Category Archives: press criticism

how to reach a large scale with high-quality messages

(Washington, DC) This post–cross-posted on the Democracy Fund blog—is the third in a series about CIRCLE’s evaluations of the Fund’s initiatives to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from our specific evaluations. The previous entries in the series are: “Educating Voters in a Time of Political Polarization” and “Supporting a Beleaguered News Industry.” Join CIRCLE for discussion of the posts using the hashtag #ChangeTheDialogue, as well as a live chat on Tuesday, June 25th at 2pm ET/1pm CT/11am PT.

Since 2012, the Democracy Fund has invested in projects and experiments intended to inform and engage voters. Several of these efforts sought to change the way citizens respond to divisive and deceptive rhetoric. To succeed, an organization would have to (1) create an experience that altered people’s skills, attitudes, and/or habits, and (2) reach a mass audience.

In this post we focus on the second issue: scale. Since adults cannot be compelled to undergo civic education, and about 241 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2012, engaging citizens in sufficient numbers to improve a national election is challenging. Democracy Fund grantees used at least four different strategies to reach mass audiences with nonpartisan education.

First, the Healthy Democracy Fund’s Citizens Initiative Reviews convened representative groups of citizens to deliberate about pending state ballot initiatives in Oregon. The citizens’ panels wrote summaries of these ballot initiatives that the state then mailed to all voters as part of the Oregon voter guide. Although only 48 people were directly involved in the deliberations, the results of their discussions reached hundreds of thousands of Oregon voters. Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the statements that these deliberators had written and that a significant portion of the voting public found the statements to be useful. In an experiment that Gastil conducted, citizens who read the statements shifted their views substantially and showed evidence of learning. So, in this case, a small-scale exercise in deliberative democracy led to mass public education.

Second, Flackcheck.org produced videos ridiculing deceptive campaign ads. The videos were free, online, and meant to be funny. A major reason to use parody and humor was to increase the odds that viewers would voluntarily share the videos with their friends and relatives. We asked a representative sample of Americans what would generally encourage them to share a political video, and 39% said that they would be more likely to share it if it was funny. The only attribute that attracted more support was the importance of the topic. We also asked respondents to watch one of three Flackcheck parody videos, and 37% thought the one they saw was funny, although 20% did not.

In the end, the Flackcheck parody videos attracted some 800,000 views. That is a relatively large number, although a small proportion of the electorate. On a subcontract from CIRCLE, Marc Smith is analyzing the dissemination network created by the sharing of Flackcheck videos online. Below are shown the people and organizations that follow Flackcheck’s Twitter account and their mutual connections. It is a substantial online community.

Third, AmericaSpeaks recruited individuals to deliberate online as part of Face the Facts USA. AmericaSpeaks is best known for large, face-to-face deliberative events called 21st Century Town meetings. Although they convene thousands of people, often in conference centers, their scale is small compared to the national population. The Face the Facts project provided an opportunity for AmericaSpeaks to recruit participants to low-cost and scalable Google Hangout discussions. That is a model that could be replicated as an alternative or a complement to more expensive, face-to-face discussions.

Finally, several projects involved influencing professional journalists or media outlets as an indirect means of educating the public. These projects took advantage of the fact that millions of Americans still receive information and commentary from news media sources. The Democracy Fund grantees strove to improve the quality of their coverage and thereby reach a substantial portion of the voting public.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Swing States Project” attempted to improve the quality of local media coverage by commissioning local media critics to critique the coverage . We interviewed political journalists in the targeted states. Among respondents who were aware of the project, 59% responded that it had influenced them. Thirty-six percent indicated that it had a moderate influence or influenced them “very much.” Although we cannot estimate how this influence on journalists affected voters’ understanding of the issues, the findings suggest that a fair number of journalists whose work is being read and watched by voters in swing states were taking steps to improve their coverage.

