in the name of democracy

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IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY

In memory of Timothy E. CookKevin P. Reilly Sr. Endowed Chair in Political Communication, (2001-2006)

Manship School of Mass Communication and the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs

Louisiana State University

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THE 2011 BREAUX SYMPOSIUM

“One of the contemporary problems of governance thattroubles me most is the difficulty of getting good ideasinto the public discussion….Many good ideas do notfind a place in civic dialog, thus limiting our ability tosolve social, economic and political problems.”

— Senator John Breaux

The annual Breaux Symposium was established in2000 as a core program of the Manship School of MassCommunication’s Reilly Center for Media & PublicAffairs. Its goal is to explore areas where little or noresearch has been conducted and to approach ideasfrom a fresh perspective – in other words, to turnissues on their head. Underpinning the ManshipSchool’s focus on the study of media and politics, theBreaux Symposium’s central question is: How well isthe public being informed, and what must be done toincrease citizen awareness and constructive debate?

The inaugural symposium featured Marvin Kalb,Walter Isaacson and David Broder discussing the roleof the press at the turn of the century. In the pastdecade symposia topics have included new models fornews, the role of advocacy groups in bypassingtraditional media to reach voters and redefining publicopinion polling in an age of segmented marketing andpersonalized communication.

About the JOHN BREAUX SYMPOS IUM

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4 ................ Guide to the online version

5 ................ Purpose of the 2011 Breaux Symposium

6 ................ Panelists’ Biographies

8 ................ Themes from the Symposium

11 ................ Panel One: Incivility in Public Discourse

29 ................ Suggested Discussion Questions

31 ................ Panel Two: The Challenges of Reporting in a PolarizedMedia Environment


55 ................ Panel Three: Bridging the Gaps between Scholarshipand Journalism


78 ................ For Further Reading

80 ................ About the Manship School of Mass Communication and the ReillyCenter for Media & Public Affairs

Table of CONTENTS

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In the Name of Democracy: Political Communication Research & Practice in a Polarized Media Environment

2011 John Breaux SymposiumMarch 28-29, 2011

Reilly Center for Media & Public AffairsManship School of Mass Communication

Louisiana State UniversityBaton Rouge

The study and practice of political communication are at a crossroads. Within thepast decade, the political and media environment has become markedly morefragmented and polarized. Control of the White House and Congress has shiftedback and forth across parties, bringing dramatic changes—and often gridlock—tonational policy agendas. Presidents and other elected representatives struggle tomake policy and communicate with the public in an often corrosive politicalatmosphere. And reporters try to make sense of it all with fewer resources and aseemingly less attentive public.

What can be done to improve the study and practice of political communication inthis changed environment? How can scholars learn more from practitioners andpractitioners learn more from scholars in order to elevate political discourse andpublic understanding? What can the academy do to prepare students for thechanging world of media and politics?

The 2011 Breaux Symposium brought together top political communicationscholars, veteran journalists and practitioners to discuss these issues andrecommend strategies for improvement.

The following material is an edited transcript of the discussion accompanied byprovocative discussion questions. A full transcript of the entire Breaux Symposium,along with an electronic version of this report enhanced with hyperlinks to research,news articles, and examples for discussion, can be found at www.manship.lsu.edu.

Items denoted by asterisks* are institutions or websites recommended for furtherexamination. A complete list appears at the back of the report.

Editor’s Note: The 2011 John Breaux Symposium occurred March 28 and 29, 2011 at Louisiana State University’s Manship Schoolof Mass Communication. The transcript editor, Maggie Heyn Richardson is a freelance writer living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Forthe full transcript of the symposium, please call 225-578-7312.

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Dan Balz is national political correspondent at The WashingtonPost. He joined the paper in 1978 and has been involved in thepaper’s political coverage as a reporter or editor throughout hiscareer. In addition to his political reporting, he has served as thePost’s national editor, covered the White House during the firstBush administration and has written extensively about Congress.

W. Lance Bennett is professor of political science and Ruddick C.Lawrence Professor of Communication at the University ofWashington, where he directs the Center for Communication andCivic Engagement. The focus of his work is on how communicationprocesses affect citizen identification and engagement withpolitics.

Michael X. Delli Carpini became dean of the Annenberg Schoolfor Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. Priorto joining the University of Pennsylvania faculty, Dr. Delli Carpiniwas director of the public policy program of the Pew CharitableTrusts (1999-2003), a member of the political science departmentat Barnard College, serving as chair of the department from 1995to 1999 and a member of Columbia University’s graduate faculty(1987-2002).

Robert M. Entman is J.B. and M.C. Shapiro Professor of Media andPublic Affairs and professor of international affairs at The GeorgeWashington University. He has published dozens of journalarticles, reports, and book chapters in such fields as politicalcommunication, public opinion, race relations, and public policy.Dr. Entman edits the book series Communication, Society and Politics(with Lance Bennett) for the Cambridge University Press.

Roderick P. Hart holds the Shivers Chair in Communication andGovernment at the University of Texas at Austin and serves asdean of the College of Communication and director of the AnnetteStrauss Institute for Civic Participation. He is the author or editorof twelve books including Campaign Talk: Why Elections Are Good forUs (Princeton, 2000) and has published more than 200 articles andpapers.

Shanto Iyengar holds the Chandler Chair in Communication atStanford University where he is also professor of political scienceand director of the Political Communication Laboratory. Iyengar isthe author of several books, including News That Matters(University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Media Politics: A Citizen’sGuide (Norton, 2011).

PANEL ISTS ’ Biographies

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Regina Lawrence holds the Kevin P. Reilly, Sr. Chair PoliticalCommunication in the Manship School of Mass Communication atLouisiana State University, where she teaches courses in mediaand politics and public opinion. Lawrence has written severalbooks and numerous articles analyzing media coverage of highprofile news events and policy issues, including the Abu Ghraibprison scandal, shootings in public schools, the obesity epidemic,welfare reform and television coverage of the September 11thterrorist attack.

Robert Mann holds the Manship Chair at the Manship School ofMass Communication at Louisiana State University and is co-director of the school’s Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. Heteaches courses in political communication and is currentlyresearching the history of U.S. war propaganda. He is also editor ofthe Media & Public Affairs book series, published jointly by theManship School and LSU Press.

Bill Purcell is special advisor to the president of HarvardUniversity and former director of Harvard’s Institute of Politics atthe John F. Kennedy School of Government. Purcell has spent morethan 30 years in public service, law and higher education. Asmayor of Nashville (1999-2007) the city saw unprecedentedeconomic expansion, an increase in metro school funding of morethan 50 percent, and the development and preservation of morethan 26,000 affordable housing units. He also served as foundingdean of the College of Public Service and Urban Affairs atTennessee State University in 2008, was founder and director ofthe Child and Family Policy Center at Vanderbilt University (1996-99) and served five terms as a legislator in the Tennessee House ofRepresentatives.

Amy Walter is the Political Director of ABC News, overseeing allpolitical coverage on ABCNews.com, including ABC’s daily politicaltip sheet "The Note." She also guides the planning and editorialcontent of all political news and provides on-air analysis on WorldNews with Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America, Nightline, andThis Week with Christiane Amanpour. She was most recently theeditor-in-chief of The Hotline, Washington’s premier daily briefingon American politics.

Moderator John Maxwell Hamilton is LSU’s Executive Vice Chancellor andProvost and former dean of the Manship School of MassCommunication. He came to LSU in 1992 after more than twodecades as a journalist and public servant. Hamilton reportedabroad for ABC Radio and the Christian Science Monitor, amongother media, and was a longtime national commentator on publicradio's MarketPlace. Hamilton has served in the U.S. Agency forInternational Development during the Carter Administration, on thestaff of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and at the World Bank.

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For complex reasons, incivility in publicdiscourse has long been a part ofAmerican life.

Incivility is often described as a damaging social phenomenon that hasreached new heights today. But political incivility has flourishedhistorically because it is also a stimulant that appeals to several layers ofhuman emotions. Rather than simply call for a return to politeness, wemust understand that incivility – in its own irrational way — is appealing,and even seductive. Incivility is dramatic, social, dialectical, personified,and more, and understanding its deep reach is important in assessing itsprominence in public discourse.

Incivility isn’t just rudeness—it’sdisorderly discourse.

The current discussion about incivility centers largely on its tone: coarselanguage, name-calling, and even violent language and imagery. Focusingmerely on rudeness, however, ignores a larger issue: the lack of reasoneddiscussion and debate in the US about things like the growing levels ofpolitical and economic inequality, and why they matter for democracy.Incivility is disorderly discourse that introduces noise and distraction intothe public conversation.

The political system today encouragesdisorderly/uncivil discourse.

Our political conversation has become increasingly disorderly because thetwo political parties see declining incentives for “partisan mutualadjustment”—a state of compromise achieved through willingness todebate and govern in the public interest.

THEMES from the Symposium

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The mainstream media today find it harderthan ever to break away from thatspectacle.

The 24-hour news cycle has produced a steady stream of repetitive,truncated news stories that often lack context. And deeply ingrainedjournalistic routines encourage reporters to simply report the spin battlesof the two major parties even if—or especially when—they are uncivil andnonfactual. These habits are exacerbated by newsroom cuts, which havecrippled the ability of journalists to develop stories beyond the realm ofsound bytes. Meanwhile, well-funded campaigns have greater ability thanever to control messaging both during elections and throughout entireterms of office.

Therefore, we need to establish “thirdspaces”—beyond traditional academicresearch and routine journalism—in whichto create more informed and meaningfulpublic discussion.

There is tremendous possibility—and evident need—for carving out newspaces where scholars and journalists can produce meaningful,substantive information valued by their respective professions and by thepublic. Scholars bring perspective, data and research, ingredientsjournalists don’t often have time to cultivate. Journalists bring publicaccess and a strong sense of the public pulse. Together, newpartnerships might begin to break through the uncivil spectacle to providethe public with more informed perspectives. Both journalists and scholarsneed to take the initiative—and some risks—to create these thirdspaces.

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Incivility in Political Discourse

Panel One

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We began our gathering on Tuesday March 29th with a current hot topic:incivility in political discourse. To prompt the discussion, three of our panelistswrote short essays exploring the deeper reasons that public discourse seems souncivil today. The full essays by Robert Entman, Lance Bennett, and RoderickHart can be found at:http://uiswcmsweb.prod.lsu.edu/manship/MassComm/ReillyCenter/item16477.html

These three scholars of political communication moved beyond the usual litanyof “causes” of incivility (i.e. cable news bloviating and online ranting) to explorethe deeper reasons for the current state of public discourse.

Entman, “Incivility and Asymmetrical Partisan Warfare”:Incivility can be defined not just in terms of politeness, but alsoin terms of orderly discourse. Today’s “political and policymakingprocesses are not ordered around acknowledged facts or even thesearch for and reasoned discussion of arguable facts. Nor arepublic policy decisions in the US driven by the desire to solveproblems…” Our political conversation has become increasinglydisorderly because there are declining incentives for “partisanmutual adjustment.” One of our two main political parties todaybenefits electorally and in policy-making from impolite anddisorderly discourse, while the other lacks incentives to fight backwith equal fervor.

Hart, “The Seductions of Incivility”: In contrast to the popularnotion that we should just ”return to civility,” we must recognizethat incivility (the impolite kind) exists for a reason: It isattractive. In fact, incivility serves a number of functions—noneof them necessarily rational or conducive to democracy, but veryhuman functions nonetheless. Incivility is dramatic, personified,expulsive, even poetic—for these and other reasons, it flourishes.We should distinguish between “gold-plated incivility—the stuffof great revolutions,” and the more banal “coarse and unthinkingresponses to the irritations” of everyday political life.

Bennett, “What’s Wrong with Incivility?: Civility as the NewCensorship in American Politics”: Calling for a “return to civility”has become the new political correctness that stifles politicaldebate. When one side of the political aisle has greater resourcesand incentives to make public conversation disorderly, while theother lacks a high-grade moral discourse with which to respond,then civility itself becomes the problem. In that rigged contest,we can have a ”civil” debate that nonetheless lacks a true

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exchange of morally principled ideas. “To fail in this rhetoricalopportunity to be honest about American values will maketactical choices about political discourses — civil or uncivil, brandX or Y — matter little.” Meanwhile, inequality in America isincreasing dangerously and the left seems to have no moraldiscourse to counter the personal freedom and anti-governmentdiscourse of the right.

