The end point of better journalism: How do we know when we've made democracy better?

I write this as I am banging my head against my keyboard, frustrated by the game of chicken that politicians seem to be playing with democracy, and the aiding and abetting via the national news media. More specifically: is there any surprise that the GOP would attack the judiciary while the party leader is being tried for 91 felony counts in four different states? And, is it any surprise that the New York Times company line still remains that they will cover Trump with independence rather than with moral outrage?

But this leaves me to wrestle with a question that motivates what is becoming my research guidestar: if we have concerns about democratic backsliding, what does fixing our fractured, open-to-authoritarian democracy look like? From a social science perspective, what interventions do we hope will happen to stop the slide into a country where there is no longer a shared commitment to nonviolence despite extreme disagreement? What measure, what objective, will be enough to convince us that we have reached the good/great society, assuming that there is even some baseline agreement upon which the good society even suggests?

Research starts with these big questions, but then there has to be some smaller question that can be tackled and assessed and understood in the context of practical reality. So I want to consider a few recent tech, media, and related policy goals, and then think about what the ideal outcome for democratic life looks like, assuming that we are successful somehow at achieving these ends.

These are what I see as the main interventions, but the add on question to every one of these bullets is “and what this means in a world of democratized, easily accessible generative AI”:

• Increasing the supply of journalism, generally imagined as more local news and information, almost always imagined as some professionalized version of news. This can take the form of supporting news employment or making the economic lift on news publishers a little less extreme in the digital attention economy.

• Decreasing political polarization in communities

• Regulating/taxing big tech with the aim of increasing baseline revenue streams to news outlets

• Regulating/taxing big tech with the aim of reducing misinformation

• Increasing public trust in journalism as an institution (principally mainstream/ideologically “independent” journalism)

• Getting more people to pay for news

• Building news literacy - helping people understand the information they are consuming and evaluate sources and claims.

• Mitigating political extremism, especially on the right, via “better” information

• Less important to the corporate news industry but part of a way to both increase supply, quality, and viewpoint diversity: the unionization movement in newsrooms such that journalists are paid a living wage/have some protections against the volatile hiring and firing.

So let’s take this first intervention, adding more supply of journalism to communities — what is the socially desirable outcome of increasing the supply of journalism to communities, other than just more supply - which is on its own a foggy endpoint. We need to remember that increasing the supply of content does not mean that we have increased demand; in fact, this rush to build more and more supply further fragmented the attention of digital news audiences and increased the supply of digital ad space, thus weakening the financial value that could be set against any one news article.

What are we hoping an infusion of more journalists will achieve?

Below, I outline some of the possible socially desirable goals that emerge from these supply boosts.

If there is anything we can learn from buzzy business talk, it’s that we need “SMART” goals - beyond just general aspirations: smart, measurable, actionable/attainable, relevant, and time-bound. SMART goals sound goofball gross consultant-speak to me, but respect for democratic norms is definitely not clearly codified and these norms are interpreted differently by people, who in turn may have their own rankings for which norms are most important/relevant to the current crisis at hand.

Summary version:

• more journalists and more journalism? (and how much is enough?)

• some sort of impact on political culture

• some sort of shift in political knowledge or political efficacy

• more trust in journalism

• insulation against misinformation

• sticking it back to platforms

The first empirical dilemma: How do we know when we have added enough journalists to a community? 

Do we turn to some previous pre-Great Recession high point in 2008? 2000? 2004? of staffing levels at large regional newspaper dailies?

Moreover, those journalists back in 2000 and 2004 and 2008 and now were by and large under-covering or poorly covering marginalized communities.

Communities are so different from each other, in my view, and different cities have different communities of interest, power players, and so forth. So just as there is no one solution to “save the news” there is likely no perfect, standardized way to estimate exactly how many journalists would be needed to provide comprehensive coverage that exceeds the level of coverage of a dominant metro daily newspaper pre-digital disruption.

I do think we can get closer, though, by looking at other per-capita measures of various important civil society institutions - there are benchmarks for how many police might be necessary per people in a given city, based on crime levels. We know what ideal teacher-student ratios are for school systems and classrooms more generally. We have some idea about how many hospital beds we need for a given population and population density (and, as we learned in COVID, how many ventilators). We know what broadband penetration it takes for most people in a place to have access online. We have estimates of what size prisons we need for our populations (a whole other issue!) and general sense of supply chains for food, gasoline, and beyond. Insurance companies can predict via algorithms how much they are likely to have to pay out in certain areas, charging us along the way. We know how many Chick-Fil-A restaurants the privately owned chain will allow in any one location, and roughly how Trader Joes and Target and Walmart assess how many stores a population can support.

