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Part II: C

Part II: Commission Findings and Recommended Strategies

Promoting Public Engagement

Skilled people, appropriate technologies, and reliable and relevant information are the building blocks of a successful communications environment. What generates news and information flow in that environment, however, is not just those building blocks. It is engagement—specifically, people’s engagement with information and with each other.

Engagement within a community can take infinite forms. People engage when they watch, listen to, or read the news, discuss local affairs with neighbors, attend community celebrations, and volunteer for civic projects. They engage in formal ways, such as voting and running for office. They engage in informal ways, such as writing letters to the editor or to their elected representatives or blogging. The process of engaging does not mean that everyone must be active as a citizen at every moment. Engaging does mean, however, that people regard their geographically defined communities as communities in a deeper sense. They see their neighbors as a network of shared information and sustenance bound by feelings of mutual obligation and support.

What engagement means to a democratic community is that citizens genuinely participate in self-governance. Communities thrive when citizens are motivated to accept responsibility with respect to community issues. Communities are sustained when people feel themselves empowered to organize in order to achieve positive outcomes either through their own actions or the responsiveness of their elected representatives. Information is essential to this empowerment process, and personal involvement in community issues can provide the critical context in which information becomes active.

In a democratic community, any citizen who wants to should also have opportunities to exercise vigilance over those who conduct civic affairs. The network of people who engage daily with civic information may never include everyone, but ideally, the groups of citizens who engage seriously with civic information should represent the entire community. Otherwise, community problem solving may not fully reflect everyone’s interests. Engagement opportunities should not arbitrarily exclude anyone.

Engagement is important because of what its presence provides and because of what its absence portends. Engagement builds what political scientist Robert Putnam has famously called “social capital.”⁵⁶ Social capital is the stock of trust, reciprocity, and habits of cooperation that allow people to collaborate successfully for common purposes. Research suggests connections between social capital and indicators of community success such as public health, economic sustainability, and low crime rates.⁵⁷

Strong Community Problem Solving Requires “Bridging Capital”

Putnam’s work identified two kinds of social capital, “bonding” and “bridging.” Bonding social capital arises within fairly homogenous and close-knit groups. Bridging social capital arises among groups. Bridging capital helps knit together different neighborhoods, different social classes, and different subcommunities as they may be defined by age, religion, ethnicity, or culture.

Where strong bridging ties exist, people maximize their prospects for exchanging information or developing information collaboratively. No one is expert in everything, but everyone is informed about some things, including their own experience. The public’s diversity of information and perspective can contribute mightily to a community’s sense of shared identity and collective knowledge. When people engage across group lines, they share the diverse levels of information that all citizens possess. They inevitably strengthen a community’s capacity for problem solving.

What follows from disengagement is the flip side of these community assets. Instead of trust, there is alienation. Instead of cooperation, there is indifference. Instead of knowledge, there is ignorance, misunderstanding, and higher levels of social conflict. People do not contribute to the larger community because they do not feel a part of it. They potentially suffer not only as citizens, in their public role, but as private individuals as well. They have less information about available opportunities. They have fewer connections to address issues in their own lives. There is even evidence that reduced social capital can be injurious to personal health.⁵⁸

Despite the vastly different demographics of Silicon Valley, the state of Montana, and the city of Philadelphia, the Commission’s forum in each locale revealed a lack of, and yearning for, bridging capital. Speakers in Philadelphia addressed gaps in understanding and communication across racial and ethnic lines, and between working-class and wealthier Philadelphians. Speakers in Montana spoke of the relative “information isolation” of rural communities, including Native American communities. Speakers in Mountain View, California, addressed the need to bridge ethnic and economic subcommunities, but also gave voice to the alienation of young people.

The Commission is aware that the testimony it received represents only a slice of America’s story. The consistent impression left, however, was that many Americans do not see themselves fully represented in the “mainstream” information flows of their local communities.

The witnesses who spoke to the Commission about their experiences as workers, as members of ethnic minorities, or as advocates for young people all believed that mainstream media convey too little information about—or relevant to—their subcommunities. They also see their concerns portrayed to the larger community in ways that are superficial, misleading, and negatively stereotypical. A common theme is that readers learn about poor people, labor unions, ethnic minorities, and youth only through stories framed by conflict.

Members of minority groups may engage less with mainstream media because they doubt whether mainstream media reflect the reality of their communities. Minorities own approximately eight percent of the full-power radio stations in the United States, three percent of the television stations.⁵⁹ Since 2000, minority journalists have never accounted for more than 14 percent of the total professional print journalism community, with the percentage in 2009 amounting to 13.4 percent. And more than 42 percent of print newsrooms in America employ no journalists who are African American, Asian American, Native American or Latino. Of the 6,000 journalists who lost their jobs in 2008, 854 were members of racial minorities.⁶⁰ These are stark figures considering that, within the next 35 years, it is likely that America’s “minorities” will come to represent the numerical majority in the United States.⁶¹

Yet, it is clear that people want to engage. The impulse to share information, to create and be part of a larger information flow, is powerful across all groups in society. Raj Jayadev, a youth organizer who helped create Silicon Valley De-bug, a multicultural, youth-produced magazine, told the Commission that, in the current decade, “‘youth organizing’ and ‘youth media’ have become synonymous.” He reported:

Young people who are not from the dot-com fast track—having either not seen themselves in the traditional media or only saw themselves portrayed as criminals, drop-outs, or detractors to the community—have taken this work to another level through an embrace of newer technologies . . . . A consequence of not being included in the news world is an abandonment of it all together and an impulse to simply have your own.

In a similar vein, although witnesses testified to insufficient bridging between ethnic and mainstream media, ethnic media are in many ways thriving within the subcommunities they serve.

The Commission believes local communities can significantly strengthen public engagement by addressing two issues: opportunity and motivation. Because increased engagement has significant payoffs for both individuals and communities, it behooves institutions to address what makes engagement plausible and inviting to the general public, and to expand opportunities for constructive engagement where feasible.