The Center for Public Integrity’s “Consider the Source” provided in-depth reporting on campaign finance issues that newspapers, broadcasters, and other news sources could use. CIRCLE interviewed 13 prominent experts who report on money and politics. Nearly half of these interviewees felt that CPI resources had influenced the conversation among media professionals, and that consequently the media now offers more comprehensive stories about money in politics. Although only 200,000 people read the CPI stories at the CPI website, the organization’s media tracking service estimated that the stories reached a potential circulation of 48 million people through pick up by other media organizations.

Although CIRCLE’s evaluations did not yield recipes for changing mass behavior, the following conclusions are consistent with our findings:

Distributing recommendations from a credible public deliberation can have significant influence on the public, if the deliberation is reflected in an official vehicle, such as a state voter guide.
“Providing resources to the media can be an effective means of reaching scale, if the source is viewed as fair and providing them with relevant and valued content
It’s hard to get to scale by trying to become a destination site.

supporting a beleaguered news industry

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This is the second in a series of blog posts about CIRCLE’s evaluations of initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. It is cross-posted from the Democracy Fund blog.

Two Democracy Fund grantees–the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) and the Columbia Journalism Review–worked to support reporters and editors in order to improve their election coverage and better inform the public on key issues of national concern. We evaluated these initiatives by interviewing some of the potentially affected journalists, 97 in all.

One theme that emerged very clearly was the challenging situation that confronts the news industry. This context has been well documented in other research. For example, according to a study of the changing news environment in Baltimore, conducted by the Pew Research Center, the number of news outlets in the city has proliferated to 53 “radio talk shows, . . . blogs, specialized new outlets, new media sites, TV stations, radio news programs, newspapers and their various legacy media websites.” But the number of reporters has fallen. That means there is more written and spoken about the news than ever, but it is highly repetitive. A search of six major news topics found that 83 percent of the articles and blog posts repeated the same material—sometimes with commentary—and more than half the original text came from paid print media such as the Baltimore Sun.

In turn, Baltimore’s remaining professional journalists are so overstretched that they cannot provide what is called “enterprise reporting” (digging to find new information not already in the public domain). The city government and other official institutions now have more, rather than less, control over the news. The report notes, “As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.”

Our interviews found ample evidence of similar conditions. One reporter said, “the political reporting in our state has shrunk to the point where a lot of the major reporters are ones that have been doing it for decades and, quite frankly, their reporting (and lack of digging) reflects how tired they are.”

On the whole, our interviewees were very pleased to be provided with support in the form of CPI’s in-depth reporting and the Columbia Journalism Review’s coverage of their work. For example:

“Without that kind of work I don’t know how one could sort themselves through what’s happened, unless they’ve been following for the past 5 years.”
“Without Open Secrets and CPI I don’t know how a journalist who is new could figure this stuff out.”

They noted various ways in which these interventions had affected them. They mentioned learning about good practices that are used in other newspapers, getting ideas for stories, and encouraging high quality work. Commenting on the CJR’s effort, one reporter said, “It sort of serves as a watchdog to remind people to do a good job, to do a thorough job, to look for fresh angles, to dig beneath the surface, and, ah, hopefully those are things that I’m doing already.”

Local coverage emerged as an area that needs special attention and support. As a reporter told us, “One of the faults with journalism coverage and journalism criticism, in general, is that it tends to focus on the big national players and the big national issues. And as we’ve seen a number of major publications pull back on local coverage …, it’s become all the more important that we have some sort of press criticism function taking care of local media and engaging with local media. And I think that a lot of reporters working locally and regionally would benefit from that sort of attention and that sort of engagement as well.”

There were, however, a few concerns that also related to the limited capacity and fragile financial condition of the news industry. CPI’s model is to provide in-depth reporting that news sources can use in writing their own articles and broadcasts, and a few respondents were worried that CPI might become a competitor for readers. The Columbia Journalism Review wrote appreciative as well as critical articles about political news coverage, but a few respondents felt that these articles did not demonstrate adequate sensitivity to the limited capacity of local newsrooms. Although most interviewees were pleased with the CJR’s coverage, the relatively few respondents who felt it was unfair were likely to think that the CJR’s correspondent had overlooked their limited capacity to accomplish what was being suggested.

