Jay Rosen’s Citizen-Voter’s agenda can redeem political journalism
Ezra Klein podcast interview summary and link
This summarizes and paraphrases a podcast, “It’s Time for the Media to Choose: Neutrality or Democracy?” The Ezra Klein Show (Society & Culture). Available on PocketCast and
The topic of Jay’s Citizen-Voter’s agenda news strategy for journalists starts at minute 22:22.
Paraphrase: Instead of beginning with the horse race, the sports metaphors, the industry of political campaigns, who’s up who’s down, you begin with a very simple question:
“What do you want the candidates to talk about as they compete for votes?””
Where do you learn this? By asking voters this question over and over, 1000 times or more in every single campaign.
If you ask this often enuf, you are doing the market research political journalists are uniquely capable and mandated to do. You find out what really matters to voting people.
If you ask a 1000 or more voters in the next campaign what they want to hear the candidates discuss, I guarantee you it will not be what most candidates prefer to blather on about. Except for Democratic Socialist candidates like like Bernie, AOC and Lucas Kunce, candidates want to talk about what’s easy for them, what they have rehearsed — not what voters actually want to hear.
This is why corporate media and corporate political journalism is a sinking ship. Both-sides-ism — the view from nowhere — distracts journalists, voters and candidates from the questions voters want to hear discussed.
If you ask 1000 voters what they want to her discussed, this builds an agenda for news coverage set by the people you want to inform, set by the people who in fact pay you to inform them, by paying for your journalism.
Pursuing the Citizen-Voter’s agenda is an exit ramp from the superficial and inevitable dead end of politics as sports, politics as horse-race-bet reporting. It could even — shudder — make political journalism an honorable profession again.
This idea was born in the 1990s when Rush Limbaugh began to dominate a large fraction of the political discussion. How can journalists empower citizen-voters? By asking them what they want candidates to talk about. Then you ask the candidates these questions. This is the service political journalists can do for audiences. This also builds a loyal following for the journalist.
In 2021 a few local newsrooms are starting to try the Voters agenda news strategy cause it’s a less cynical, more fun and a better use of journalist’s time, energy and effort.
The below paraphrases the podcast description copy:
Rosen is a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., author of the blog “PressThink,” and one of America’s sharpest contemporary media critics. His insight is simple: The media’s implicit model of American politics — of two co-equal parties with competing governing philosophies — both-sides-ism — the view from nowhere — is fundamentally broken. Today, if we name the political-cultural conflict in our face, we call it the struggle between between pro- and anti-democracy forces. Identifying this as a struggle between left and right plays into the hands of the Right, legitimizing them as co-equal with democracy’s proponents.
The way Rosen sees it, the American mainstream press must make a choice: Will it double down on its commitment to detached, nonpartisan neutrality? Or will it choose instead to boldly and aggressively defend democratic group process?
In this conversation we eventually talk about what pro-democracy journalism could look like in practice.
“The conflict with honest journalism is structural. As its base dwindles more and more, the G.O.P. has to be at war with the press” to discredit the press, because the daylight of honesty and truth and values is toxic to them, like vampires. Of course if the press folds under criticism from the Right, the vampires win.
“Making it harder to vote, and harder to understand what the party is really about — these are two parts of the same project” for the Republican Party, Jay Rosen writes.
Rosen’s been critiquing “both sides journalism” for years now, long before such arguments came into vogue. As a result, he’s done some of the most original thinking about an alternative model of journalism and how to explain it simply so everyone can understand it.
Other topics we discuss:
- The drawbacks of the press’s focus on Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema,
- how journalists should cover Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson,
- why Rosen believes “moderate” and “centrist” are two of the most toxic terms in political journalism,
- the consequences of an economy where political news has to compete for attention with Netflix, Xbox and TikTok; and
- why Substack and podcasting may hold the keys to restoring trust in individual journalists by permitting them to express their values clearly. This is the only way to build a loyal following of readers-listeners. Both-sides-ism and “the view from nowhere” are how and why corporate media is losing its audience in droves.
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Articles mentioned:
“Americans’ Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record” by Megan Brenan
“The Coming Confrontation Between the American Press and the Republican Party” by Jay Rosen on PressThink
“Battleship Newspaper” by Jay Rosen on PressThink
“Election Coverage: The Road Not Taken” by Jay Rosen on PressThink
CBS News poll on Build Back Better
Book Recommendations:
The Boys on the Bus by Timothy Crouse
Making News by Gaye Tuchman
Deciding What’s News by Herbert Gans
This episode is guest-hosted by Nicole Hemmer, a historian whose work focuses on the right-wing media and American politics. She is an associate research scholar with the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia and author of “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.” You can follow her on Twitter @PastPunditry. (There’s more about the other guest hosts during Ezra’s parental leave here.)
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.
