International Journalism and Democracy

Civic Engagement Models from Around the World

Angela Romano

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136973734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines different models from around the world of how journalism can support deliberation — the processes in which societies recognize and discuss the issues that affect them, appraise the potential responses, and make decisions about whether and how to take action. Authors from across the globe identify the types of journalism that might best assist or even drive deliberative activity in different cultural and political contexts. Case studies from 15 nations spotlight different approaches to deliberative journalism, including strategies that have been sometimes been labeled as public or civic journalism, peace journalism, development journalism, citizen journalism, the street press, community journalism, social entrepreneurism, or other names. Each of the approaches that are described offer a distinctive potential to support deliberative democracy, but the book does not present any of these models or case studies as examples of categorical success. Rather, it explores different elements of the nature, strengths, limitations and challenges of each approach, as well as issues affecting their longer-term sustainability and effectiveness.

Part I
Deliberative Journalism

1
Deliberation and Journalism

Angela Romano

The news media are not merely mirrors of society or passive, impartial conveyors of information about social and political affairs. The news media’s influence on public agenda setting and communities’ understanding of issues and events makes them a major social power in their own right. The authors who have contributed to this book continue a long history of media practitioners, scholars and observers who have asked whether journalism’s power might be wielded to help societies recognize and resolve their problems. They remember the adage of playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote that a good newspaper is ‘a nation talking to itself’. In these days of globalization and multimedia proliferation, journalism should help the various publics that the print, broadcast and online media serve—whether they are small neighbourhoods or cross-national communities—to have meaningful conversations among themselves about issues that affect them. In other words, the book explores how journalism might support the processes of social deliberation.

Deliberation must be clearly differentiated from conversation, debate, argument and other forms of dialogue, although one or more of these types of discussion will always be involved in deliberation. Deliberation is the discussion and consideration that is undertaken before a decision or action is made. John Dewey’s classic definition is that ‘deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action…. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the varying lines of possible action are really like…. An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal’ (Dewey 2007/1922: 190). David Mathews further notes that deliberation does not guarantee that action will happen, but ‘it creates the possibility that an action will be taken mindful of the consequences. Deliberation helps us to look before we leap’ (Mathews 1999: 182).

The capacity of the media to mobilize a community response is not always a force for good; it may equally unleash an inferno of tyranny and injustice. The 1994 Rwanda Genocide is an example of the living nightmare that journalism might give rein to. Rwanda’s local radio and print media were used to incite hatred, dehumanize members of the ‘rival’ ethnic group, and provide directions to killers on how to locate victims to butcher. While an estimated 800,000 to one million people were being systematically slaughtered, the international media corps might have alerted the world community and provoked an effective external intervention. Instead they largely overlooked, downplayed or misunderstood the events (Des Forges 1999, Thompson 2007).

Many types of conversation may lead to action, but for the purposes of this book, not all will be considered as deliberation. Both Rwanda’s hate-mon-gering media and the sluggish international media contributed to the ways in which their respective communities crystallized a particular vision of the country’s circumstances, and their decisions about whether and how to act. However, the conversation initiated by these media was not inclusive of a full range of perspectives. Nor did it provide information that would encourage reflection on the viewpoints, needs and values of other social groups or re examination of each group’s own positions. This chapter will explore the premise that deliberation must permit the participation of all relevant community stakeholders, including the minorities, the marginalized, the disadvantaged and even those deemed as ‘deviant’. This enables the exercise of what John Rawls (1993; 1997) calls ‘public reason’. This is inclusive, critical deliberation by a society that includes diverse and even unpopular views about the common good and has processes for enabling the expression of plurality.

DELIBERATION

The ability of communities to achieve great feats through self-governance has been noted for centuries. Observing American life in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that a government might perform the activities undertaken by companies and private individuals. However, he also asked ‘what political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association?’ (de Tocqueville 1945/1840: 108). De Tocqueville expressed the fear that if ‘individuals lost the power of achieving great things single-handed’ or the ‘the means of producing them by united exertions’, then the people ‘would soon relapse into barbarism’ (1945/1840: 107).

De Tocqueville’s comments illuminate both the importance of deliberation and its underlying premise. Politics is not something that only happens in the realms of government or formal political processes. Politics occurs whenever individuals act alone or with others to identify and resolve issues, both minor and momentous, that affect their community. Community-driven politics usually transpires after deliberative talk, which helps individuals to establish the common understandings about the nature of their problems and how to deal with them.

Deliberation is different from mobilization. Deliberation may assist communities to marshal the labour, finances, physical resources or force required for such politics to occur. However, the mobilization of action usually requires a range of other activities and resources beyond those involved in deliberation. For journalists, this is an important distinction. Several chapters in this book indicate that journalists are more comfortable with the tasks involved in supporting deliberation than they are with becoming community mobilizers.