This all gives us some sense about how many journalists a community might need, although the estimates I mention above reflect the goals of different stakeholders: police folks are likely imagining a particular understanding of what “secure” and “crime” looks like in any one place, while Target and other box stores are trying to both maximize the efficiencies of scale and make sure they are making the most money possible. So there is also a set of competing ends that come out of each estimation that need to be reconciled, too.

Even if we have a target number for how many journalists to get back to, there probably will never be “enough” to really do justice to truly monitoring the hundreds of local government, school board, sports, business, and beyond in a region - a large metro daily never covered its county and region comprehensively to the point that every meeting of possible news value had a journalist present. So short of just saying “more journalism”, then….

1. More content? How much content do we need, and of what kind?

Well, on the most basic level, I think proponent would like to see more professionally vetted and produced local news that meets community information needs that are more than just about civic and political life, but include daily guidance about health, environment, education, finances, culture, and beyond. We also might hope that there might be a standard bearer institutional authority to narrate a sense of place and shared values, or at least shared points of democratic disagreement.

Still, there is no guarantee that more content will also lead to more news consumers; in fact, news avoidance is at record highs, everywhere. As I have seen in Illinois, efforts to supplement local news content via syndicated philanthropic efforts can lead to content homogeneity with unexpected consequences: lots of little newspapers through the state all publishing the same exact story.

More content in the form of automated aggregations of stories through structured data from various municipal and state reports fills the content of so-called “pink slime” news sites, but these stories are incredibly boring and, as far as I can tell, their existence alongside misleading political information is more problematic than helpful for people making decisions about how to engage with politics (e.g. vote).

2. Some sort of change to how we vote or our political cultures?

Many scholars worry about political polarization - as if people flocking to the poles of their parties in increasingly more extreme ways leads to a weakening of the middle - and thus, communities to reflect less pluralistic, tolerant ways of engaging across difference. Daniel Kreiss has often made the argument that some polarization is ok - and in his view, big blue cities are socially desirable because these cities, ideally, respect the rights of marginalized individuals and have in mind Democrat party-platform ideals of more social welfare support via government services and more regulations to keep a city safer, cleaner, and ultimately, aide in making access to opportunities truly egalitarian, as benchmarked by one’s specific starting point. It’s the extremist nationalism that we don’t want.

There are also those who would like to see more evidence of political pluralism - e.g. voters being able to support politicians based on platforms rather than party identity. This is often operationalized as split-ticket voting in scholarly literature. Again, split ticket voting doesn’t necessarily lead to effective policymaking, as gridlock between competing policy agendas can hamper actual political efficacy.

3. Do we want more people to vote? There is an old school argument against universal suffrage no one would dare raise now, but more voters means more voters making choices that are likely not well-reasoned, but are instead based on identity, likeability, and other affective dimensions that have little to do with how a politician might actually govern. More voters doesn’t mean more informed voters, and liberals often malign what they see as easily misled, often impoverished voters who “vote against their interests” in supporting politicians whose policies would ultimately make poor people’s lives harder. There was an older argument voiced by scholars like Robert Putnam that low voter turnout might actually indicate satisfaction with the status quo. The jury is out in Australia about whether compulsory voting actually can be tied to more effective governance or better measures of economic health and well-being.

4. Do we want people to be more informed? Informed about what? I believe there is a hierarchy of information needs, so eloquently voiced by Harry Backlund in his 2019 essay for the now Pulitzer-winning City Bureau - “Is your journalism a luxury or a necessity?” - and the ability to be informed about anything beyond day-to-day existence is a luxury of the privileged. This reminds me a bit of a recent story in the LA Times about Cal State LA kids who simply do not have the time to protest the events going on in Gaza because they are balancing jobs and their families and their classes - to protest about somewhere else, to camp out and miss daily obligations without worrying about making rent — this sentiment reflects the luxury of being able to pay attention to political information.

Note: it may be unfair to ask/expect people to pay more attention to the world around their immediate surroundings, even. My heart aches and aches every time I see an unhoused person on the street right next to the wealth of the city around them - and reading story after story about homelessness in San Diego has still not equipped me with any sense of meaningful social efficacy to do anything - except buy people coffee, water, or food when I can, and have the idea, yet unrealized, of having care bags of socks and menstruation products and so forth. When I read news about my city, I feel powerless against a mayor and city council that has created dozens of showcase public advisory boards that have no actual governing power. News sometimes makes life feel worse or scarier than it is. Television and radio news often scares my child, so it cannot be kept on during times when he is awake and in earshot.

