1980’s, real income declined or stayed the same for
lower-income individuals while wealth rose rapidly
for the wealthy. The bottom 60 percent owned only a
minuscule share of total wealth and was heavily bur-
dened with a high level of personal debt. In those
rare cases when poor people were covered in the
news, studies have shown that the news media rein-
forced racial stereotypes. There has always been
ample coverage of crime, but during the 1980’s this
coverage was increasingly used for graphic and inex-
pensive filler, which often promoted popular para-
noia regarding crime waves and prodded politicians
to increase “tough talk” on crime.
Public Journalism The rise of a movement called
“public journalism,” alternatively called “civic jour-
nalism,” began in the 1980’s in the United States. It
tried to redefine traditional journalistic values, to
question the worth of vaunted objectivity, and to
question ethical guidelines. Even more, the move-
ment promoted the involvement of journalists as
participants in the community and as reflecting the
composition of the society around them in their re-
porting. The 1988 presidential elections served as a
catalyst for the initiation of public journalism. Many
media people were concerned about the relationship
between journalists and political candidates that had
developed throughout the decade. There was a trend
for candidates to depend more on media consultants,
not only during campaigns but also between cam-
paigns. Both candidates and their campaign manag-
ers became obsessed with controlling their message
during the 1980’s. The rise of public journalism was a
reaction to the failure of journalism in its role of fos-
tering honest reporting of important people in pub-
lic life, to the idea that journalism should be a positive
force in the revitalization of public life. It argued that
many cultural changes in conventional reporting had
to take place before any journalistic changes in com-
munity development could occur.
For the news media, the problem was how to ad-
dress these challenges to create an environment that
would lead to a better understanding of community
issues by citizens. Public journalism encouraged citi-
zen participation in public life by providing news
that would help them make enlightened decisions in
a democratic, self-governing society. At its core was
the assumption that journalism has an obligation to
public life beyond simply relating news or present-
ing facts. Following from this premise, civic journal-
ism tried to make a newspaper a forum for the dis-
cussion of public issues, to focus on events and issues
important to ordinary people, and to help people
function as political activists.
Impact Although the movement for public, or civic
journalism, started in the 1980’s, its most drastic
growth occurred in the 1990’s. New organizations
sprang up to promote the movement’s ideas, such as
the Pew Center for Civic Journalism. The Kettering
Foundation and the Public Journalism Network
tried to spread civic journalism across the country.
By the end of the 1990’s, proponents of public jour-
nalism were enthusiastic, but critics saw an erosion
of some principles of traditional reporting. As a re-
sult, the new movement spurred great controversy
across the media and the public. Yet by 2002, at least
one-fifth of U.S. daily newspapers practiced some
form of public journalism. Newspaper editors as-
serted that their public journalism increased public
deliberation, civic problem solving, and volunteer-
ism and had changed public policy. A key finding of
the studyMeasuring Civic Journalisms Projectby the
Pew Center was that 96 percent of public journalism
projects had used an explanatory story frame to
cover public issues instead of a more traditional con-
flict frame, which usually reports two conflicting
viewpoints.
Further Reading
Black, Jay, ed.The Public/Civic/Communitarian Jour-
nalism Debate.Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1997. A collection of articles concern-
ing one of the central ethical issues of journalism:
To what extent is the journalist an isolated indi-
vidualist, and to what extent is he or she a commit-
ted member of the wider community?
Corrigan, Don.The Public Journalism Movement in
America: Evangelists in the Newsroom.Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1999. Offers a thorough and dev-
astating critique of public journalism by showing
that its advocates have failed to diagnose what re-
ally ails American journalism and that their pre-
scriptions for saving journalism are more likely to
harm than to help the profession. The author in-
troduces data from an extensive survey of newspa-
per editors and academics, as well as a compre-
hensive lexicon of public journalism.
Machesney, Robert W.Rich Media, Poor Democracy:
Communication Politics in Dubious Times.New York:
New Press, 2000. Discusses the roots of corporateThe Eighties in America Journalism 553