In response to these provocative ideas, our other panelists joined in a spirited,and quite civil, debate. Here is a condensed version of our discussion; the fulltranscript can be found at:http://uiswcmsweb.prod.lsu.edu/manship/MassComm/ReillyCenter/item16477.html

Notice how the discussion turned on several key questions thatshould be of interest to students, professionals, and scholars:

j Hasn’t American politics always been uncivil?

j Who is most to blame for the incivility we see in politicstoday?

j Is civility among policy-makers in Washington possibleanymore, given changes such as redistricting and the riseof partisan media?

j Is civility among the general public possible anymore, orhave we become so divided that we have lostfundamental agreement on shared principles?*

j What can the academy and communicationsprofessionals do to increase civil discourse?

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LANCE BENNETT

Calling for civility is not a viable solution to our communicationproblems in America today. In fact, I say it's part of the problem.

How can that be, you might ask at this hour of the morning. Ithink the problem is that the left has no high-ground moraldiscourse to counter the right's very principled moral discourse ofindividual freedom as the ultimate American value.

So in effect, rude discourse becomes an effective communicationstrategy when the other side has no moral discourse to respondwith when attacked. The left does not call upon America'snatural high-ground progressive discourse of equality.

The United States leads the democratic world in the level of andthe growth of inequality. And most political scientists know thatdemocracy can't stand extreme inequalities at the level thatAmerica is approaching or perhaps has exceeded. Economicdifference breeds social identification differences, lack of trust andsense of worth, with some people feeling overly worthy and othersbranded not worthy enough to be in the same society together.

Lack of caring and a lack of concern about the common good,which democracy depends on, has been lost in this country today,not as a result of incivility, but the result of the naturalconversation partners on the left not being able to talk aboutinequality as a fundamental principle required in democracy.

ROBERT ENTMAN

The problem, it seems to me, is that incivility, defined asreinforcing the disorderly nature of American politics, serves theinterest of one political party, serves the basic ideological goals ofits constituents and particularly its funders. And the other partyis, for various reasons, incapable of responding in kind.

The Republicans, it seems to me, have undertaken a campaign ofthis form of incivility, of disorder in the policy process, for a verygood reason from their strategic point of view. It serves theirinterest to make government less respected, less efficient and lesseffective. For the Democrats, there are structural reasons, and hereI would sort of part ways with Lance. I think there are reasons whythe Democrats don't come up with an equality narrative, or in factthe Democrats have no narrative at all — in particular the way weorganize our political campaigns.

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Let me make a contrast and also say why this should not be seen asan anti-Republican screed. All I want to do is go back to the 1980s,okay, when Ronald Reagan was president. There was a bipartisan taxincrease to deal with a big budget deficit problem. There wascooperation in foreign policy such that we sort of managed thetransition to negotiating with the Soviet Union and allowing it tocollapse fairly peacefully. George McGovern and Barry Goldwaterwere his best of friends. Tip O'Neill played poker with Ronald Reagan.All of this is gone now. Why? Why have we moved so far to the pointwhere now Republicans are not willing to acknowledge real problemslike climate change, like what really is the source of our fiscal deficit?And how do we bring them back to the point where as in the 1980s,they're conservative, they have a very compelling story, compellingleaders, but they could also work with Democrats?

That seems to be the central problem of incivility and disorderthat we face, and it needs to be addressed.

RODERICK HART

I'm a bit more pluralistic than my colleagues are because I thinkincivility is not a product of the Right alone. I'm old enough toremember the Left making very difficult challenges to PresidentReagan and others, as well. So it just happens to be at thisparticular moment maybe the louder and more obnoxious voicesare on the Right. But, the Left is fully capable of producingincivility and does so every day. Indeed, I would suggest that ifyou go to a union bar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin tonight, you'd hearsome extraordinarily uncivil things being said about the(Republican) governor of Wisconsin.

JACK HAMILTON

I think these arguments seem rather de-contextualized. We have along history of incivility. We have Aaron Burr shooting AlexanderHamilton, and we have the Alien and Sedition Acts, which was oneof the supreme acts of political incivility in this country, trumpinganything that is happening today: The actual act of throwingpeople in jail because you didn't like what they said, one partystomping on another.

Thinking about the obvious canard that Barack Obama isn't anAmerican citizen is not an anomaly at all. It comes out of a finehistorical tradition. It may go viral because we have newtechnology to spread it around.

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But incivility in our society today is not just about politics, it'sabout the way we treat sports, it’s about — I’m appalled, though,I’m sure many people in this audience enjoy watching this guy,the vulgarian, the comedian – the movie where he runs aroundand insults people, who is that?

Borat, yes.

So Borat cannot be disassociated, it seems to me, from politics.He's part of what's going on today in our society.

LANCE BENNETT

On page two of my paper I cite no less an authority than Sarah Palinon the history of incivility in America. And she says, "When was therhetoric less heated? Back in those calm days when political figuresliterally settled their differences with dueling pistols?"

I guess my question is what do we gain by contextualizinghistorically? How do we contextualize to draw some useful point?Just saying that there has always been incivility in a waylegitimizes our current state of affairs, and we might not want todo that lightly.

The rudest form of democracy of all is the abandonment ofsubstantial proportions of our citizenry to poverty, poor health,bad education. All of the things that make the American dream areality are being set adrift in this moment of incivility.

ROBERT ENTMAN

I don't think it matters whether in a bar in Milwaukee, Democratsare just as nasty as Republicans in a bar in Omaha, or whatever.That's really not terribly significant to what I think we're trying toget at here, which is at the elite level.

I really think it's important that we acknowledge there is adifference between the two parties and the level of incivility inwhich they engage—incivility as, let's just say for shorthand, adisregard of factuality. And the reason for that is that theRepublicans gain, everything sort of works their way, by usingincivility.

Has it been going on for 200 years like that? I don't know. I don'tknow why it matters. I mean, it seems to me what matters iswhat's happening now. We have some very serious problems.

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Let me just say one last thing on this. Incivility as Borat reallydisregards the definition of civility. The definition has to do withgovernment, with civic life, not certain people making fun of eachother and so on. I would agree that our society seems to becoarsened in a number of ways, but that's not the key problem.

RODERICK HART

There is something about the way one uses language that, indeed,is either civil or uncivil. And I think that a more fundamentalquestion before you even get to the world of public policy is this:How you decide to use your mind and your mouth at the sametime?

I think it is a larger, cultural thing. I point out to you theadvertising that was done at the Super Bowl this past year. It wasreally quite shocking. The most famous one featured a little babygetting smashed against a hotel room window. Stand back andlook at that as cultural discourse. And ask yourself if this is thebest we human beings can do when using our mouths to interactwith one another about, what, renting a vacation home?

AMY WALTER

I think that this is a really fantastic discussion, to get into thisidea about who's being more fact based or truthful, and who'sbeing more uncivil. Let's watch for these next couple of monthshere. Let's see how civil Democrats are once the entitlementreform debate begins, and I doubt that we're going to be able tosay that their claims will be completely fact based. I doubt thatwe'll be able to say that they are not making claims that are overthe top. I mean, even before this began you saw the democraticcampaign committee going in with ads targeting members ofCongress before the discussion even began. And so I think thechallenge really is, especially for those who are leaders of thecampaign committees, people whose job it is to help elect thesepeople, to say let the discussion begin before you begin the namecalling, right?

Disagreement is the name of the game. This is what we'resupposed to be about, and the name-calling can be part of it. But,let's have that without the money pouring into ads and targetingbefore we've even gone one block on this debate.

The political machinery knows that these are the sorts of thingsthat help them win races. And so until that piece is taken in,

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saying you have to agree, Democratic National Committee/Republican National Committee, not to spend one dime trashingthe other party until we actually have gotten something done.Until that happens I don't think you're going to get very far.

SHANTO IYENGAR

I want to address Jack's comment about contextualization.Unfortunately, as a social scientist, contextualization requiressome form of data evidence, and so I'm only going to be referringto contextualization since 1948, since that is when survey datafirst became available.

There is no doubt, it's crystal clear, that if you look at Americanpublic opinion and you ask the question how do Democrats andRepublicans feel about each other, there has been a profoundshift in sentiment.

The University of Michigan has this device called a feelingthermometer. How you feel about people. If you don't like them atall, give them a score of zero, and if you feel very warm aboutthem, give them a score of 100. And if you look at Democrats’evaluations of Republicans and vice versa and track the averagescore beginning in 1948, it's pretty close to 50. They’re indifferentabout the other side until 1980, and then you begin to witness arather steep polarization in these thermometer scores. In 2008the average was 29, so that's a pretty dramatic increase in — Idon't want to call it hatred, but it reminds me of — I'm sureyou're familiar with Hunter Thompson's classic work — itreminds me of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72.

The debate in political science used to be that political elites arepolarized and there may be incivility at the top, but among rank-and-file partisans everything is fine. People get along, you know,there isn't this level of intense dislike. My good friend Mo Fiorinatakes that position that there's elite polarization but not masspolarization, but I would simply go on the record as saying thathe’s right if you define polarization in ideological or policy terms,but wrong if polarization means a lack of goodwill and trustacross the partisan divide.

Let's ask the question how would you feel if your son or daughterwere to marry someone from a party other than yours. This is aclassic question that was asked by Almond and Verba in theirlandmark study of the civic culture in 1959. American

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respondents laughed out loud when the interviewer posed thisquestion to them. We have replicated that question three times inthe last four years. In the most recent replication we find thatthere are more people in this country who find the politicalhurdle to marriage more significant than the religious hurdle. It's25 percent as of 2010.

JACK HAMILTON

And what's the percentage for religion?

SHANTO IYENGAR

It's about 24 percent.

MICHAEL DELLI CARPINI

I do think that at the level of national politics right now, theevidence is stronger that part of the Republican Party's nationalstrategy — whether you talk about the Republican Party asindividual people in office, people associated with the RepublicanParty, or whether you talk about various parts of the media thatare supportive of the Republican Party — is to make argumentsthat are counter to even basic facts. But, there's another part ofincivility that has to do with tone. And I think this is part of whatRod's been trying to get at. Think about the controversy overSarah Palin's website that had the Democratic office holderstargeted with a gun sight. That was viewed as uncivil. That's not afact-based concern, right? That's a concern about the tone of theargument. And I think that those issues are also crucial in howwe think about politics and the level of civility.

How does one make an argument that is a principleddisagreement with your opponents but do it in a way that is notoverly personalized, that is not over the top, whatever we meanby “over the top?” So maybe it is helpful to think about incivilityas manifested in the language that people use and the behaviorof people.

Additionally, maybe one of the ways of thinking about it is thatincivility is a product of the larger conditions of a political andsocial system. At some point if there are fundamental value-baseddisagreements among groups in society it becomes really difficultto be civil, right? If you think about what's going on in the MiddleEast right now, there's lots of ways you can think about the unrestand the rebellions and the protests. At one level you could look at

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that and say, why are these people being so uncivil to each other?But that's not the way we would think about it, because I think wehave sensed from looking at it from afar that there are somefundamental disagreements there, value based, condition based,equity based. I think you would say I understand why there is thatdegree of animus that's taking place.

What I want to put on the table is, are we at a point in the UnitedStates where differences in values and differences in actualeconomic conditions are such that incivility is a necessary outcome?

JACK HAMILTON

The other thing that just occurred to me is that in our country wedon't have much of a tradition of strong dissent. We've alwayshad a pretty strong consensus in our country — a middle-classconsensus where everybody sort of agrees.

Let me put it another way because I can tell by the expression onyour face you absolutely don't agree with that, so I'm going to tryand make another stab at this.

LANCE BENNETT

I can't wait to disagree.

JACK HAMILTON

That's good. We've had a very strong middle class in this countryand rarely have had a really strong left or really strong right forany sustained period of time. And maybe what is wrong in ourcountry is that we don't have a good enough tradition of havingpeople far enough away from the center and enjoying that.

LANCE BENNETT

Wow, how many ways can I disagree with that? I think that's nottrue. It's not contextualized, Jack.

Just in the last century I can name at least three moments ofstrong ideological conflict that raised the values of equalitythrough social movements. And they weren't middle-classmovements at all. There was the union workers’ rightsmovements in the beginning of the 20th century and the late19th century that produced a readership for an activist press.This is where journalists might pay heed. A readership formagazines like McClure's, the “muckrakers” as Teddy Roosevelt

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stigmatized them, was by no means a middle-class audience.Upton Sinclair and, in his early days Walter Lippmann, wrote forthese publications that played important roles in socialmovements and social reform.

And then I could go to the 30s where there was, again, a strongideological equality-based social movement that was notmiddle class.

And then I would go to the civil rights movement of the 40s, 50s,and 60s, again not a middle class but a strong equality-orientedmovement that expanded the American dream for a lot ofexcluded Americans.

