Journalism for Democracy Beyond Elections

Host:

Roshan Bliss, National Coalition for Dialogue and Liberation

Who’s in the room?

• Caitlin Tapia
• Michelle Faust Raghavan, Claridad Media
• Gene Sonn, Resolve Philly
• Linda Shaw, Solutions Journalism Network
• Nation Hahn, EdNC
• Megan Garvey, LAist
• Allison Dikanovic, Kansas City Star
• Chelsea Naughton, America Amplified
• Meredith Edlow, photographer
• David Bornstein, Solutions Journalism Network
• Frank, professor observing

These other things that are about democracy beyond elections exist, but people don’t know about them, examples:

• Participatory budgeting

How do we use journalism to engage folks in conversations and decisions that impact them beyond going to the ballot on Election Day?

Linda:

• Research that horse race coverage leads people to lose trust in political and journalism institutions
• Start with community listening
• Use the citizen’s agenda approach
  • What are the issues you want politicians to be solving?
• Use solutions journalism to cover those issues

Megan:

• LAist has done a lot of work listening to community and figuring out where people are at when it comes to participating in democracy
• Human voter guide — People didn’t know how to vote, how to get a ballot, what each of the roles do
  • If you don’t know how to get the ballot, the rest is moot
• Civics and democracy reporter → instead of politics reporter
• LA has a new mayor
  • Used influencers and other strategies to get a demographically representative survey response from voters about issues of importance
  • Main story that has come out so far: promise tracker
    • Identified main points of the new mayor’s policy for reducing the homelessness crisis and tracked success
    • We’re able to hold her to account on each point regularly
  • Promise Tracker takeaways
    • City data is terrible
    • A written story
  • “Meet Your Mayor” type quiz/guide

What people say they want/what’s good for our democracy vs. what people actually engage with?

Chelsea:

• Platforms: people aren’t their best selves on social media
• Zombie mode, outrage motivates people
• The platforms we put information on are set up to get people to behave that way
• We have an obligation to figure out another way to deliver that information

Megan:

• Planet Money TikTok
• Providing information in a more interesting/creative way

Chelsea:

• You’re not hosting the dinner party
• You’re providing a dish at the dinner party
• You’re not showing up in the space in a way that people care about

Caitlin:

• Statements that fuel policies and decisions vs. seeking a platform and coverage
• Where is the journalism line between paparazzi and those who are implementing policies and decisions that affect people’s lives

Gene:

• Documenters expansion
• Active participation → more than 200 people who were signed up for training
• Hunger to be involved in democracy beyond elections
• Meetings that are supposed to include the public have become prohibitively restrictive

Roshan:

• Journalists collaborating with professional facilitators to engage around an issue at hand in the community along the lines of reality TV covering the deliberative process

Megan:

• “Make Al Care”
  • LA is infamous for having very low turnouts for elections
  • Al was a cafe owner who had never voted
    • He didn’t see the point or how it could connect to his life
  • What would it take to get Al to vote?
  • Politicians came and started pitching to Al
  • Reporter drove him to the polls
• Covered 2000 campaign following Dick Cheney and Ralph Nader
  • Nader had said Bush and Gore were basically the same
  • People’s lives aren’t all that different depending on who is in office

Peggy:

• Robert Putnam’s research — bowling alone
• Civic institutions where people come together
• Decline of civic institutions tracks with decline of participation in democracy
• The more that people see the ways they can engage, the more they will

Nation:

• Community college students
• Surveyed with Reach
• Created candidate survey based on students’ questions
• Brought them to the candidates
• Hosted a forum to create videos for social media and also a digital guide
• The community colleges distributed the survey
  • EdNC gave the data back to the colleges
• Teacher survey, partnered with Dept. of Public Instruction
• Promise: EdNC would include the survey results in the DPI report
• Creating meaningful ways for people engage in ways that can actually affect policy

Megan:

• Voter guides start with the responsibilities of what officials do

David:

• Most Americans don’t know what the government does
• Department of energy
• Inflation and infrastructure act — Biggest public expenditure since the new deal, should be talked about but people don’t know what it is
• We don’t understand or cover what problem solving looks like in the government
• How do we cover government day by day to show what they actually do that affects our lives
• The brand of government has been destroyed by journalism

Peter Block:

• Conversation about democracy is about self-governance 
• Our attention on elections gets in the way of our coverage of democracy
• What are you doing to keep your neighborhood safe?

Chelsea:

• Series about democracy from the ground up
• Focused on people who were doing the work of democracy outside of politics and government
• Profiles of people and portraits of what else is democracy
• Think more broadly about what democracy is, put it in different beats

Meredith:

• For Black people, there is a very thin line between democracy and slavery
• Has bred this culture of hierarchy
• Has bred this culture of disseminating your information to a certain subset of people
• We talk past the reality of if we don’t have democracy, some people would be enslaved
• “My position of the world outside of democracy is slavery.”
• Until we get comfortable talking about slavery and what that means to the United States
• Knew so little about the history of her family’s experience in Virginia
• Was confused about the origin of her name, went on a personal search
• If we don’t start talking more about slavery and the sanitation of history after the Civil War, I’m not sure we’re having the best conversation about democracy
• In churches in Virginia, a lot of white rightwing conservative ideas and politics mix with Black people who vote Democrat but also have conservative religious views

Megan:

• We are an ahistorical country that wants to forget.
• It’s easy to forget that the electoral college exists because of slavery, the rules that keep people from distributing water at the polls is to keep people from voting.
• We need reporting that offers historical context.

David:

• The message to get people to dismiss/disengage with democracy is that “democracy doesn’t deliver”
• Journalism doesn’t cover how democracy delivers
• “We can’t be an advocate for the government”

Peter Block:

• What is the other conversation we can be having other than investigative?

Chelsea:

• “Traveling While Black” exhibit
• Oral histories in a VR headset
• At a restaurant in the Green Book, riding around in a bus
• The immersive experience brought you into the space
• Allocating resources to powerful VR experiences can be really important
• We forget that the way we present our stories can have such a huge impact

Gene:

• The plane landing safely isn’t a journalism story
• If the pattern of planes landing safely is going up, that is a story
• Grew up attending a public forum in a school gymnasium, the physical representation of democracy was powerful

David:

• Documentary about election workers called no time to fail

Nation:

• People think about their lives first, and their civics and community second
• If you can directly show people that their voices will be heard
• Philanthropy: Survey to inform grantmaking

Megan:

• We can cover democratic systems
• Who has power and why and how to create greater access
• Making streams available

David:

• Budgets tell you how power is operating in a town