The difference between communities and publics also needs to be clarified. A community is a collection of people with some common attribute that gives them a loose or intense shared identification. Communities may be based on geography, such as the small-scale communities of suburbs and villages or the large-scale communities of nations or cross-national alliances. Others are communities of interest, whose members may be physically distant from each other but who are linked by common social and political characteristics. Every individual thus belongs to various communities of interest that are based on factors such as shared ethnic background, gender, sexuality, common concerns about a political issue or the environment, workplace activities, sporting or leisure interests, or other attributes. Communities become a ‘public’ when people turn from their private and individual affairs because they perceive a common interest in fixing shared problems or controlling the consequences of others people’s activities and exchanges (Dewey 1991/1927: 126). The public is not just people who experience or assess the words, actions and policies of others. The public is ‘a shared political space for people to assemble, speak their minds, and record their extended conversation so that others, out of sight, might be part of it’ (Carey 1997: 14).

THE UNRULINESS OF DELIBERATION

In comments that have become more pertinent with time, Dewey has observed that individuals are distracted from public issues by popular entertainment, the demands of corporate capitalism, a focus on lifestyle and personal concerns, and the impact of industrialization on social structures and networks (Dewey 1991/1927: Ch. IV). Dewey also suggested that each individual’s time is absorbed not just by many competing activities but also by the numerous publics that they might potentially join with. He noted that there are innumerable potential publics within a community, each with different, overlapping or opposing sets of issues and concerns. This makes it hard for individuals to focus on one issue, or to evaluate the far-reaching consequences that various courses of action may have for the various publics that they belong to (Dewey 1991/1927: 131–7). These factors weaken the possibility that individuals will form a public that will last long enough to engage in deliberation, decision making or action.

Given how muddled and confusing the processes of public life are, many of the procedures that have been consciously designed to promote public deliberation—such as deliberative community forums—invest a considerable amount of time and effort trying simply to understand what the nub of the problem is. Deliberation also involves recognizing the different stakeholders who may have an interest in the issue, incorporating their knowledge and perspectives, and identifying not just the differences but also the commonalities in each stakeholder’s experiences, values and opinions. From there, the participants frame different ways of responding to the issue, appraise the consequences of each response, the resources needed for action, and the ways in which communities might be organized so that their disparate efforts contribute to mutual goals. These deliberative processes help to create and nourish a public, as well as help to achieve its goals.

Outside carefully planned exercises such as deliberative forums, the processes of deliberation rarely occur in a tidy, linear progression. However, most of these steps described previously are usually required to some degree if deliberation is to occur in everyday life. Mathews notes that processes and institutions that support deliberation can be easy to dismiss because they are often fluid with little coherent structure—such as informal gatherings, ad hoc associations, and the banter of people who mull over the meaning of their everyday experiences. He compares them to the wetlands of America’s Gulf Coast, which were filled in or dug out for property developments and shipping channels by those who saw them only as acres of mud and matted vegetation. ‘The consequences were disastrous: sea life that bred in the swamps died off, and coastal cities were exposed to the full fury of hurricanes’ (Mathews 2009: 60). Thus many seemingly inconsequential interactions in daily life may potentially contribute in major ways to organic politics. For this kind of organic politics to be successful, societies need to master the art of civic or collective learning, in which citizens are both the agents and objects of learning (Mathews 2009: 61). The nature of collective learning has been identified in many different political traditions.

It can be seen in Paulo Freire’s concept of conscientization (conscientiza-ção), which originated in Latin America but which has influenced many political movements elsewhere. Conscientization means that the public establishes a critical consciousness. To do this, people must become aware of the internalized ‘myths’ (or ways of understanding our world) that they learn through social communications, including the mass media (Freire 1993/1970: 121). These myths can shape and limit the ways in which we view social power relations, a community’s potential, and capability to be self-determining actors. Freire opposes the ‘banking model’ of education in which someone acts as a traditional teacher, simply transferring preselected information and insights to the student (1993/1970: 52–60). Journalists also conform to the banking model if they see their role as only to transmit facts to an uninformed audience. Freire proposes that people who act as ‘educators’ must establish a reciprocal relationship with learners in which their joint engagement allows each to establish new ways of understanding the prevailing conditions and new priorities about which problems are worthy of study and action (Freire 1993/1970: 61–7).

Similar concepts of collective learning are visible in Mahatma Gandhi’s still-influential principles of swaraj or self-governance, which promotes self-assessment and self-reliance at both the individual and the community level. Ghandi believed in bottom-up governance, and was concerned by people’s propensity to assume that politics occurred only in formal government institutions and that there was no way for them to achieve change (Gandhi 1921). He said that swaraj could be attained ‘by educating the masses to a sense of their capacity to regulate and control authority’ (Gandhi 1925).

Ganhdi’s proposed system relied on satyagraha, or adherence to the truth, whereby people must constantly put aside vested interests and accepted conventions in order to check their reality, admit to their mistakes, and adjust their...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Deliberative Journalism
• Part II Public and Citizen Journalism
• Part III Other Deliberative Models for Peace, Participation, Development and Empowerment
• Part IV Conclusions
• Contributors
• Index