And that's what we're missing today.

DAN BALZ

I think it's wrong to say that Democrats have not attempted tomake this argument about equality and inequality. If you lookback at almost every Democratic campaign for the last fourcycles or more, that has been a central theme of the message.

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Whether it was Al Gore's “the people versus the powerful”;certainly John Kerry talked about inequality or the insecurity ofthe middle class.

But, I think that one of the problems that Democrats andprogressives have had over a long period of time is that for somany years that was, in fact the, central narrative of Americanpolitics — the New Deal, the Great Society, expandingopportunity, redistribution, et cetera. And at a certain point thepublic rebelled against that. They felt that it wasn't working, itwas too much, it was too costly. It was taking too much out oftheir own middle-class well-being. And so the Democrats havehad a much harder time making that argument and I think havebecome more timid at making it consistently.

The other point I wanted to make — and I think part of thereason we're here discussing incivility — is not because peopleare concerned that the dialog is occasionally rude and over thetop. I think the issue is the degree to which that is or isn'tcontributing to this sense that we're not able to govern. We're notable to collectively deal with big problems facing the country.

If you go back to the Reagan era, it wasn't that there was totalcivility in politics, but there was a structure of American politicsthat in fact allowed or encouraged people on different sides tofigure out how to come together.

And in the meantime, as Shanto points out, the sorting out thathas happened, the homogenization of the two parties, hasallowed people to talk only to themselves and not to be forced togo across this line.

So the question, I think in my mind, is not how do you reduceincivility but how do you get things done in a period in whichincivility is commonplace and accepted and not going awayanytime soon?

BILL PURCELL

Marvin Griffin, the former governor of Georgia said, "Politics is likekilling rats. It's all day and all night." I think incivility has been therethroughout, and we've all experienced it. I think what troubles us isthat it appears to be effective. It appears to be making a difference.It appears to in some way have moved to the front.

And in reading these papers and then hearing the authors what

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occurs to me is that incivility has the ability to appear to work orperhaps to work in a vacuum, particularly at a time when peopleare anxious and uncertain and unclear about their world. And atthis moment I think they are unclear about the whole world, fromglobal warming to recent events in Japan and in the Middle East.

There is more uncertainty about those things and less answers,even from their leaders frankly, than at any time perhaps inrecent memory. And when they're uncertain, and then there isthis one other thing, a vacuum, into that can step these kinds ofuncivil moments and provide, or appear to provide, leadership.Even when it's not showing a direction, it's only a negativereaction. And that's why I think at this moment this level ofincivility is so troubling to us.

But, what replaces it or resolves it is, in the end, leadership,people who provide answers and solutions and direction withwhich people are comfortable. Until that happens then thatvacuum and that void is filled by these other voices, and it'sterribly troubling.

JACK HAMILTON

Can I come back to a point that Dan made? If Senator Breauxwere here I know he would say, as he often does, that one of theproblems with incivility is the way we created political districts,so that they become easy wins for people with views that arefairly consistent within that district. And therefore, they don'thave to spend time getting to know each other and getting alongwith and working with others who have a variety of points ofview. They can just, frankly, serve a smaller group with aparticularly homogenous point of view. And so we've created asystem, or a system has been created, sometimes on purposeand sometimes because of other factors, that has made itpossible for people to actually excel by being strident rather thanby cooperating.

BILL PURCELL

I think I'm much conflicted on that. As you make districts morecompetitive, then in fact you are at the campaign all the time,continuously. It changes the ground rules within the districtsintroducing the notion of wedging issues so as to obtain themathematical majority for that purpose only. I'm not convincedthat making them all very close will be much happier campaigns,

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politicians or peoples who find themselves all day, everyday beingmoved, literally, just by the margins right at the center.

RODERICK HART

I'd like to issue a short sermon. We've been talking appropriatelyabout political variables today. But, I just want to make a couple ofobservations to note that incivility is also a moral choice.

In so many ways, I think we as people are measured by what wesay, but also by what we don't say. The uncivil response is onemade by someone who's decided to say pretty much everythingthat's on his or her mind. Civility, in contrast, is a matter ofchoosing not to say some of the horrid things one is thinking.

Shanto was talking earlier about levels of negative affect and howthere's so much polarization these days. That may well be true,but that does not necessarily have to lead to incivility, which isultimately a separate, rhetorical act.

Being uncivil is something one does with language, with overtbehavior. Having negative feelings, even though they're highlypolarized feelings, does not necessarily have to lead one tobehave in an uncivil manner.

When people are truly aggrieved, when their lives are dismal,then perhaps the natural thing to do is to be uncivil. I understandthat. But there is a great deal of incivility practiced for us on cabletelevision these days by persons whose lives are hardly dismal,who have suffered no real grievances. I argue that the hottestplace in hell is surely reserved for people who are really, reallywell paid and who are uncivil to boot.

SHANTO IYENGAR

I was actually going to say something else but now that Rod hassermonized, my view is that it's the other way around. That thisaffective divide is increasing as a response to incivility. So whenDemocrats and Republicans year in and year out witness the kindof name calling and the stridency of the debate, they naturallyconclude that, gee, people on the other side must be really bad.

BOB MANN

I want to agree with Shanto's point. In my experience, working formany years in the Senate, the most effective people are certainlyin most cases the most civil people, the ones who manage to get

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along. Ted Kennedy was not one of the most effective legislatorsbecause he went around making people angry with him andmaking enemies. He may have made enemies in places likeLouisiana, but within the Senate itself he was pretty effective.And it was because he was a master at civility.

I turn on MSNBC every night for a few minutes for, as long as Ican stand it, and the people that I see getting a lot of theattention on the cable shows are people that I don't think are allthat effective within their institutions. I mean, U.S. Rep. MicheleBachmann couldn't manage to get herself into the leadership.She supposedly has this great following for running forpresident. But, within the House, she's a marginal figure. Shedoesn't pass any legislation. I don't think anyone really followsher, legislatively, at least.

But incivility has become a fairly effective strategy in elections.My experience over 20 or 25 years of politics is that in the averageelection today you start out with a much smaller number ofundecided voters. The electorate starts out more polarized than itdid 20, 30, 40 years ago.

I teach my students that one of the most effective strategies, ifyou want to persuade somebody, is to find a way to agree withthem, find a way to find common ground with them, find a way toidentify with their values.

But, if you want to immobilize someone, then incivility is a prettyeffective strategy. And when the undecideds are disappearingwhat's left is immobilizing the other party’s base, and that'swhere incivility is such an effective political strategy.

So if we can figure out a way to widen the body of swing voters, orundecideds, I think we might see more civility creeping back intothe debate because then civility is just more effective.

SHANTO IYENGAR

It seems to me there's a tension here between what I would callprincipled incivility and incivility that is strictly theater, strictlytactical, strictly a ploy.

And I'm sure Dan will second this, or maybe not since he's amember of the working press, namely that it is negativity thatappeals to journalists.

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DAN BALZ

I completely disagree with that.

SHANTO IYENGAR

Well, what about this notion that —

DAN BALZ

I'm just kidding.

SHANTO IYENGAR

Well what about this notion that the Swift Boat ad generatedmore news coverage than the War in Iraq?

JACK HAMILTON

Let me add to that because I think an important part of thisequation is the media part. To what extent is the soft underbelly

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of journalism seeking out people who have strident views ratherthan those who might be less interesting but perhaps moreconstructive?

AMY WALTER

I think we have to understand that we already did 5,300,000,000words about the deficit problem and what's going on inAfghanistan. I think what the Swift Boat ad did is to take a reallycomplicated concept, which is who do you want to be yourpresident, and recognize that people don't make choices based onpolicy. Especially, when you're talking about electing an executive,policy's a piece of it, there's no doubt, but also they want to getthe measure of these candidates. And so the debate about theSwift Boat ad or the debate about birthers or the debate about somany of these other things is in some ways getting to the heart ofwho are these people that we're putting into this position. It is amuch more emotional process, and I think we have to be able toembrace that.

Plus, this goes to the heart of who the general public believes isthe proper messenger. I can go out and make a statement and saywe went through and we checked all these facts, and they’re justnot true. And there's going to be a big segment of the populationthat says “I don't trust you, I'm not with you because I went to mynews source that said it was true. I'm going to believe who I wantto believe.” And so there's not one capital "T" true.

We've written a billion times about where the president was born.It hasn't stopped the debate.

REGINA LAWRENCE

Perfect discussion for what I wanted to raise, getting back to thisdistinction between incivility as tone versus incivility as a fact-based ordered discussion. I'm wondering about the mainstreammedia's role in helping to make the discussion more ordered.

We've seen, I think, an increase in these nonfactual claims thatreally take on a prominent place in the discourse. I'm thinking alot about death panels because it's a study I've been doing. Thesimple answer and the appealing answer is to say, well, themainstream media should just do a better job of fact checking,right? Maybe that’s a viable model for journalism, even abusiness model, if you will, long term?

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But, it's not going to happen just with doing one fact-checkingexercise. I think it would have to be a concerted repositioning andrethinking of what mainstream journalism is and what it can be,to say we are going to consistently be in the business of not justreporting he said/she said, Republicans say it's this, Democratssay it's that. We're going to check it out, and if it's not true thenwe're not going to talk about it anymore. And I think that wouldbe the really hard choice for mainstream journalism to say SarahPalin, Sen. Charles Grassley and others can go on talking andtalking about death panels, but we're not going to talk about itanymore because it's not true. I’m assuming you would agreethat would be the really difficult, profound shift.

DAN BALZ

Well, I mean to some extent I think we do that. But, I guess Iwould say that the proposition that you put forth suggests thatthe mainstream media has a greater power, reach and authoritythan it actually does today. So that's the first problem.

But, in addition to that there is the reality that the media,whichever piece of the media you want to talk about today, is in adesperate hunt for an economic model that will allow us tosurvive. And everybody is coming at that in their own way. And soyou know on cable if you can get 300,000 viewers who are loyal,you've got perhaps a viable niche for that particular program andfor advertising to support that program. So there are a lot ofreasons beyond the tradition that journalists always likecontroversy, and we'll go to negative before we go to positive.

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Suggested Discussion Questions:

j What do you/your students/your staff think aboutBorat? Is that movie indicative of a generalcoarsening of our culture? If Borat is uncivil, is thata different kind of incivility than disorderly andnonfactual political discourse, as some of ourpanelists claimed? And which matters more to thelong-term health of our democratic system?

j Some of the panelists argued that the RepublicanParty benefits more from nonfactual, disorderly anduncivil discourse than the Democrats. Do you agreeor disagree, and why?

j Is the level of polarization and incivility growing sohigh in the US that we now lack fundamentalagreement on basic values and principles? Or is thepolarization superficial?

j Some panelists argued that the real incivility inAmerican life today is found in our significant andgrowing levels of economic inequality. How couldinequality amount to an “uncivil” way of life? Havewe reached that point in the US today?

j One panelist suggested that the real problem “is nothow do you reduce incivility but how do you getthings done in a period in which incivility iscommonplace and accepted and not going awayanytime soon.” Do you agree?

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THE CHALLENGES OFREPORTING IN A POLARIZEDMEDIA ENVIRONMENT

Panel Two

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Next we asked our panelists to discuss a pressing real-worldquestion: From a practitioner’s perspective, what are the biggestchallenges facing political communicators today—those in officeand those who report on them? Several themes emerged in thisdiscussion:

j The challenges come not just from declining resourceson the news side and increasing audience fragmentation,but also from well-funded campaigns that assertivelyplant storylines and create controversies for the media tocover.

j Technology has been a boon of sorts, but also hasoverwhelmed reporters with “triviality and minutia” and“the race for clicks”—which feeds back into the problemof controlling the storyline.

j The complexity of contemporary politics – seen ineverything from the multifaceted “Tea Party” movementto debates over entitlement reform – makes coveringpublic issues even harder.

j Moreover, the facts get muddled when the presscontinues to cover nonfactual claims because, forreporters, those claims themselves become “the story.”Similarly, when politicians refuse to engage, the pressfinds it difficult to mount an independent challenge tononfactual or manipulative claims.

j Journalism is being practiced in a variety of ways today.Some of the most inventive and possibly the mostvaluable journalism is happening outside of traditionalnewsrooms.

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JACK HAMILTON

Okay. So round two, we're going to zero in on the media and askthem to talk a little bit about these issues. In the end, we're goingto try to come up with some questions about what we should bedoing to train journalists to do a better job and perhaps trainpeople to do a better job understanding what the media does welland doesn't do well.

