the Knight Foundation. Satullo warns that accepting outside funding, particularly from foundations with local interests, needs to be weighed carefully. But he says money, or the lack of it, should not keep a newsroom from including the public in its coverage plans.
“Pick your own way to engage the citizens,” Satullo said. “We happen to like forums. But the underlying point is to cover the election — and not just the campaign.”
