FOCAS 2010 Event Reveals Competing Concepts of Civic Engagement

“So much of the discussion that we hear today and [related] policy suggestions are built, understandably, on the biases of our prior experience, based on our embedded understanding of old models—and they’re just so dead different,” observed Richard Gingras, the CEO of the Salon Media Group. This dynamic was particularly apparent in Tuesday's panel on public engagement, which you can watch here.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute began the session by connecting waning civic engagement to a lack of public trust in news organizations, and a corresponding “disappearance of the public square.” While previously citizens and commentators shared a “common set of facts” which formed the basis for debate, Ornstein said, media fragmentation and polarization have allowed factually dubious accounts of controversial topics—such as global warming or the president’s birth records—to flourish and gain prominence. The solution, he suggested, is to recreate a trusted and influential middle ground for debate. He dismissed as ineffective public interest obligations on commercial broadcasters, instead citing investment in public media through a public/private foundation as a solution. Fees levied on broadcasters could foot the bill. Commercial news producers might also have access to these funds, he said, based on certain criteria.

Bill Kling of American Public Media, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and Adam Theirer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation all chimed in with various critiques of Ornstein’s proposal. Copps defended the imposition of stronger public interest guidelines, suggesting that earlier waves of deregulation had gutted them. Thierer, a libertarian, dismissed the idea of obligations or fees, instead noting that there are many public squares, and that funders and regulators should “let 1,000 flowers bloom.” Kling argued for “carrots” matched to standards for public stations, rather than public ascertainment processes that allow station managers to simply “pay lip service” when it comes time to report that obligations have been met. But while Kling also described how APM’s Public Insight Network has allowed for more meaningful interaction with users, it took one of the two twenty-somethings at the table to shift the engagement discussion away from stations and back to the users.

Conor White-Sullivan, the CEO of Localocracy, said that he was “troubled” by the focus on broadcast. Civic information does not lead to civic action, he noted, and “convergent and new media give us the biggest opportunity to reverse that.” Localocracy provides a platform for voters to discuss and connect around local issues and elections. Citizens become disengaged, he said, in part because communications with government officials and media outlets often seem to go into “a black hole.” The way to bridge the gap between information and action is “by making media more interactive, and making interaction with the government something that happens in public and is a part of media. Media is the bridge between citizens and the government, and we need to take that seriously.”

David Cohn, the other twenty-something at the table, agreed that public engagement should not be conflated with public interest content. He suggested that this might not be a policy issue as much as a cultural one—a lack of understanding of new participatory capabilities by both journalists and the public. “Media can be an act of community organizing” he said. He expanded on this theme in a blog post after the event:

I’ve said before that professional journalists, in one interpretation, can be thought of as a diaspora. Their “home land” in newspapers has been compromised…. I joked that unless I live to be as old as Moses (120) I won’t live to see the dawning of this new digital age. I am doomed to be part of that cusp generation that must wander in the desert with the elders who remember something long passed and can’t settle into something new. Meanwhile acting as a steward and trying to head north to a new land with a younger generation to take over for me.

Questions about how best to define and encourage civic engagement came back around in the final FOCAS panel. Peter Levine of Tufts University reported back from the working group that had been tasked to come up with concrete next steps. What’s the rationale for focusing on civic engagement? The group noted that it empowers individuals, improves quality of life, and contributes to social and technical innovation. The solutions they offered acknowledged the need to not only educate a rising generation of media consumers via digital literacy training, but to treat them as active participants in building civic engagement solutions for their own communities. Proposals for both a national “geek corps” and a national competition—like the XPrize—for civic innovation were well received by participants.

Both of these ideas—already in play in beta versions such as the Public Media Corps (which we’re helping to incubate) and the forthcoming Apps for Inclusion contest—share the virtue of bringing fresh, bottom-up thinking to the table. They also affirm that while content may be part of the solution, public consultation, learning and action are just as crucial.  Or, as Charlie Firestone of the Aspen Institute put it in his closing remarks, “Ultimately, none of this works if there isn’t engagement.”