DAN BALZ

I want to lay out sort of a broad thought to start with, and that isthat one of the roles of the press is to, in one way or another, helpdemocracy work more effectively. And obviously the press has alot of other roles in addition to that: an education role, anentertainment role, a profit-making role.

There are a variety of things that any news-gatheringorganization has to think about. But, you know I think, at heart,we have to think about information as being kind of a lubricantthat makes the machinery of democracy run better.

What are the reasons that we are falling short of the ideal? Theseare in no particular order, but elements that I think contribute tothis.

One is the fragmentation of the audience. I've been at the Postalmost 33 years. When I think of the audience that we used tohave compared to the audience that we have today and the timethat our readers have today compared to what they may havehad 30 years ago, we're living in a completely different world.

And that's not just the Post. It's everybody. And it's a point that'sbeen made many times before, but I think it bears repeating, andthat is that it deprives the country of common conversation. Andin the absence of kind of a commonality of conversation, it ismuch more difficult for any part of the media to do the kinds ofthings that Regina was suggesting earlier, which is to, in otherwords, sort fact from fiction and truth from distortion.

Related to that, obviously, is that we are entering into or perhapsreentering into a period of a more partisan press. For most of thetwentieth century, the press was seen as an impartial participantin this great experiment of democracy, and that's clearly nolonger the case. The idea of objectivity, if it was ever achievable, isnow seen as not necessarily valuable in a way that it used to be.

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And I think that has had a significant effect on the wayjournalism writ large is able to do its job. There is the loss ofcredibility generally from the media. I don't think there's anyquestion about that, that next to politicians and used carsalesman, the media is not well thought of. It diminishes theability of any part of the media or people in the media to do thekind of job that they think they're supposed to do in bringingsome light, rather than heat, to an uncivil and divided society.

Second, there is a disagreement over facts today. I had aconversation with Andy Kohut of Pew a year or so ago. And hesaid one of the striking changes when you look at public opinion,and Shanto probably can reinforce this, is that there used to be atime when conservatives and liberals disagreed on what wasneeded to, let's say, fix the economy. But, they generally agreed onwhat the condition of the economy was and today left and rightdo not.

Often people's perceptions of the economy or a particularproblem are grounded much more in self-identification of partyand ideology, than they are in necessarily the facts of themoment. And so at the time when George W. Bush was in office,Republicans had much more confidence in government than theydo now, when Barack Obama is in office. Even if nothing hadchanged.

My next point, and I think it's a very important one, and that isthat there has been in a sense the triumph of the permanentcampaign that has affected journalism as much as it has affectedpolitics. And by that what I mean is that the campaigning and thetactics of campaigning are now perpetual, not just in campaignpolitics but in government.

We now have in the communications apparatus on the politicalside something that did not really exist when I started in thebusiness, and that is a proactive effort on the part of politicalcommunicators not to simply supply information but to shape anarrative and to plant a story. I mean, the dirty little secret todayis that much of what you see in the press critical of onecandidate or another was generated out of research by anopposing campaign. The press is not as transparent about that asit should be, and we've put down some rules at the WashingtonPost about how to be transparent.

But, the reality is — because, the news organizations are smaller,

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the demands are greater, and you have less time to really dothorough reporting — much more is handed to you.

It doesn't mean the press doesn't check it, but much more comesto you directly from somebody who has political and self-interestin attacking, destroying, and weakening the opposition. And wehave become complicit in that in a way, that we are not beinghonest about that as we ought to be.

I think another aspect of what has made our jobs more difficultand made it harder for us to do them in a way that I think weought to is that now, because of the nature of technology, we areoverwhelmed with triviality and minutia and inside-gamediscussions as opposed to being able to step back and think morebroadly, report more deeply.

Twitter is a great information source for me and I know for manyjournalists. It has replaced the old wire service ticker in thenewsroom as the place where you get the news fastest. Nobodylooks to AP for the bulletin anymore. You go to Twitter, and if youare following enough of the right people you'll hear and learnabout things faster there than you can anywhere else.

But, at the same time that is what it is, which is a 140-character-maximum tip sheet. And then out of each of those tweets, thereis a discussion that gets going in bytes as opposed to the thoughtsand paragraphs and sentences in long form journalism.

The other is that as our audiences have fragmented, we speakmuch more to one another rather than to the country at large orto broader audiences. I think that over time newspapers are less amass media than they were twenty years ago or forty years ago.

Even newspapers, as broad an audience as we have, have becomemore of a niche publication. Our circulation at the Post, like everynewspaper, is down significantly in the last ten years. We havegone from mass to niche, and it has forced the conversation intosmaller discussion. We talk more about fewer things. And as aresult, I think that it allows the politicians to have greatermanipulative power over what the press does.

And finally, I would say that the other factor that has anenormous effect on what we do is simply the decline in resourcesthat we have. We have fewer reporters, and the Washington Post,for example, now no longer has a single national bureau. We usedto have bureaus in New York and Atlanta and Florida and Texas

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and Denver and California and Seattle, not all at the same time butat one time or another and for a long time in most of those places.We shut them down during the Great Recession because—

JACK HAMILTON

You don't have one in New York?

DAN BALZ

We don't have one in New York, no. We have not a single nationalbureau. I can't tell you the effect that had on the staff when thatemail went out announcing that. I mean, it was just kind of asense of, we lost our ambition. But, it was done for a specificreason and that was because the newsroom and the paper washemorrhaging money, and we had to — the editors were underpressure to find ways to cut costs.

We don't have the reach that we once had in a large part becausewe don't have the economic resources.

So, I think all of that creates an environment in which it is muchharder for us to do anything other than kind of stay abreast ofthe daily developments.

We're under pressure to grow our web audience in a significantway. We all know what that means, and that is, in a sense, goingdownscale. It is going more tabloid. If there is a "trending topic"our website feels the need to be on top of it. And that's notnecessarily chasing deeper, more thoughtful journalism. It'schasing the latest thing Sarah Palin said or somebody else who isexpert at getting attention.

So we're just living in a much different environment today and Ithink a much more challenging environment to do the kind ofjournalism that we think that mainstream media or even the bestof the blog world can and ought to be doing.

AMY WALTER

I think that Dan did an excellent job, so I'm just going to draw ina couple of these points and then open it up.

The question was how does the media work in this polarizedenvironment? And it gets to the central question about is thepress there to be the truth teller? Are we here to be the refereebetween these opposing camps or these different points of view?

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The bigger problem of course is who gets to decide who's tellingthe truth?

Back in the good ole days, right, we knew who “the press” was.There were three national TV networks, and you knew who theywere. You had Cronkite on there telling you how it is, and you hadnational newspapers, and you had public intellectuals, and thosewere the people telling us the truth, which some people look backto fondly.

At the same time, I think there weren't a whole lot of people thatlooked like me telling the truth. There weren't a whole lot ofpeople that looked like a lot of people in this room that were thetruth tellers.

So, the good news about fragmentation is, yes, we've become alittle more niche oriented which in some ways is bad. In that Ican just follow the news feeds and the issues that I care about,and I can completely avoid any issue or any news source that Ifeel disregards my views. But, it means that there are a lot ofother voices now brought into the debate which I think becomereally important and really challenge everybody.

The other challenge going forth — and I think the Tea Party was areally fascinating story for the media to cover, because I thinkwe're going to see more of these, too.

When we cover politics, it's pretty simple arithmetic, right? Youhave the Democratic candidate, you have the Republicancandidate. You have the campaign arms of the major parties. Youhave groups that are aligned with Republicans and groups thatare aligned with Democrats, and there's a leader in each one ofthose movements. If the NRA is running ads against thecandidate, you go to the head of the NRA and you talk to themabout this. You have the Focus on the Family, or you have liberalgroups like labor, and you knew where to go and what they weredoing. And they had a pretty clear agenda, and they also had aleader.

Now, we go into something called the Tea Party movement, whichreally was not what any of us had been used to. There was noleader, there was no central organizing principle, and so howmedia organizations responded to that was sort of interesting. Onthe left, there are accusations that these were racist people whohated the president because of the color of his skin. There were

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people who said absolutely not, these are just people who areinterested in fiscal sanity and finally getting our country back ontrack. They're not Republicans, in fact they're ousting Republicans.

What we really came to learn is that in this era of social mediaand fragmentation, it's going to be harder and harder for us tosort of categorize these movements. And they are going to keeppopping up.

I wrote about the Tea Party at the beginning, saying it's a moodand not movement. And the mood was one that was, I think,shared by a lot of Americans who didn't identify themselves asTea Partiers. There was a deep level of anger and frustration outthere among the electorate from a whole bunch of reasons.Fundamentally there were issues that they raised that a whole lotof people could agree with which was the sense that Washingtonis broken, the sense that these big issues that we keep sayingwe're going to tackle and politicians keep saying that they'regoing to buck up and deal with, they haven't.

And so there's just boiling frustration bubbling over, and we hadto call it the Tea Party because we didn't really know how to

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categorize it any other way. And I remember the most difficultthing on election night — as we were leading up to election night,the obvious question comes out in one of our planning meetings,which is, okay, so the results are coming in, we're going to list howmany TeaParty candidates won, and how many Tea Partycandidates lost. Well, there really is no such thing as a Tea Partycandidate. How can that be? There's a Tea Party, there's a TeaParty movement, there are Tea Party candidates.

Well, yes, but everybody sort of has a different definition. TheWashington Post defined Tea Party candidates as this, the New YorkTimes defined them as this, these people defined them as that.There are thousands of definitions for what is a Tea Partycandidate. So they sort of made it up as they went along, which isfine, but it is much more difficult to put empirical data on them.And we, as journalists, also have to be okay with that, and that'shard for us because we do like to have things very black and white.

And that goes to final point which is the fact that we're dealingright now with complex issues that aren't necessarily easily putinto the “this person's right, this person's wrong, this is the fact, andthis is just absolutely made-up false.” You get to the battle overentitlement where many Democrats are saying there's no problemin Social Security, we're going to be fine. So let's tackle other issuesbefore we tackle Social Security. And Republicans are sayingabsolutely not, this is going to fall apart right before our eyes.

It's a very complex story to tell — for anybody to tell — in a waythat really gets people better educated where we can feel likewe've actually told the truth about the story, because it's not aseasy or as simple as that.

And I think we're going to continue to be into this push and pull— because the the race for clicks becomes much more significant.

I think that the media is still trying to figure out what is thecorrect metric to use to determine whether you're popular or not.Is it how many people read your stories? Is it how many have re-tweeted the tweet about your story? Is it how may people havepicked up an actual copy of the newspaper? Is it how manyvideos you've got? It is how much money somebody spent to puta video on? It looks very different today than it looked even amonth ago in terms of helping determine the success or failure ofgetting that story to regular people.

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ROBERT ENTMAN

I did want to just say one thing, which is that often people fromwhat I still believe are the mainstream media, tend to be overlymodest about their continued clout.

It seems to me that despite the fragmentation, there is still theneed for an issue to be widely diffused to the point thatpoliticians have to pay attention. The traditional media can stillhave a real role in the gate keeping.

JACK HAMILTON

I've been sitting here thinking about the fact that the Postdoesn't have any national bureaus, and I didn't know that. Andthen I got to thinking about the obvious forces that act onjournalists, from the point of view of the public, do we actuallyknow less than we did before?

DAN BALZ

Well, I think there is more information more readily availabletoday for people who want to find it, than there ever has been.But, does that mean we are better informed? I don't know if that'sthe case because we can know about the existence of a lot ofthings. But, the question is does the journalism we provide todaygive you the context, the history, the full report on those in a waythat you can process it easily and make it accessible?

I'll give you an example of why I think that the lack of domesticbureaus makes a difference for a paper like the Post. And I saythis as a former bureau person. I was in our Texas bureau forthree years. When a story like Wisconsin erupts, we can getreporters there and everybody did. But, without a Midwest bureauwe're going to pay attention to that story only when it isenormously hot. And if we are lucky we will go back from time totime, but I suspect we will not go back as much as if I were in theChicago bureau. We would be able to look and find ways to writeabout that story for our audience that would be different thanthe Milwaukee Journal or the Madison Capital Times because they'vegot their own particular perspective.

And I think that the value of having people in bureaus is that youget to understand and know a region or a particular group ofpoliticians or a particular trend in a particular area, in a way thatis different from people who are in Washington only.

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And I think today it's possible to report everything from a placethat is not where the action really is. You can report almost anystory from Washington now. You can get access to video. You canphone people, no matter where they are. You can do a somewhatcreditable job of covering a story like that, but I don't think youever understand it in the same way you do if you're there.