CIRCLE’s interviews suggest the following conclusions:

Because of staffing cuts and turnover in the profession, the news media struggles to cover politics. They are aware of their difficult situation and generally grateful for assistance.
Providing high-quality information and constructive criticism does change reporters’ behavior.
Professionals in the news media are understandably somewhat sensitive about being given advice unless the person offering it recognizes the practical limitations they face.
They are also concerned about being manipulated by ostensibly nonpartisan organizations that they fear may have partisan objectives. (See our previous blog post on the problem of distrust.)
Interventions designed to support the news media should not inadvertently compete with the news media by taking away readers or viewers.

how the new media ecosystem favors government

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(Chicago) Media outlets have proliferated. Once, only press barons could publish news and opinions, but today, anyone can blog or post a video. A high proportion of the new content is critical and editorially independent–in the sense that no one tells the writers what they may say. Yet the paradoxical result is that government controls the news agenda much more than it ever did.

This pattern is clearest at the local level, where new media have killed the traditional newspaper’s business model, causing newspapers to lay off their “enterprise reporters”–those who dig up original information. In Baltimore, for example, a Pew study finds that 53 major outlets now cover local news and information. But they can collectively afford almost no enterprise reporting. As a result, they all repeat the same content (albeit with diverse opinions tacked on), and the content comes disproportionately from the mayor’s office. “We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.” The news environment feels free because bloggers get to say nasty things about the mayor. But City Hall decides what they are talking about in the first place.

The same trend is now happening at the national level, although to a lesser extent because some enterprise reporters still work in DC. In Politico, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write:

[The] White House … has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

Again, the story is complicated at the national level, because reporters are still paid to dig for information in Washington. Lots of important information is available, regardless of the White House’s attitude to press conferences. Also, the two rival national parties have incentives to uncover some kinds of damaging information about each other. But VandeHei and Allen make a fair point. Far too few reporters are available to cover far too wide a range of stories.

In the longer term, a new model may develop for funding an actual watchdog press. But that won’t happen automatically, because enterprise reporting in the public interest is a classic public good–valuable to everyone in general, but not to anyone in particular. In theory, the government could subsidize the news as a public good on the model of European national broadcasters or American public broadcasting (which receives a pittance from the federal government). But publicly funded media becomes corrupt unless it is challenged by some kind of independent news: see the travails of the BBC. Thus the challenge of funding enterprise reporting remains even if the government helps. Our traditional model involved some lucky cross-subsidization: classified ads paid for journalists who covered city council meetings. That model was killed by Craigslist. I don’t believe crowd-sourcing or unpaid citizen journalism can fill the need–Baltimore illustrates what that leads to. And I don’t believe in technological fixes, because they can only cut the costs of publishing and dissemination, which are already extraordinarily low. New organizational forms are going to have to develop. I think universities have a role to play, because we have 2,000 institutions, nearly 3 percent of GDP, skills for analysis and communication, and a self-interested need to be able to share our ideas with the public.

professors and practitioners pontificate on political parody and persuasion

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I am at a University of Pennsylvania conference entitled “P6: Professors And Practitioners Pontificate on Political Parody And Persuasion.” The focus is really on parody. An example is Steven Colbert’s real creation of a PAC and a Super PAC during the 2012 election. (We heard that story very engagingly recounted by Trevor Potter, who was Colbert’s real–and also on-air–election lawyer). Survey data suggest that people who watched The Colbert Report really did learn about campaign finance issues.