5. Do we want more people to trust professional journalists (more)?

   The crisis of trust in journalism has been long coming, and the most significant panic came at the realization, back in 2016, when public stakeholders realized that Republican-identified people largely had abandoned the institutional news media, and, moreover, had alarmingly low levels of trust in journalism (some estimates are at about 11-14% of Republicans trust in the news media).

   But the crisis of trust most news thinktank-y type places has sought to address the most longstanding distrust in marginalized communities, mostly those of color, who have been systematically harmed by white supremacy in the newsroom. This is not exclusively true (see Trusting News - although the focus is on local news trust), but it’s mostly true — and the problem tends to be the over-represented Republican voter in swing states and low-population states where our concern should perhaps be most urgently directed - as they have disproportionate voting power relative to the actual majority of US voters.

   Unfortunately, the political power of marginalized people in large cities to be able to direct the course of national politics is deeply limited for dozens of structural reasons. Repenting for sometimes centuries worth of past and present racist coverage is something news organizations absolutely must consider. But there is a weird and inconvenient fact that Black Americans tend to trust local television more than any other source of news and information, and it is local news that persists in developing the stereotype of over-representing Black criminality far over-indexing against the actual proportion of Black people actual committing crimes, especially violent ones. And it is the text-based/news publisher news outlets that are doing the bulk of the work trying to make amends. This is an important and inconvenient sticking point that I do not believe has been adequately considered.

6. Do we want to insulate people against misinformation?

   It is so important to remember that what I see as misinformation may be someone else’s trusted source — or only source — of understanding institutions that don’t care about them. Patricia Posey writes about the lack of access to standard, institutional banking for Black and Brown urban dwellers - who instead turn to payday lenders to navigate being unbanked (and sometimes undocumented). These lenders are widely covered as deeply exploitative, but the very functions that make them exploitative are what make them the best choice for some people living in these communities — outsiders judging what goes on within communities they lack insight into simply

I don’t want to let hateful people get away with putting their children or family members in unsafe situations, but some people really do believe they need to have information that is situated in the lens of their religious faith. I keep coming back to the story about parents hearing from pastors that they should kick their trans kids out of their family homes — that this is the biblical way to deal with queer and trans family members. This is clearly twisted, but this is what people in these communities see as resonant with their values. My misinformation is someone else’s hanging on to making sense of a disordered and confusing world.

Ok, now let’s take my smart friends and their critiques of news media. I don’t meant to be relativist, but we also have to acknowledge that the best “independent” journalism is also prone to some problematic limitations. Cue the New York Times, whose coverage decisions are focused more on impartiality and in-depth coverage and which has little interest in making the threat to democratic norms central to their political coverage.

Are we about to do this again, yet another, third campaign cycle where news organizations deny the importance they serve as a moral compass for righting the aspirations of democratic life, as the New York Times’ executive editor, Joe Kahn, has recently done?

“…the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters…If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election… It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one…”

7. Do we want to reduce the dominance of platforms in people’s lives as algorithmically mediated sources that prioritize keeping our attention rather than democracy?

This on its own terms deserves a post, as this is super complicated and there are actual policy ideas on the table that might begin to try to chip away at platform dominance. I can tell you that demanding the censorship or the curation of more content, with the exception perhaps of getting platform regulations up to the existing election information regulations set by the FEC and related state-level agencies creates some scary precedents about what constitutes civil discourse. Dems efforts to curtail misinformation and conspiracy is to the right, I believe, their effort to ban books to prevent kids from getting the “wrong idea.”

I’m going to end here because I am tired and this is way too long of a post, but the takeaway is that democracy means different things to people - and the enduring dilemma between advancing individual rights and social welfare through the state with the aim of creating representative democracy that is truly representative of all comers are at odds with each other. Shared democratic norms are ideal, but there have rarely been shared democratic norms (we imagine the 1950s to be such an era, but remember, um, segregation). Disagreement - the right to disagree in ways that are productive and honor, however gross this may be, the capacity of some people to use democratic institutions to undermine democracy — this is how democracy works, its weaknesses, its warts. Whether journalism has anything at all to do with democracy, or is a prerequisite for a healthy and robust public sphere is the stuff of normative theory — all the information in the world, all the word, the best words, as president #45 might say, means little if people don’t bother to pay attention, consider it, and apply it to their own lives in the service of outward-facing community betterment.