And the more people are out there, I think the better thejournalism is that we can provide to people. Does that meanpeople don't have some sense of what Governor Scott Walkertried to do in Wisconsin or the basic argument that's going on?No. But, I don't think it is as full and rich as we've been able toprovide in the past.


In the admittedly crude way that some of us who study whatpeople know, the basic conclusion is that people are no more norno less informed overall in general now than they were in theEighties or the Sixties even going back to the Fifties and Forties.

So the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing? You couldmake a case that with all the information technologies, increasededucation, and so on and so forth, you would expectimprovements, but you don't see them. There's at least a little bitof evidence, though it's really mixed, that in the new informationenvironment you're beginning to see a bigger gap between groups.For those who are informed, there's more choice involved in thatnow, and so the gap between the informed and the uninformed isgetting a little bit wider.

I also think it's a little early to look at these kinds of things. Irealize this is a more academic approach, but you might not seethe full implications of these changes for another five, ten, fifteenyears before you really know what the effects are.

But, I think it's really important not to romanticize when we didn'tdo that great a job in the past. I mean, you look at levels of generalknowledge about important issues in the past, and you knowthere's always been a group that seems to be quite informed and amajority of the public that's sort of informed and then a big part ofthe population that is really uninformed about things.

So the issue is not just are we doing any worse, but are therethings we could do better?

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I'm not sure I can think of examples that are as dramatic as thekind of persistent misinformation about something like Obama'sbirthplace. The last survey I saw was that if you added the peoplewho said they weren't sure and the people who said they didn'tthink he was born in the United States, that it was a majority of theAmerican public that at least said they weren't sure where he wasborn. So that level of persistent misinformation you can tie prettydirectly to a regular presentation of that issue in the mediaenvironment.

I just was watching the news last night, and there was at leastsixty seconds or two minutes devoted to Donald Trump talkingabout he is no longer certain as to whether Obama was born inthe United States. The traditional journalistic approach to this isif somebody in a position of importance—and Donald Trump isthinking about running for president plus he's Donald Trump—says something outrageous like that, the way it gets covered is hegets sixty seconds or so to talk about it. And then someone willanswer afterwards, “but of course this issue has pretty much beenput to bed. We have reason to think Obama was born in theUnited States.”

But, how is that affecting what people think when you hearconstantly people coming forward with these claims? Is itcompletely outrageous for news organizations — how much doesit violate the traditions of what journalists should do to say, youknow what, we're not going to talk about it so much?

AMY WALTER

But, Donald Trump and others who are doing that, they know theaudience that they’re speaking to. Right now, he is speaking to aRepublican primary audience which is an audience that's going tobe much more receptive to that, right?

So, within the Republican primary, that's actually a debate thatthey're going to continue to focus on. We've already debunked it,but they're going to keep talking about it. So that in and of itself isthe story, which is you have candidates going and talking to theprimary electorate with that on the top of their agenda.

JACK HAMILTON

Can I throw something in here? There’s another side to that, too,that you might want to react to, which is that some of the finestmoments in journalism are the moments when reporters go out

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and say something is or is not true. We all know examples ofEdward R. Murrow when he stood up and said McCarthyism waswrong. There are even smaller moments that are not smaller forthe people involved in them.

One I always like to think about is during the Chechnya Warthese AP reporters — the Soviets were saying that no one wasbeing killed, and they went out under fire and counted the bodies.And they weren't just saying what the Soviets said and what theChechens said — one side said this and the other side said that —they went out and counted the bodies.

And it seems to me in journalism one of the things that has tohappen is people have to tell us — it's not okay to just say we getbalance. People have to sometimes go out and tell us what'sreally happening.

DAN BALZ

The press can't ignore certain things.

This comes out of the '92 campaign. It's one of my favoriteexamples.

When the Gennifer Flowers story broke about Bill Clinton, theNew York Times decided that they were not going to touch thisstory for some perfectly legitimate gatekeeper reasons. And so,they were carrying nothing about this as the problem becamegreater and greater. And we felt for all the other reasons thatbecause it was consuming his campaign, we had to deal with itand wanted to deal in a way we thought was responsible. And itreached the point where his campaign was, as you all remember,genuinely threatened by this. And we were wondering how theNew York Times would report the story that Bill Clinton droppedout of the presidential race yesterday because of something —because of a scandal that we've told you nothing about up to now.That would've been irresponsible on the part of the New YorkTimes.

But, the other point is are there times when the press should goout and proactively tell the truth? I think we try to do that. And Ithink the question is how often do you have to do it?


If we expect the media to play a role in informing people, itrequires repeating things. One way people learn is they hear it

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again and again and again and again, that violates, I know, a lot ofnorms of journalists.

But, if you feel forced into covering something like where wasObama born or the earlier issues like the ones that you'vementioned, the idea starts with: Here are the facts, now we'll tellyou what's happened today about that. As much as that violateswhat journalist are “supposed” to do, if you want people to learn,you've got to do that.

LANCE BENNETT

There are choices. There are choices about sources and framesthat you do make. And I think we could acknowledge these arereally more conscious choices than they appear.

There was another story about the Tea Party that I only heard afew times. I did hear it, but it seems to me to be a moreinteresting and important story about the Tea Party which is, arethey really the creatures of the Koch brothers and Dick Armeyand Fox News, among others? Why wasn't that the daily repeatedstory? Because the Tea Party has this mythology of being agrassroots spontaneous uprising of concerned citizens whowanted to take back the real American values, right? Why wasn'tthe special interest backstory repeated more often for publicinformation purposes? That might have been a more enlighteningstory for the public to hear more often.

ROBERT ENTMAN

I have an answer to that. It's just an obscure theory about“indexing,” and that's an inside academic —

DAN BALZ

You lost us.

AMY WALTER

Yes. You can tell who is in academia and who's not.

ROBERT ENTMAN

That is to say, if that story line or frame is to be imposed as amajor part of the narrative, one of the two sets of elites whodominate the news, create the news, has to be purveying thatline. And they weren't. The Democrats were not saying, wait asecond, this Tea Party — and they could've exaggerated and said

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it's purely a fiction manufactured by the Koch brothers orwhatever. But, they didn't even try to do that. So then it becomesvery hard for journalists to make it a continuing story.

AMY WALTER

I do think where the press did get it right, was to say in manyways this was somewhat spontaneous. These people came out ofnowhere, like Christine O'Donnell, for example, did in Delaware.But, what the media didn't do though, until in some cases it wastoo late, was to pick up on that trend. So by the time we got toDelaware it was clear something was happening.

So much of this was about a mood of the electorate. And that Iguess is the question which is how do you categorize mood?That's a tougher thing to write about.

The Campaign Finance Institute* we can go to as the truth tellers,right? They study this stuff. They came out right after theelection, and what they found was actually Democrats spent a lotmore money.

So this idea that this was a corporate bought election just didn't— the facts — if we're going to go back to facts, the facts werethere.

LANCE BENNETT

They didn't make the media. So, the Tea Party backers had amuch better investment going in media coverage. They just madebetter bets that the media was going to do their pre-publicity forthem.

AMY WALTER

But, wait, they got outspent, and they won. Money doesn't matter.

LANCE BENNETT

No, it matters if the media is actually telling your story for free.

BILL PURCELL

This is changing course slightly. Starting with Dan's premise, Ithink that's been generally accepted, that journalism has at leasta role in helping democracy. The question I have is how do yousee the press helping states, local governments, the people in therest of the country, as we go forward with fewer journalists?

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DAN BALZ

I think that one thing we have to think about is that journalismis now practiced in a lot of places we don't think of asjournalistic. Which is to say there are institutes, think tanks, CFIbeing one but others, the New America Foundation*, variousplaces, where people who used to be employed at newsorganizations try to do the kind of work that they once thoughtthey could at a news organization and found themselvesfrustrated in their inability to it.

I think one of the only issues that still does concern me is, dothose entities, do those institutions have the same kind ofjournalistic values that we were all raised on? Because, there'sbeen kind of a breakdown of that generally as the whole systemhas become democratized, everybody's a journalist. I mean, theidea of citizen journalism is a very good thing, but there are somequestions that we all have about it.

SHANTO IYENGAR

It seems to me one of the themes running through this discussionis that somehow the press and journalism can be a correctiveforce, if you will, to help redress the balance betweenmisinformation and information. And that repetition somehow is

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going to be a force that might work. But, it seems to me, theevidence is increasingly suggesting that the only people who tuneinto the news are the people who have — let's categorize them asrelatively well-informed. And that is not going to have muchimpact on the kinds of problems that Bob is documenting in hispaper, folks who believe that Obama is Muslim, for instance.

So I think it's — we need to be very cautious about making claimsabout exposure, when we know today that the audience for newsis dismally small. This is a point that Michael was raising earlier,too, in this debate about political knowledge.

In many ways, when you think about the press, the model is it'sthe rich getting richer. The only people tuning in to theWashington Post are the people who know a hell of a lot. Everyoneelse is pretty much clueless.

BOB MANN

Well, something that Dan said triggered this thought that I hadabout the imbalance of resources. Newspapers and journalism, ingeneral, are laying off people left and right. Not only the bureausare going away, but the newsroom staff is shrinking. And theaverage reporter, who maybe had the luxury of spending a coupleof days developing a story, is now trying to file three or fourstories a day in some cases.

While, at the same time, more money is being poured intopolitics. The average campaign is finding ways to put even morepeople on its staff to influence the public, influence the press,deal with the press, and now expand to online. Now, you can'thave any kind of campaign of decent size without having a staffdevoted to online and digital media, and so the media are evenmore outnumbered than you once were. How do we possiblyexpect truth or resisting the spin, however you want to put it,when it was never a fair fight, but now it's like a bringing a waterpistol to a knife fight?

DAN BALZ

Well, you're right, but it's not something that can't be resisted orshouldn't be.

I want to take a moment to recall the late David Broder, who dieda couple of weeks ago and was a mentor to me and so manyothers. There was something about David that was unique and

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special, and one of those things was he understood that while theinside game of politics is important and needs to be covered, thatif you're really covering American politics intelligently it is asmuch through the voters as through the candidates and thecampaign operatives.

And that is a lost art at this point in journalism, for a lot ofunderstandable reasons. I don't diminish those reasons. But,David brought a sense to his political coverage and to hisunderstanding of American politics that was not grounded inwhat the Democratic Senate Campaign Committeecommunication staff did or what the Obama campaign’sextremely efficient new media operation was doing.

In other words, he recognized that there was a kind of anindependent source of information that journalists could andshould tap into, if you're covering American politics. And he wentout and did it, literally knocking on doors in select precincts. Andif anybody's ever done it, it's not just going out and grabbing fourpeople at a street corner and asking them a couple of questionsand moving on. It's literally hours of tramping up and down thestreet, knocking on a door, going in, sitting down with people intheir living room and having a conversation with them.

It is laborious work. But, it is work that David always believed in,and I — having learned how to do this with him — agree, alwaysprovides you an insight and in a sense a kind of an independentgrounding so that you are able to resist so much of the daily orhourly or minute-by-minute inflow of stuff that is designed, in asense, to distract you from the main game.

And I think if there were more ways to continue to encouragethat it would help to overcome exactly the problem we are talkingabout.

RODERICK HART

I want to make three small points about connecting journalism tothe electronic media. The web has presented the greatest possibilityfor aggregating information ever conceived. And it also has thegreatest capacity for disaggregating information that's ever beenpossible. And I think this creates three challenges to journalism.

One, and this is particularly important in the United States, is akind of crisis of inclusion — the extent to which we will be able tounderstand how other people live. The civil rights movement in

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some ways came alive with images from Birmingham, Alabama.Suddenly, good, white, Midwestern people on the farm becameconcerned in a way — they hadn’t known any black people untilthen and suddenly all that changed. That was a tremendouslyimportant, emancipatory thing for the nation. That kind ofinstant emancipation has become harder today.

Another challenge I call the crisis of meaning. There have neverbeen more facts available to us than there are these days. Thereal problem is finding out what all these facts mean. Witheveryone having facts, and with everyone having their ownmeanings, the question becomes this: Which meanings are goingto become authoritative? This is the task formerly known as thepress’s major responsibility.

The last one is a crisis of representativeness. Television, inparticular, but print, as well, really trades not so much in facts asin examples. Journalism can't tell everything that happened in agiven day, so it finds the “teaching example,” the synecdoche, thatone little case that tells a much larger story. And because there'sso much out there these days, finding that teaching example hasbecome much harder. For example, take the O.J. Simpson case. Imean, the guy ran with a football and then some time later tookrevenge on his unfaithful wife. We talked about that one example

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for ten whole years in this country. These days, a fresh “O.J. Case”is delivered to us each night on the cheesier cable news stations.

So it seems to me that journalism has never been moreadvantaged and disadvantaged by the very same phenomenon –the extraordinary explosion of information.

LANCE BENNETT

Well, I'm intrigued by most of what you say, Rod, especially thatpoint about the meaning and how we assign meanings and howwe tell these stories, especially when they don't have theinstitutional traction to keep them going.

A study that Regina Lawrence and I did with Steve Livingstonlooked at Abu Ghraib. Our prediction was that even though boththe Times and the Post admitted that they hadn't done the bestpossible job of covering the run-up to the war, our prediction wasthey wouldn't be able to do much better on Abu Ghraib for thesame exact reasons having to with this obscure term “indexing.”This basically says that if there aren't factions who have decision-making power who are keeping another side of the story going,the press can't keep that side of the story going on its own forinteresting reasons having to do with rules that are self-imposed.

So what happened with Abu Ghraib was that for a couple ofweeks the word “torture” came into the news, and the question is,was Abu Ghraib and those horrible moments an isolated incidentof trained troops running amok in the most unfortunate ways, orwas it a symptom of a larger U.S. policy of torturing prisoners ofwar? And the interesting thing is that after a couple of weeks thePost dropped the term “torture.” So I asked the Washington Post’sDana Priest what happened to the term “torture?” And she said,we tried that term but when the Democrats refused to stand upand engage with it, we couldn't continue using it, or it wouldappear to be a crusade on our part. Telling another side of thestory would appear to be, in their perception, a crusade, imposinga frame on the news rather than the sources creating it for them.The press can’t tell another side of the story unless those inpower want to tell it, and that's what indexing is aboutfundamentally.

Journalism schools aren't changing the way journalism is beingtaught. The press isn't changing the way it's reporting stories andyet it's a dying business

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So what's keeping it from being able to rethink and recreate itsown enterprise?

RODERICK HART

You're suggesting that the Manship School start a course inadvocacy journalism?

LANCE BENNETT

Why not? Why not be the one, the first one, to go out there andsay we're going to do a different kind of journalism instruction?

DAN BALZ

Then the question would be advocacy for what? To do the kind ofthing you're talking about requires — you know, you don't juststumble into that. Also, you're advocating advocacy journalism,or at least thinking about new ways of doing journalism, at a timewhen, I think, every news organization is trying to be as creativeand innovative as possible in looking for new ways to do what wedo in order to not just attract more of an audience but to hold theaudience that we have. I can speak about my end of the business,where much of that energy is all focused on the digital side. Andit is a challenge much less of content and much more ofpresentation and how you — what you do to get it to differentplatforms. The amount of time, resources and labor that goes intothat today compared to what goes into the old-fashionedquestions of, what exactly we cover and how are we going tocover it, that balance is shifting just for the reason that the web isthe future, and if we don't master it, we know that we're probablynot going to be around.

BILL PURCELL

This new advocacy journalism, isn't partisan journalism a form ofthat? I grew up in a town where the morning paper wasDemocratic, the evening paper was Republican, everyone knewthat. I guess what I'm wondering, then, are you advocating areturn to another kind of journalism of another time, whenThomas Jefferson had a newspaper, Alexander Hamilton had anewspaper…

LANCE BENNETT

I can quickly clarify that I don't think that offering a side to theAbu Ghraib story framed as torture is advocacy. I think that

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would've been a more accurate framing of the story. Now, youcould take an advocacy position around that, but I don't thinkthat you need to go to advocacy journalism to have discussedthat frame with Abu Ghraib. But, I have no objection to advocacyjournalism. I think it might actually improve our currentcondition.


I think that when we talk about the history of the partisan press,we also have to remember there was brief period during thathistory where there was something called the independentpartisan press. And they still were associated with politicalparties, but they tried to bring in the notion that there were stillsuch things as facts. If you're going to do partisan or ideologicaljournalism, how do you do it in a way that it still has some rulesas to what constitutes how to present information in a truthful,fair manner? In a world where you have a range of outlets, whichthis new media environment provides, I think experimenting withsome of these models to get at something that we think is closerto the truth is a good idea. As complicated as I know that term is,I think that we really need to think of new ways of doing this.

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j Can you identify current examples of manufacturedcontroversies or nonfactual claims that are getting a great dealof news coverage?

j What should journalists do when confronted with stories, likethe controversy over President Obama’s birthplace, that rest onnonfactual claims? For example, should the press havecontinued to cover Donald Trump’s claims for as long as theydid? For that matter, should Trump’s presidential aspirationshave gained as much attention as they did?

j The Tea Party has received a great deal of news coverage.Should the press have focused more on the billionaire fundersbehind that movement?

j Our panelists noted some benefits and some drawbacksstemming from new media technologies. One drawback is “therace for clicks,” as newsrooms try to compete with a multitudeof other sites for web traffic. Is there any upside?

j Panelist Dan Balz observed that a major problem in today’ssociety is media fragmentation. The fragmentation, however, isthe result of many more options for information, on televisionand the Internet. Is this information explosion worth theresulting fragmented media environment? Why or why not?

j In discussing indexing, panelist Lance Bennett argues that “thepress can’t tell another side of the story unless those in powerwant to tell it.” Do you agree? Do you see examples of this incurrent events?

j Panelist Dan Balz said of the news media, “We talk more aboutfewer things. And as a result, I think that it allows thepoliticians to have greater manipulative power over what thepress does.” How do you see this happening in current coverageof political events?

j Do you believe the news media has a responsibility, as panelistBill Purcell says, of “helping democracy?” If so, how might thatimpact that the way some journalists approach their jobs?

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Panel Three

Bridging the Gaps betweenScholarship and Journalism

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In our final panel, we asked our participants what academics andscholars can do together in order to better inform the public andto better prepare students for the contemporary world of mediaand politics. Their thoughtful responses suggest the followingchallenges and some initiatives that could be tried in the academyand in the newsroom, as well as by professional politicaloperatives:

j Clearly, finding resources for new initiatives will be achallenge, and expecting such initiatives to be quickmoneymakers may not allow them to develop.

j Moreover, busy reporters working on tighter deadlines,covering more stories, can find it challenging to findscholars who can translate their research into timely andaccessible knowledge for the general public.

j One possible model is to create tightly focused initiativesthat bring scholarly and journalistic expertise to bear ontopics not currently being covered well. Another is toexperiment with online formats to combine scholarshipand journalism. Still another is to experiment with newforms of journalism education.

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JACK HAMILTON

I think it would be useful to start out by asking the question, is itactually possible to get these two groups to work together? I thinkthere has become a greater rift over the decades betweenacademics and people in the workplace. So, is this a marriagethat could work?

SHANTO IYENGAR

I'm not optimistic. I just want to reiterate something that Dansaid which is that clearly, the Post is having budget-related issues.So all I want to say is that having spent 12 years at a publicinstitution in the state of California, I will echo that sentiment. Ifyou're looking for collaboration from the University of California,for instance, I would think that the budget environment is justnot very promising. So, it's a daunting challenge. How do weactually provide the resources for this kind of a collaborativerelationship to work?

AMY WALTER

Why can't we think about this — when we think about theresources — if it's more focused on something very, very specific.So, if you went to a business school and said, we're just going tocover these two issues. We realize there are thousands of thingsout there we should do, but we're just going to do what we areknown for and very good at, we have scholars here and residentswho can help us, we have students and TAs and such. And ratherthan saying, oh my God, there's so much going on. We're notcovering it well, we don't have any money. And for each school,everybody knows what they're really good at, and partnering upwith a news organization in whatever form possible to get thatstuff out there. I mean, I feel like there's so much that you guysdo in academia that never makes it outside of the journals. Andsome of it is because of the language that is used, but some of itis because there's not necessarily the vehicle.

BILL PURCELL

Usually fewer resources are impetuses to collaboration. Normallywhen we have less money, we start thinking about who can wepartner with. But it does require someone having vision about it,and then, I think, being sure that the result is honest and useful.

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JACK HAMILTON

Let me see if somebody would be willing to say this, thatjournalists use academicians all the time. They ask the questions,they may only get a quote from them from time to time, but theyuse them. They get information. But, in fact, might it not be fairto say that, in fact, academics oftentimes know woefully littleabout what journalists really do? Some people are nowgraduating with PhDs to study the media. But they've neverworked in a newsroom, they don't know how to write a newsstory, they don't know anything about news routines whatsoever,they don't know what kind of pressures journalists work under.Isn't there a problem that we have lots of people with PhDs whodon't know a thing about journalism but say they study it?

REGINA LAWRENCE

Okay, so I'm just going to say this for the sake of argument. Whatwould we really gain from doing that? We've just learnedeverything we need to know in a two-hour conversation. They don'thave many resources, they don't have time to become expertsunless they've been in the field a really long time, they're undertremendous pressures and they've got to write a couple of storiesevery day. What else do I need to know? I mean, my job as ascholar is to try to study and look for the patterns of influence onthe news, look for patterns of what gets emphasized, what getsdownplayed, what the public never has a chance to learn about.And sure, my understanding could be enriched by spending anafternoon in a newsroom, but I'm not aiming to be a journalist.

RODERICK HART

One way of studying journalism is to study journalists. And myguess is that we're not as good at that as we might be. The otherthing to study is audiences. I mean, a lot of us who are interestedin journalism really aren't interested so much in the output itselfas in its intake, in what people do with the news they consume.So, if you approach journalism from the perspective of Americanculture, inquiring into people’s habits of processing information,you find that journalists themselves often don’t know much indetail about their audiences. Those of us in the academy have agood shot at understanding what people do with journalismwhen taking it in. We have a contribution to make here becausewe have more time to study it than do working journalists.

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I'll take the other side of this, which is, I think, that there wouldbe a benefit for academics who are interested in studying theoutput of journalism. Where it's good and where we think it fallsshort. I think the kind of work that Herb Gans did when he spenta year in the major networks and newspapers as anethnographer. From what I’ve heard from people who do that, it'shard to get permission to do that oftentimes because there is akind of suspicion that if an academic comes to study your newsorganization, the odds are what they're going to write about isgoing to be critical and not positive. But I do think if someone is ajournalism scholar, not somebody who teaches the practice ofjournalism, I think that's a really beneficial thing.

BOB MANN

And wouldn't the same apply to politics? You know, they'reacademics. They should know — they should spend time innewsrooms, they should also spend time working in campaigns.Is there anything to be gained by that kind of immersion as well?


In fairness, I think there are academics who do that. I do thinkthere's a risk. I mean, you don't want — in the same way thatjournalists, part of the way they try to do what they do, at least asI see it as an outsider, is to not be too immersed. You want tounderstand the mind-set of the people that you're trying tounderstand, but you also don't want to be captured by that. So it'stricky to do it well. But I think if you study public opinion, youshould talk to people. If you study journalism, you shouldunderstand how they work. If you study elected officials, youshould walk in their shoes a little bit to understand it. I have nodoubt that those are all valuable things to do.

BOB MANN

As someone who spent a lot of years working in politics and thencame to this place in the workforce where I had to teach courses,where I had to use journal articles, some of which you at thistable wrote, I was reading them thinking, holy smokes, I wish thatI'd known all these things because I could've put them intopractical use. Now the problem is I still read some of thesearticles and I'm not sure I completely understand what they're

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saying because they're written in a way that is not accessible to abusy campaign manager, press secretary or somebody in acampaign. But there's a lot out there that I think that practicingpoliticians and campaign professionals could learn and I thinkthat both sides ought to do a better job at figuring out how tocome up with some common language or some common forumor some way to communicate.

It's not just that academics aren't doing a good enough job ofburrowing into the newsrooms and campaigns, it's thatacademics aren't doing a good enough job of figuring out creativeways to entice people outside academia to read their work. Thelast page of the Columbia Journalism Review* every month is anacademic article, or several, that are interpreted for journalists.And Jack Hamilton and I talked about going to Campaigns &Elections and saying, hey, every month could we take a journalarticle — political science or media studies — and share it withyour readers? Because there's good stuff out there that they'renot getting.

ROBERT ENTMAN

I would have to say this is – that in a number of interactions I’vehad over the years, that journalists tend – maybe this is less truenow then it was ten years ago – to be a little impatient withstatistics and numbers and theoretical cautions. It’s a differentmind-set. And what’s actually intensely interesting to the nerdyacademic may seem impossibly dry and abstract to the practicingjournalist. So, I wouldn’t minimize the sort of cultural differenceshere. It’s a little like Democrats and Republicans.

There are a number of vehicles for overcoming those things,including this very gathering and things like this. I wonder ifthere isn’t a way of institutionalizing a regular gathering thatwould both involve some of the latest research, some of which isactually quite directly relevant to your bottom line, and how youcan more efficiently produce things and so forth. A regular forumwould serve both sides, because we scholars believe journalistsactually have brains and want to be thoughtful people and so on.And, then, vice versa: “Here’s something that you academics don’tseem to get even though we’ve tried to tell you.”

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Part of that is just getting the right academics — at least I’ll speakfor my half of the equation in the room. People who can translatetheir work in a way that’s more accessible. We’re really bad atmaking that leap — because we’re cautious of saying, here, this isa statistically significant difference, translating that to a moreEnglish language sentence. Learning to be a little more willing totake that leap, but still true to the data, I mean, that requiresskills that academics don’t always have. But I think when itworks, it works really well.

AMY WALTER

For us, we’re constantly looking for the people out there who aregetting information from candidates, how are they processing it?And you all have the ability to do that. I think that’s probably theplace to begin. Which is, where are we really falling short? Forexample, watching the coverage of the economic crisis. You had alot of people covering a really complicated topic, but didn’t reallyknow what any of this was. And we didn’t really have places toturn to for good solid advice about how to cover this or to use notjust for a quote in the story, but to give us the real depth ofunderstanding of how this works.

JACK HAMILTON

Obviously social science has become — as has masscommunication — much more of a quantitative study than aqualitative one. Without getting into the good or bad of that, it’sinteresting that when the professionals talk about whatacademicians have to offer, it’s data. As opposed to, there are stillpeople who are scholars who don’t just deal with data. They dealin other kinds of qualitative data and other kinds ofunderstanding.

DAN BALZ

Well, I disagree slightly with that. One reason we get data frompolitical science is because so much of the work now in politicalscience is data driven. And the challenge, I always find, and I go tothe APSA [American Political Science Association} conference orgo through the papers every year and I’m struck by a couple ofthings. One —

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JACK HAMILTON

You go through the papers every year?

DAN BALZ

Yes. I mean, not every paper. I look in the areas that are relevantto what I cover. And I scroll through the papers and if somethinglooks interesting, I download it and try to read it. And sometimeswrite about it.

But, one, there is often very little that is of real relevance to the –sort of the questions of the moment. You know, we don’t have theluxury of being able to talk about something that happened eightyears ago. And so, in this year’s example, there were four or fivepapers that looked specifically at aspects of Barack Obama’spresidency, his leadership, public opinion on that. Those wereimmensely interesting. And I was able to write a – what I felt, wasa pretty interesting piece about what that said about Obama. Butthat’s the exception, not the rule.

And from my point of view, if there were a way to have kind of amutual conversation, that would be valuable to us. Is there a wayyou guys can move your focus toward that? You all have the timeand the expertise to look at things that are of no particular valueto us on a daily or weekly basis. But I think there can be a betterblending of our needs and your expertise, if we can figure outways to harness that, distribute it, make it more easily available.And there are a lot of journalists who would make use of that, Ithink.

RODERICK HART

Every four years, a lot of us academics get calls from journalistsasking about the campaigns and that sort of thing. And some ofthese interviews are really great and some of them are not sogreat. And the interviews that are not so great are the ones thatstart with the interviewer saying, "Don't you believe that..." Thesereporters have already got the story written and are just lookingfor a quote. In contrast, the best conversations occur whenreporters are really trying to interpret things for themselves.That's when the divide between journalists and academics fallsapart. But it takes really good journalists to do that kind ofinterview, individuals who are true intellectuals but happen to getpaid for being journalists.

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AMY WALTER

Yeah, I like that. My other point, building on Dan's, is how tofigure out where the academic study is that looks at what isdriving so much of the debate in the middle of a campaign. I'mamazed at how little — at least that I've seen or could find —scholarship on what the recent Supreme Court decision reallymeans for the day-to-day campaign operations of this lastelection. And I recognize that it was a short amount of time, butthe Citizens United case and its impact on fund-raising and onhow candidates run their campaigns is something that getsbrought up all the time.

And so we had a debate all through the campaign. Just had toturn on any station. Corporate America is buying this election.No, it's not. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Well, somebody could be there asthe referee for that to say, here's what's really happening. Thatyou say, this is where we need to be, is getting right into themiddle of this. Maybe I'm going against all academic rules andregulations, but as long as we're reinventing, let's just reinvent. Inthe middle of a campaign, to be able to jump in and say, based onthis amount of research that we scholars have done, here's whatit is. This is what we know. And a year from now, we'll probablyknow a lot more. But what we can tell you at this point, based onthis data, is this.

JACK HAMILTON

Just as journalists have their own problems of routines that get inthe way of perhaps allowing them to do a better job, academicsactually find themselves being more and more constrained by notwanting to say anything that somebody could contest, and thussticking to quantitative data. That becomes a kind of potentialweakness.

REGINA LAWRENCE

I would jump in and agree with that and say just as, you know,journalism has constraints these days, it's absolutely the same inacademia. So, the question then becomes, how can we createsome kinds of structures that change the incentive somehow forboth sides that allow us the freedom, the resources, to doinnovative kinds of work that's useful to you that doesn't stand inthe way of other people's academic careers but actually allowsthem to be public intellectuals?

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DAN BALZ

Every day we journalists are trying to advance knowledge a bitknowing that we're never going to get the whole of it. And if wecould get you all to think a little bit more that way and ventureoutside of the customs that you're used to that constrain you tobe able to make a definitive statement. To be able to put specificinformation based on academic work that has gone on toilluminate something that we're all writing about. That would bemost helpful. And then we would have to figure out a database ora place where we would all intersect and be able to look at it.

SHANTO IYENGAR

I think the kinds of things Amy and Dan are talking about are infact occurring on a daily basis. We've got these hybrids — youknow about Monkey Cage.* You know about 538.* There's a wholebunch of well-known political scientists who are now blogging.And the blogosphere has emerged as a major, sort of a focal pointof these kinds of breaking news type events. Campaigns inparticular. And I think that's quite a bit of valuable interchangegoing on in the blogosphere.

I think the more structural issue that we need to confront is thisidea of how do we create the systematic exchange betweenacademics and practitioners in which each side actually benefits.

That's why the Washington Post deal that we were working on wasso wonderful because I got data. I got to use all those studies thatthe Post conducted and we published articles based on that data.And Rich Morin got to write these really hot columns where hewas the number one columnist of the Washington Post site. So, inthat sense, it was a win-win.

That, it seems to me, is the core of the problem. How do we set upan environment in which there is this sort of incentive for bothsides to willingly participate?

AMY WALTER

So you guys should be able to — in the same way that 538, Imean, he came out of nowhere. That was not because, you know,he got a platform on the New York Times. He got a platform on theTimes because he had built that up.

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Or Mystery Pollster* and -

AMY WALTER

Right, and Mystery Pollster. Same thing.


But the incentive structure of academic institutions has tochange some for that to really happen. We can't, you know, do it— right now, we do this on the side.

LANCE BENNETT

I think that's a key. Bob Entman and I grouse all the time,whenever we're together, that we need more time to justtranslate what we think we know into accessible, easy to tellstories about how politics and journalism work. But I think thatmuch as I would actually like to spend more time talking aboutthis stuff with journalists and politicians, I think that our ways ofknowing come into conflict. So, case in point, I've spent sometime actually having conversations with journalists aboutindexing or framing. And at the end of the day, what I hear is,what can we do? What can we do? Well, I mean, that's a stopperright there. So it's like, you've done your best to present what youthink you know in simple terms that people actually get and thenwe can't do anything. That's really frustrating. So maybe weshould think about where there are overlapping areas in our waysof knowing that we can identify and pursue.

Where are the margins in journalism for doing different kinds ofstories? More interpretive stories, as Rod puts it, or longer storieson a website perhaps, that somebody would click on. And howcould we scholars contribute to those.

Healthcare is a classic example. Apparently, the Democratsthought the press was going to explain healthcare to theAmerican public. Apparently, they had this misguided notion thatthey didn't need to spin it — they would let the press explain itbecause, isn't that their job?

I don't know what papers they've been reading, but in any event,this turned out not to be a good assumption on their part. And sothey got hammered on healthcare.

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So, there might be ways of knowing and ways of understandingthe world that we can begin to bring into sharper focus for eachother. And then use those points of convergence to organize adifferent kind of conversation.

JACK HAMILTON

Lance, there are good reasons why journalists find it difficult toavoid indexing. And the fact that there is a discussion about itand they say they don't know what to do about it, doesn't meanthey don't go home and think about it.

But there is another side to this. It seems to me that maybe theaudience for that discussion is really the public, so that they knowhow to interpret what they read in the papers. So they say, “yeah,look at how many official sources they have, boy they have a lot ofofficial sources to this story. I wonder who they aren't talking to.” Imean, even if you were asking yourself that question as anintelligent reader, you would be a much better consumer of news.

I think this idea of media literacy, which is taking off across thecountry, is something that we need to feed into.

LANCE BENNETT

Maybe media literacy is a point of convergence. Where politicians,academics and journalists could certainly contribute to thatdiscussion.

JACK HAMILTON

So where would be other meeting grounds for journalists andacademics?

REGINA LAWRENCE

How can we institutionalize some sorts of communication orcollaboration so that there's not just one event like these, whichare fabulous, but I'd love to have the opportunity to have theseconversations on an ongoing basis.

JACK HAMILTON

ASNE [American Society of Newspaper Editors] would be a goodplace, if they were willing to do it, to have scholars come in andtalk about what scholars think about media. They couldn't havefour days devoted to that, but part of an afternoon. It might be asinteresting as having the Secretary of Defense come in.

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DAN BALZ

I think you have to think about it in this sense, who are thejournalists, and at what level are the journalists you want toinfluence? Some of what you are talking about in terms offraming and that sort of thing is, in a sense, lost on an individualreporter because an individual reporter has very little ability toaffect the thinking of the paper. You've got to take thatconversation to the ASNE, yeah that's got to be a conversationwith the editors and publishers. I think that what we've got tothink about is a whole series of these discussions that are moretargeted and aimed at a way that's practical.

And then the other thing that I think comes with that is to breakdown this kind of mutual, you know, they don't think much ofme. You gotta get past that view that what the other side does wedon't value as much as they think we should. And I think wheneverybody gets together you are able to break that down but itjust takes time.

AMY WALTER

And some it is also much more informal, I mean I'm sure you getemails all the time, but the invention of Twitter and email andblogs, you can actually now communicate directly with people. Soif somebody from the Philadelphia Inquirer writes a story and yousay, “You know what, my colleague and I have actually done a tonof research on this and I have a lot to add to it.” Just that simpleexercise could create a relationship that we never would havehad. It’s picking up the phone and saying, “you've done some coolwork I want to talk to you about it.” Or “I have some good,interesting stuff to add.”

LANCE BENNETT

I guess the question is what sort of ongoing exchange would bemore productive for both sides. I wonder what would move someof these conversations in different directions. What would be thevenue, what would the format be for that? Can we come up witha format that would actually change something?

We are all looking at a journalism business that is kind of goingout of business, and certainly experiencing change that's chaoticin a lot of ways. And, yet, there are few signs of major formatchanges in journalism practices in either news organizations orjournalism schools.

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JACK HAMILTON

I suppose, if you think about it, schools like this one have some ofthe same fears that journalists have about what they do. Theydon't want to get too far away from what's familiar for fear of justbeing out there alone. And they are not sure they are doing theright thing. So, it's hard, especially when you've got students’ livesat stake, taking them in some direction you don't know wherewill take them.

RODERICK HART

When I became a dean, at my very first meeting with ourAdvisory Council (which was made up of a lot of workingprofessionals), I remember trying to lay out how a universityworks. I used the word "research" once or twice too often and theydescended on me: “You don't need research. Why are you guyswriting these articles for small publications that nobody readsunless they read Greek?” Right at that point, I initiated acampaign to get my Advisory Council to understand what exactlythe College’s faculty was doing when they were doing research.

Interestingly enough, as the new media took hold, all that talkstopped. By then, my Advisory Council had become very, veryinterested in the research being done by our faculty. The newmedia created a meeting place that hadn't existed before, a placewhere all of us – journalists and academics alike—could sit downand talk about truly revolutionary matters.

So this may be a moment in history when these fascinatingtechnologies are introducing people to one another who didn'tknow they needed one another. Since we’re all so overwhelmedwith what these technologies can do, this is a most fortuitoustime for all hands to gather around the same table and have atruly great conversation.

JACK HAMILTON

If you look at what we've talked about today, on the one hand weare looking at change, but it seemed to me pretty mucheverybody here agreed that the eternal verities about journalism,being able to think and write, don't change no matter what. Andif you can establish that with your students they're probablygoing to be okay. I mean, because those are the tools you aregoing to need in any environment if you’re going to do somethingof quality.

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RODERICK HART

Despite all the handwringing in traditional journalism, it seemsto me inevitable, there will always be a market for authoritativeinformation. Smart people are simply not going to make multi-million dollar decisions by reading someone’s blog. They're justnot going to do it. The question is: What sorts of organizationswill develop to produce authoritative and reliable information ona dependable basis? Now that used to be the newspaper.

Hopefully, newspapers will continue to be part of the storybecause, when all is said and done, people are not going to spendtheir money or make major policy decisions on the basis ofgossip. No matter how attractive the gossip becomes, people –news consumers – are always going to need experts. And they’regoing to turn to journalism for that font of expertise. They willpay for facts freshly delivered and for authoritativeinterpretations of those facts. They will do so because, asinformed citizens, they have no other choice.

AMY WALTER

It does sort of go into the heart of the business model which Ithink is - you know we've been trying to do this too. I'm sure Dangets the same point driven home to him by folks who work in thebusiness side of this, who say, "You can't sell politics. You can sellsports, you can sell business. You can't sell politics." Because it'snot something that people are necessarily going to pay for.

RODERICK HART

But I think it's also the case that people are going to pay formeaning. They are going to pay for interpretation. The more datacoming at you every day the more you will crave meaning. Ifyou’re going to make smart marketing decisions, smartinvestment decisions, you’ll want to know what things mean. As aresult, somebody, somewhere, is going to become the meaning-maker for that data flow. It’s inevitable.

AMY WALTER

But how do you do that for political reporting? Themeaningfulness, having people pay for the expertise. Where youare talking about the market, there is actual cause/effect — youcan point to why spending this money benefits me, versus whyshould I pay for political news that I could get for free.

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RODERICK HART

Well if I'm in business, I'm going to want authoritativeinformation about how to make my market decisions, decisionsinevitably affected by public policy choices. I'm also going to wantauthoritative information about where to put my PAC money aswell. In other words, I just don’t see people resigning themselvesto walking down the street stupidly. For their own sakes, and forthe sakes of their families, they’ll want to be smart when walkingdown that street.

Now the real downside of all this is the matter of thecommonwealth, of maintaining a great, common conversation inthis country. I don't know how to monetize that conversation forthe lower middle classes. And I think that's something thatshould worry all of us a great deal.

DAN BALZ

I think the other thing that Amy and I think about is while we aredeeply worried about finding the right economic model,ultimately that's not the responsibility for Amy or me. We have adifferent responsibility. Not every story in the newspaper is goingto be the best read or the one that is going to attract the mostadvertisers but, in the long run, it has value to the readership in away you can't monetize. And if we don't have that kind ofinformation we’re not a real newspaper.

Peter Hart, the Democratic pollster, said to me when I wasliterally just starting out doing political reporting for the Post —and I think it's so relevant today because we are focused on who'sgoing to win this race or who's going to win that race — and hesaid the role of a good political reporter is not a horse picker. Itshould not be your goal or your aspiration to be able to predictwho's going to win this race or that race. He said the real value ofgood political reporting is that when election results come in,your readers understand why whatever happened happened.

There are still people making decisions of all kinds, economicdecisions or life decisions or decisions about where they want thecountry to go, and there is a value for credible, authoritativeinformation. And that needs to continue to be our goal.

JACK HAMILTON:

Let me give everybody a last word.

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BOB MANN

Just one point which goes back to where we began, and that isthis issue of how to get people interested in our work. And Lance,I use your book as a great example of a complex subject that hasbeen written in a way that average people can understand. A fewyears ago I was in Washington and gathered together a group ofstudents who had gone on to work on Capitol Hill and otherplaces I said “Look, tell me what you got out of our program.What do you want more of and what do you want less of?” And Iwas fully prepared for these new political professionals to tell me,you know, less of the theoretical stuff. And what they saidsurprised me. They said, we want more of the theory because nowwe are seeing, we're in the real world, we're seeing how indexingworks. We see it now. So, my point is we spend a lot of time in aprofessional school like this teaching skills, which I think is veryimportant, but I'm also seeing that teaching students aboutindexing pays off when they become a journalist, or when theybecome a political professional, they now see it in a way andappreciate it in a way that they probably wouldn't if we tried tocram it down their throats once they are out there practicing.

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SHANTO IYENGAR

Here's the one thing that I would add, which is a point that youmade about your observation about the number of scholars doingwork on journalism and issues related to journalism who havenever set foot in a newsroom. It seems to me one of the thingsthat we in higher education can do is to try and foster moreinterdisciplinary opportunities. So it might help if the politicalscientists in the graduate program here at LSU were actuallycoming in and taking classes at the Manship School and viceversa. I think one small step is to sort of encourage that kind ofcross-disciplinary fertilization.

RODERICK HART

I'm an optimist about all of this. Just think about what's in thedaily newspaper: Page One — events in Japan; you turn the page,someone’s opinion; turn the page, someone died, you find theobituaries; turn the page, there is something about fashion; turnthe page, something else about sports; turn the page, somethingabout business. These are all aspects of people’s lives, things theyinstinctively find to be important, things that are part of thecultural fabric.

The alternative is someone sitting down and saying, “You know, Ithink I’d like to lead a stupid life; I already know everything I needto know.” I just don't think there are many of these people in theworld. I believe that people want to live smart lives. Whatjournalism does is help them live smart lives. And it's not justabout making the right stock picks. It’s about picks for their entirelives. You can live a life stupidly or you can live it intelligently. Itseems to me that the purpose of journalism education, mediaeducation, and education in general is to help people becomesmart about the choices they make. In short, I firmly believe thatthe economic models are ultimately going to work out forjournalism because there will always be a market for intelligence.

BILL PURCELL

The only thing I would add comes from another time. There was apresident who they accused of being uncivil. They said he was alittle bit tough and too direct and a little bit rough in what hesaid. And he often engaged in debates, if you want to call it that,maybe even a response that was unfitting of a president andundeserved. They said this about Harry Truman quite a lot. And

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Truman when questioned about it said, "I never gave anybodyhell, I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." And itoccurs to me, that underlying all of this is just a basic desireamong everyone here, that as much truth as possible bedistributed and from there, hopefully, we will have the societythat we intended to have.


I really think the more I think about what academics do and whatjournalists do that perhaps academics need to be a little bit morelike journalists and journalists need to be a little be more likeacademics. And by that I mean, as researchers we need to do thework that is a little more relevant, a little more timely, that's alittle bit more, you know, using the numbers but being away fromthe numbers for those of us that do quantitative work. Andinterpreting them. And I think journalists need to be able to do alittle bit more of the kind of numbers game, more research-oriented work because journalism is a type of research.

REGINA LAWRENCE

I want to disassociate myself from my own remarks earlier. Ifanybody is still sitting here when Jack asked the question, Ithought you were trying to stir things up, so I thought I'd help. Iactually do think it's terrific for people to have moreopportunities to get into the newsroom and get into real worldpolitical situations and observe them and study them andimmerse themselves.

DAN BALZ

I think the best of what we all do is reporting. And there is nosubstitute for that whether you're a journalist or an academic. Itis a combination of curiosity and an open mind and a pursuit ofsome truth. Or, at least, as close to the truth as you can get that Ithink drives the best of both of our industries. And the more wecan learn from one another maybe the closer we can get to theideal that we all want.

LANCE BENNETT

What we might want to do is find a sort of open publishing spot,which has some kind of easy rules, like, no footnotes. It would beessay format and it would be relatively short, a few thousandwords at the most. These are the sort of essays that maybe we

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would all like to do, and the question is, how do you sustain this?Who might think about creating a forum that would be lightlyedited and reviewed but not in a laborious process? And the ideawould be to talk about contemporary issues in a timely fashion,bringing the scholars and journalists together and thereforeproviding some incentives to actually see what's being said on theother side of the same issue. And this could be done relativelycheaply and it could be staffed by students from the graduateprograms and journalism programs, so that piece of it would beprobably fun and instructional.

AMY WALTER

I like that idea a lot. I've met a lot of awesome people here and I'dhope to keep these relationships going and I think the easiest wayto do that is something like this where if I list something on thereabout, hey this is an issue that we are getting a lot of questionsabout or I have a lot of concerns about, can somebody help leadme. It may not be you, but you could say, oh my gosh I know thisperson who does great work at UCLA on such and such, whodoesn't get enough credit for what they've done, you should talkto them. And they talk to you in real language that you wouldunderstand.

ROBERT ENTMAN

To summarize some of the things that are what you might callunique selling propositions for the kind of journalism thateveryone seems to want. One, think about freeing the media froma broken party system so that you don't have to automaticallythink of partisans from each party as a way you get “balance.”Two, give journalists a personal voice. I mean we've talked at theedges of this, but what is wrong with Dan Balz having arecognizable voice that continues from issue to issue, page topage and actually has followers. It doesn't have to just be thepeople on the Op Ed page. I think that would be another uniqueselling proposition. That is something that would distinguish themajor media of the sort that we think are crucial in the publicsphere. And, third, at least consider the possibility that the aim isfor truth, not for balance. Sometimes the truth is indeedunbalanced. The world is not flat.

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j Should academics spend more time studying hownews is made in the newsroom? Should reportersspend more time familiarizing themselves withscholarly research? What are the hindrances oneach side?

j How could journalists and scholars interact on amore regular basis, outside the context of a 5-minute phone interview?

j How might reporters and academics work togetherto improve the quality of the questions reportersask and the quality of responses academics give?

j What procedures and norms will have to change inacademia to encourage scholars to engage more inpublic discourse? What procedures and norms willhave to change in mainstream journalism to allowreporters to develop more academically informedstories?

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For Further Reading

American Society of Newspaper Editors: asne.org

Campaign Finance Institute: cfinst.org

Columbia Journalism Review: cjr.org

FiveThirtyEight: fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

Monkey Cage: themonkeycage.org

Mystery Pollster: huffingtonpost.com/mark-blumenthal

New America Foundation: newamerica.net

Poynter Institute: poynter.org

Project for Excellence in Journalism: journalism.org

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http://issuu.com/action/openurl?url=http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://issuu.com/action/openurl?url=http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-blumenthal

http://issuu.com/action/openurl?url=http://cjr.org/

http://issuu.com/action/openurl?url=http://cfinst.org/

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We would like to thank the following individuals, corporations and foundations for theirsupport of the Breaux Symposium endowment:

AT&T

Donald “Boysie” Bollinger

Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, P.C.

CenturyTel

Chevron

Cox Communications

Ted Forstmann

Freeport-McMoRan

Noel Gould

Jones Walker

Dr. Chip LaHaye

Edward and Rosanne Martinet

Nancy Marsiglia

Murphy Oil Corporation

Southwest Computer Bureau

Syngenta Crop Protection

The Friends of Adam Smith

Walton Family Foundation, Inc.

The Reilly Center for Media & Public AffairsThe Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs was established in 2000 by the Manship School of MassCommunication. Its mission is to generate thoughtful programs and research about mass communication andits many-faceted relationships with social, economic and political issues. The Breaux Symposium is central tothe programming of the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. Past Breaux Symposia include “The Press at theTurn of the Century,” “Voting Alone,” “Parties, Pacs, and Persuasion,” “Freeing the Press,” “News in the PublicInterest: A Free and Subsidized Press,” “We Hold These Truths? How New Technology is Changing Foreign AffairsReporting,” “New Models for News,” “A Tool Kit for News Consumers,” “By the People, for the People: RedefiningPublic Opinion Polling in Age of Segmented Audiences and Personalized Communication,” and “Ethnic Media:Their Influence of Politics and Participation.” For more information on any of the previous symposia, please visitour website www.lsu.edu/reillycenter or call (225) 578-7312.

The Manship School of Mass CommunicationThe mission of the Manship School is to produce highly competent communicators with broad knowledge andtraining in the liberal arts and the media. The school promotes effective communication, critical thinking andethical responsibility. Through its teaching, research, and public service, the school is committed to leading thestudy and practice of media and public affairs. Believing that media should reflect and provide leadership tosociety, the school seeks diversity in its outlook, student body, faculty and staff.

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