Colbert behaved badly. For instance, he created a nonprofit 501(c)4 corporation that could accept donations without disclosing the donors’ names, and then he donated all that corporation’s money to his Super PAC to pay for ludicrous attack ads that really aired. The Super PAC was legally allowed to say that it had only one donor, the 501(c)4. Trevor Potter advised him to do this on air, and his legal advice was real. The advice may even have been creative, developing a new loophole that other PACs could exploit. Colbert was trying to satirize Karl Rove, who had both a Super PAC and a 501(c)4. But it seems that Rove did not actually transfer money in the way that Colbert did, perhaps because Potter had invented this loophole for Colbert. Rove’s lawyer contacted the show to complain that Colbert had implied Rove was using this loophole. In another context, such a complaint would have had the feel of a “cease and desist” letter. In the context of a comedy show, the complaint became fodder for further humor at Rove’s expense. So Colbert’s sins include: raising and laundering private money to pay for attack ads that he didn’t sincerely agree with, commissioning aggressive legal advice to create new loopholes, and turning a fact-check of his own show into an opportunity for satire.

To be clear: I think everything he did was great. It was educational and effective. Even if Potter invented a loophole or two for Colbert, they would have developed anyway, and it was excellent to demonstrate how fragile the system is. But Colbert’s work is interesting from a theoretical perspective because it promotes good deliberation by blatantly violating most of the traditional principles of deliberation. For instance, in Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson’s Democracy and Deliberation (p. 81), we’re told that good deliberators demonstrate “civic integrity,” which means “consistency in speech” (saying the same thing regardless of audience and context) and “political sincerity.” Good deliberators also display “consistency between speech and action” and “integrity of principle,” which means “the acceptance of the broader implications of the principles presupposed in one’s moral positions.” Colbert, in contrast, speaks and acts precisely contrary to his actual principles.

Perhaps deliberation should be viewed broadly. It has always included forms of discourse like satire and guerilla theater that violate the narrow norms of David Lewis’ “serious speech situations.” Or perhaps it is problematic that only Brechtian satire and gonzo journalism now cut through the clutter of mass communications–telling the truth no longer works.

the youth vote in the media

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I think the press has been doing a good job covering the youth vote. That is by no means guaranteed. In 2004, youth turnout rose, but the dominant storyline held that youth voting had declined. The narrow reason for this error was a confusion between the share of the vote and the turnout rate, which are different statistics. The bigger reason was a need to explain why Bush won. It was too complicated to say that youth voted for Kerry but were simply outnumbered in the population. Instead, reporters went straight to the assumption that youth didn’t vote.

This time, I count 95 separate news articles (since Oct. 19) that cite CIRCLE. That is by no means a complete count of youth voting articles–reporters are free to write about youth without citing us–but I receive lists of stories that name us, and that is my sample.

Before Election Day, most articles were about the likely decline of youth turnout. That was a mistaken premise but not one that I challenged directly, because I also suspected turnout would fall. I only suggested that we should be hesitant to predict turnout based on very scanty polling evidence. Not because of me, but to their credit, most reporters hedged their predictions of decline. For instance, Tony Pugh wrote a McClatchy wire service story that began:

The love affair between young voters and President Barack Obama that ignited his candidacy in 2008 and powered him to the White House seems like a distant memory in 2012.

As Election Day approaches, there’s an enthusiasm gap among young voters.

But he also quoted our friend Rob “Biko” Baker of the League of Young Voters on efforts to rekindle enthusiasm.

Since Election Night, the vast majorities of stories have been about youth as an essential part of Obama’s winning coalition, and how Republicans are in trouble if they don’t try to build a younger and more diverse constituency. As I told the Inquirer newspapers, “It is because [Mitt Romney] lost the youth vote pretty decisively in all those battleground states that he is not going to be the next president of the United States.”

I am amused by the cliche of the “new normal”:

“In 2012, communities of color, young people and women are not merely interest groups, they’re the ‘new normal’ demographic of the American electorate,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza. …

I also used the cliche, as in USA Today:

CIRCLE director Peter Levine said turnout for young voters has increased over the last three elections – averaging what he called a “new normal” of about 50 percent – and making the once not-so-reliable voting segment now an “essential political bloc.”

Two especially insightful and heavily researched pieces are by Rebecca Rosen in the Atlantic, on the effect of social media, and by Reid Cherlin in GQ on the Obama campaign’s outreach strategies.

Finally, here I am on Huffington Post live, talking about how the GOP lost the youth vote: