News and Democratic Society:

Past, Present, and Future1

Michael Schudson

D
emocracy and journalism are not the same thing. Most of the key philosophi-
cal works that lay out a case for democracy or a theory of democracy make
no reference to journalism. his is not, of course, surprising—there was no
journalism in ancient Greece. Even when the thinkers around the American and French
Revolutions were making their arguments for republican government in pamphlets and
in the pages of weekly newspapers, the press played little role in their calculations.
Later, and with growing assurance through the years, journalists themselves have
insisted that their work is essential to the public good. heir self-promotion, along with
what came to be the self-evident importance of freedom of expression in any society
claiming to be a liberal democracy, made the importance of journalism to democracy
seem obvious. One prominent American scholar of journalism, James Carey, concluded
that journalism and democracy are one and the same, that “journalism as a practice is
unthinkable except in the context of democracy; in fact, journalism is usefully under-
stood as another name for democracy.”2
his takes the plea for journalism’s democratic virtue a step too far. hat journal-
ism is crucial to modern democracy seems clear; that it is not by any means suicient

1 his essay is forthcoming in Michael Schudson, Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press (Cambridge:
Polity, 2008). An earlier version of this essay is forthcoming in the journal Cuadernos de Communicacion,
published by the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile.
2 James W. Carey, “Afterword: he Culture in Question,” James Carey: A Critical Reader, ed. Eve Stryker
Munson and Catherine A. Warren (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 332.

Michael Schudson is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia

University and in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San
Diego. His books include Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers
(1978); Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (1985);
The Power of News (1995); The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (1998);
and The Sociology of News (2003).

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for democracy seems equally clear. hat journalism does not by itself produce or pro-
vide democracy seems likewise apparent. Carey ofers a normative, one could even
say, romantic notion of journalism, deined as a pursuit so intrinsically democratic at
heart that it does not exist if democracy does not exist. Reality is more complicated
and less happy. If we accept common understandings of journalism as the practice
of periodically producing and publicly disseminating information and commentary
about contemporary afairs of general public interest and importance, then journalism
existed in Chile in the 1980s when democracy did not, it existed in Franco’s Spain
without democracy, and it exists in China today, sometimes even daring to criticize the
government—but without bringing China appreciably closer to democratic political
institutions. Journalism exists and has long existed outside democracy.
Democracy does not necessarily produce journalism, nor does journalism necessar-
ily produce democracy. British journalism arose in a monarchy. American journalism,
a journalism of colonial territories under a monarchical,
Democracy does not necessarily colonial power, preceded American democracy. Where
there is democracy, however, or where there are forces
produce journalism, nor prepared to bring it about, journalism can provide a
does journalism necessarily number of diferent services to help establish or sus-
tain representative government. he relative importance
produce democracy. of these diferent services changes over time and varies
across democracies. With the digital age upon us, and
changes taking place in journalism everywhere, the democratic functions that journal-
ism serves, or the ways it serves them, will change again.
But what are these functions? here is little clarity about this despite all the talk
of journalism’s great gifts to democratic society. Taking inventory of what journalism
ofers to democracy or what, in diferent times and places, it has provided, is a task long
overdue. I see six primary functions news has served or can serve in a democracy—and
a seventh, generally ignored, that news could and should serve. he six functions jour-
nalism has frequently assumed in democratic societies, in diferent combinations and
with diferent emphases, are:
1. Information: the news media can provide fair and full information
so citizens can make sound political choices.
2. Investigation: the news media can investigate concentrated sources
of power, particularly governmental power.
3. Analysis: the news media can provide coherent frameworks of
interpretation to help citizens comprehend a complex world.
4. Social Empathy: journalism can tell people about others in their
society and their world so that they can come to appreciate the
viewpoints and lives of other people, especially those less
advantaged than themselves.
5. Public Forum: journalism can provide a forum for dialogue among
citizens and serve as a common carrier of the perspectives of varied
groups in society.

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6. Mobilization: the news media can serve as an advocate for particular

political programs and perspectives and mobilize people to act in
support of these programs.
hese diferent functions are sometimes at cross purposes. In particular, the mobili-
zation or advocacy function may undermine the reliability of the informational and
investigative functions. Diferent news organizations may emphasize one function more
than another. A single news organ, particularly a newspaper, may serve democracy in
all these ways at once.

1. Informing the Public

his seems the most obvious and most boring claim for the role of journalism in a
democracy. Here journalism’s function is educational, informing the public—the ulti-
mate democratic authority—of what its political representatives are doing, what dan-
gers and opportunities for society loom on the horizon, and what fellow citizens are up
to, for better and for worse. he educational function of journalism puts the public in
the front seat and enables the citizenry to participate in self-government.
Much of the power of the media comes from the simple fact that news tells us
things we would not otherwise know. Obvious as this may be, it has not always been
taken for granted. Democracy probably has done more to make information a part
of journalism than journalism has done to make information a part of democracy. In
the eighteenth century, even representative legislatures and assemblies operated largely
in secret from the people who elected them. Reporters in the middle of the eight-
eenth century in Britain might talk to Members of Parliament as they left the House
of Commons, but they could not themselves observe
the MP’s debate. In Samuel Johnson’s parliamentary he educational function of
reporting, for instance, most of the speakers sounded in
journalism puts the public in
style very much the same and discoursed at length on
Johnson’s own favorite topics. In a word, he invented— the front seat and enables the
3
he had no other choice—the news. he United States
citizenry to participate in self-
Senate met entirely in secret for its irst few years, as did
the U.S. Constitutional Convention before it. Freedom government.
of the press at that time meant—and this was not a small
thing—freedom for a writer to speak his opinion as he wished, even in criticism of the
government. But it did not mean a freedom to report. It did not guarantee access to
government oices or government oicials. As late as 1842, John Quincy Adams, for-
mer President, wrote in his diary with disgust that President Tyler’s sons “divulged all
his cabinet secrets to…hired reporters for Bennett’s Herald newspaper in New York.”4

3 Robert DeMaria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) 51–6.
4 Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic,
1978) 24.

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he need for the adjective “hired” to modify “reporters” suggests how novel and dis-
reputable the occupation of reporting was at that time.
Even several generations later, when reporting had
become established, some of the tools of the journalis-
Journalism can perform its
tic trade were resisted. he most notable of these was
institutional role as a watchdog interviewing, a practice that became widely accepted
in the United States by the 1880s, but that was judged
even if nobody in the provinces
unseemly in much of Europe until after World War I.
is following the news. A French observer in the 1880s criticized “the spirit
of inquiry and espionage” of the American reporters.
He attacked “the mania for interviewing” and predicted that the British, much more
sensible than the Americans or the French, would never accept it.5 A more admiring
Danish journalist at the same time noted of the American press:
he reporter and the interview are the focus of these papers…this is
ideal journalism. hese papers are produced by journalists, not aesthetes
and politicians, and they are written for the lower class to help them,
inform them and ight corruption for them.6
his overestimates the power and purpose of the interview; the interview became, after
all, a tool of politicians and celebrities—and journalists—for self-advancement, more
than a point of entry into political life for the masses. Still, interviewing, like reporting
in general, seemed a practice it for a democratic society. he informational function of
journalism is consonant with democratic social and cultural style. American journalists
of the late nineteenth century were simply more brash and more raw in their manners
than Europeans. hey were not part of a literary circle. hey presented themselves as
men of the street and men of the city, not as men of the salon or the elite.

2. Investigation

In the second function of journalism in a democracy, the governors on stage and not
the governed in the auditorium are the focus, and journalism is a watchdog on them.
News becomes a theater in which conlicts inside government are played out on a pub-
lic stage—regardless of whether the public audience is large or small. Journalism can
perform its institutional role as a watchdog even if nobody in the provinces is following
the news. All that matters is that people in government believe they are following the
news. What is necessary to inspire this belief is simply that an inner circle of attentive
citizens is watchful. his is suicient to produce in the leaders a fear of public embar-

5 Paschal Grousset (published under the pseudonym, Philippe Daryl), Public Life in England (London:
George Routledge, 1884) 39.
6 Henrik Cavling, as cited in Marion Marzolf, “American ‘New Journalism’ Takes Root in Europe at End
of 19th Century,” Journalism Quarterly 61 (1984): 531. For more on the history of the news interview,
see Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 72–93.

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rassment or a fear of public discrediting, public controversy, legal prosecution, or losing

an election. he job of the media, in this respect, is to make powerful people tremble.
Clearly, there are two diferent versions of this dynamic. One emphasizes that news
inspires fear of publicity among powerful leaders, and the other focuses on how news
inspires thinking, relection, debate, and engagement among highly attentive elites. In
the latter sense, this may be the democratic function that most nearly approaches the
Habermasian ideal of a “public sphere.” Victor Navasky, long-time publisher of the
liberal weekly, the Nation, notes that Frank Walsh, a U.S. Senator in the 1920s, wrote
articles about the railroads for the Hearst newspaper chain, reaching some ten million
people—but the articles evoked no public response. Walsh published the same mate-
rial in the Nation, circulation 27,000, and reported: “he day The Nation went on the
Washington newsstands my telephone started ringing. I heard from editors, broadcast-
ers and Congressmen.” Navasky concludes: “Beyond the quality of the readership is the
intensity with which these publications are read.” How many readers may not matter
as much as which readers they are and, as Navasky suggests, how intensely and instru-
mentally they read.7
he watchdog function of the press has a negative orientation; it is designed to foil
tyranny rather than to forward new movement or new policy, and it prevents bad things
from happening rather than advancing the cause of the good. In this view, nothing
about journalism matters more than its obligation to hold government oicials to the
legal and moral standards of public service. Public oicials should try to do what they
say they will try to do. hey should refrain from using their oice for private gain. hey
should live up to their oaths of oice. hey should make good on their campaign prom-
ises. And if democracy is to work, the public should be well informed of just what these
people do while in oice and how well they live up to their legal obligations, campaign
promises, and public avowals. he media, therefore, should investigate.
Investigating to keep government oicials honest is not inconsistent with inform-
ing to keep the general public knowledgeable, but it is not the same thing. he ideal
of objectivity or fairness seems to presume that the world is relatively simple and rela-
tively open and displays itself to the journalist whose job it is to describe that visible
world without fear or favor. he ideal of protecting democracy through investigation
is diferent. It assumes that the world is relatively complex and relatively veiled, and
that some of the information that is most important to citizens is embedded in opaque
structures and systems and may in fact be deliberately hidden from view. he world is
not an open book. It is a text of many texts, written for many purposes, and some of
the texts are intentionally written over other texts to obscure them. Journalists therefore
have an obligation to airmatively seek the text behind the text, the story behind the
story. Journalists should be judged not only by fairness in reporting but by energy in
detection. In this model of journalism, the world is not so much a complicated place
that needs fair-minded description and analysis but a misleading and deceptive wall of

7 Victor S. Navasky, A Matter of Opinion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) 336.

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pretense that must be breached by a professional truth-teller. If the virtue of the infor-
mative journalist is judgment, the virtue of the investigative journalist is suspicion.
Suspicion would seem an easy virtue to cultivate. It is not. If it had been left to
the top reporters at the Washington Post to pursue the Watergate story, it would have
been dropped. he star reporters all believed that Richard Nixon was too smart to get
caught up in dirty tricks and burglaries and thefts. And all of them were wrong. It is
not so easy to maintain one’s suspicion. It is also not easy to turn suspicion on one’s
friends. he 2006 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting went to the San Diego Union
Tribune, among the more conservative newspapers in the country, a paper that rou-
tinely endorsed Republican Randy “Duke” Cunningham for re-election. But it was this
newspaper that followed up Cunningham’s suspicious sale of his home to a defense con-
tractor who then mysteriously sold it for a $700,000 loss. Why? he reporters wanted
to know. What they discovered was the worst bribery scandal in the history of the
United States Congress; Mr. Cunningham is now serving an eight-year term in prison,
and the ardently conservative Union Tribune is overjoyed with its success in sending a
conservative ally to prison.

3. Analysis

Analysis may be an efort to explain a complicated scene in a comprehensible nar-

rative. Today we sometimes call that “explanatory journalism,” and explanatory jour-
nalism has its own Pulitzer Prize category. he virtue required for analytic journalism
is intelligence and a kind of pedagogical wisdom, linking the capacity to understand
a complex situation with a knack for transmitting
Analysis, like investigation, that understanding to a broad public. It might try to
illustrate a complicated social phenomenon through
requires something that the life of a single individual. A lead story in the New
providing information does not York Times on March 26, 2007, came from Conrad,
Montana and described Mary Rose Derks, an 81-year-
require so fully: money. It takes old widow with a long-term-care health insurance pol-
a great deal of time and efort icy that denied her coverage, despite her dementia. Not
until the sixth paragraph does it become clear that the
to do analysis of this sort. story is not about Mary Derks but about the scandal-
ous long-term-care insurance industry. And what did
the New York Times contribute to this? Quite a lot. he Times reviewed 400 cases
of elderly policyholders who are “confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming
bureaucracies.”8 Analysis, like investigation, requires something that providing infor-
mation does not require so fully: money. It takes a great deal of time and efort to do
analysis of this sort.

8 Charles DuHigg, “Aged, Frail and Denied Care by heir Insurers,” The New York Times (26 March
2007).

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Consider one New York Times report on the consequences of the “surge” in U.S.
troops for security in Baghdad in 2007. Two days before General David Petraeus testi-
ied before the U.S. Congress about the surge, the Times published a detailed report
on what efect the surge had had, or failed to have, in three demographically disparate
neighborhoods of Baghdad. Two reporters spent over
half of their working days on this story for two months, Explanatory journalism
and they were backed up with the eforts of twenty-nine
other reporters, photographers, editors, and others. heir articulates a silence, or
editor spent two weeks of her time working on the story. foregrounds what was
his is not to mention that maintaining a bureau in Iraq
costs the Times $3 million annually.9 Few news organi- background, making it thereby
zations are willing to invest so heavily in reporting so available for conversation and
ambitious. he investment required for investigation and
analysis is worthy of our consideration because, as news- collective notice.
papers ind themselves competing with the free media
available on the internet, and competing not very successfully, the primary engines of
public investigation and analysis are increasingly at risk. Online journalism, particularly
online journalism that is not sponsored by major print and television media, has so far
shown little capacity for, or interest in, making the kind of large investments in inves-
tigation and analysis that make conventional media, especially newspapers, invaluable
for democracy.
Who is addressed in explanatory journalism? Both the attentive public and a poten-
tial attentive public. What may not be obvious is how valuable this journalism is to
the attentive public, those who are already well informed. An individual well informed
about foreign policy may nonetheless be naive about domestic policy; someone famil-
iar with problems in social service delivery for children may know little or nothing
about social services for the elderly. Explanatory journalism articulates a silence, or
foregrounds what was background, making it thereby available for conversation and
collective notice.

4. Social Empathy

What I am calling social empathy has little place in the familiar rhetoric about jour-
nalism. It deserves more attention. My own thinking about this goes back to a confer-
ence I attended in 1980 where Roger Wilkins, then an editor at the Washington Star,
told a story about sitting down at a lunch counter next to an elderly black woman in
Washington, DC, and striking up a conversation with her. I do not remember the story
precisely, but it was something like this: Wilkins, himself African-American, asked the
woman which candidate she favored in the upcoming presidential election. “President

9 Mike Hoyt, “Editorial: Iraq and the Cost of Coverage: Serious Stories, Serious Money,” Columbia
Journalism Review 46.4 (November/December 2007): 4.

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Carter, he’s a good man. I don’t know about this Ronald Reagan.” So, are you going
to vote? “Oh, no, I don’t vote.” Why is that? “Too busy and too tired, it’s too much
trouble.”
Why did Wilkins bring that story to this conference of academics and journalists
discussing the role of the press in democracy? Because, he said, he did not think jour-
nalism could do anything to change the views or actions of the woman at the lunch
counter. But he did think journalism could tell her story. Journalism could inform
those of us who do vote, and those of us who have the power to make decisions and
the leverage to turn society in one direction or another, about that woman and others
like her so that we could see her and understand her with compassion.
I think journalism does more of this and does it better than it ever has. Coverage
of Hurricane Katrina was rich, passionate, and compassionate in many news outlets.
With the New York Times, it was also persistent. he Times assigned a “Katrina editor”
and followed up the disaster with story after story, nearly every week, for the next year,
with continuing coverage long after that, following the story not only in New Orleans
and along the Gulf Coast, but also in Houston and
he better news organizations of Atlanta and other communities where hurricane vic-
tims relocated. Human interest stories have been a
our day make a great efort to part of journalism for a long time, but they are used
demonstrate the link between more and more instrumentally these days, to draw
readers or viewers into a larger tale, one that tells us
private troubles and public issues. not just about an interesting or unusual individual
but shows us how that person’s experience links up
with larger issues. he sociologist C. Wright Mills deined what he called “the socio-
logical imagination” as the leap of mind that shows the connection between a person’s
“private troubles” and the “public issues” that gave rise to them.10 he journalistic
imagination is similar. he better news organizations of our day make a great efort to
demonstrate the link between private troubles and public issues.
Social empathy is a surprisingly recent development in journalism. In the United
States, exposés of “how the other half lives” go back at least to the work of Jacob Riis
(who gave us the phrase) and Nellie Bly in the late nineteenth century. heir work drew
attention to categories of people (the poor or the insane), while today’s journalistic
empathy goes out not just to large, publicly relevant, demographically or bureaucrati-
cally deined groups, but to individuals and groups and grouplets, slivers of groups who
may have no public face or public identity. At some point in the 1970s or a bit later,
“the personal is political” became one of journalism’s most familiar clichés. Personal
trouble as entrée to a public issue seemed almost inescapable by the 1980s. he idea
of using human interest to open up larger public issues would seem to be as old as the
hills, but in the American media, at least, it is not. he idea of presenting the general
signiicance of a particular public issue by introducing an individual case, a person

10 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).

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whose troubles are in fact related to or an instance of a public problem, is recent. Even
in the 1970s, many arenas of life that give rise to empathy stories were judged by con-
ventional journalists to be undigniied, not the serious stuf of politics and business but
“SMERSH” topics—“science, medicine, education, religion and all that shit.”11
he practice of linking individual vignettes to large public policy issues became a
matter of public controversy in the early Reagan years. In 1982, CBS presented a Bill
Moyers-narrated documentary that tried to examine the impact of Reagan’s budget
reductions on the lives of everyday citizens. he program focused on four individu-
als adversely afected by Reagan’s cuts in government spending. David Gergen, then
Reagan’s communications director, attacked the documentary for blaming poverty on
the president.
But the president, himself widely noted for using (fabricated) anecdotes to make a
point, was already exercised about this kind of journalism-by-anecdote. He said, “You
can’t turn on the evening news without seeing that they’re going to interview someone
else who has lost his job. Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace
has just been laid of and that he should be interviewed nationwide?”12
Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder tested the so-called “vividness hypothesis” in
the laboratory. his hypothesis is simply that the more vivid, dramatic, or emotionally
compelling is the text or image people are exposed to, the more it will inluence them,
afecting their opinions or enduring longer in their memories. But, surprisingly, Iyengar
and Kinder found that “news stories that direct viewers’ attention to the lesh and blood
victims of national problems prove no more persuasive than news stories that cover
national problems impersonally—indeed, they tend to be less persuasive.”13
Iyengar and Kinder ind their results mysterious. hey speculate. Perhaps viewers
blame the victims and see them as causes of their own misfortune. Perhaps viewers
get so caught up in the melodrama of the speciic instance that they fail to make the
sociological leap that, for more sophisticated viewers, is so obviously what the journal-
ists are up to. Or perhaps the journalist’s implicit or explicit subordinate thesis—these
people are just like you or, more spiritually, there but for the grace of God are you—is
something viewers simply do not accept: I am not black. I am not old. My family has
not abandoned me. I have never relied on government assistance. I do not live in New
Jersey. So what you are showing me does not translate into my own everyday life.14
Social empathy stories, then, do not always prompt the imaginative leap in readers
and viewers that journalists intend. Still, the development of this sort of journalism
seems to be one of the great achievements of the leading contemporary press and one
that is linked closely to democratic values. It expresses the virtues of curiosity and
empathy in the journalist, and it encourages empathy and understanding in the audi-

11 Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Knopf, 1997) 411.

12 Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News that Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987) 34.
13 Iyengar and Kinder 42.
14 Iyengar and Kinder 34–46.

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ence. Joseph Raz, a political philosopher, writes that it is important in a democracy, and
particularly a pluralistic democratic society, for the media to portray and thereby legiti-
mate various styles of life in society, giving them “the stamp of public acceptability.”15
Learning about our neighbors through the mass media, both news and entertainment,
Raz suggests, serves a vital democratic function. Reporters who do this work surely
recognize that they are serving democracy, but journalists as well as media critics who
urge news to serve democracy better rarely call attention to this sort of journalism,
which is often not at all directly political. his makes Raz’s brief but elegant remarks
all the more noteworthy.
True, covering medicine and education and religion leads also to covering diet,
restaurants, cars, celebrities, and so on and can be a distraction from public life rather
than an expansion of the range of it, but all of these topics are potential entrances into
public life.16

5. Public Forum

From the early days of journalism to the present, newspapers have made space for
letters to the editor. In the U.S. for close to forty years, leading newspapers also have
provided an “op-ed” page—so named because it is the page opposite the editorial
page—in which staf writers, syndicated columnists, and guest columnists, experts as
well as ordinary citizens, provide a variety of views on current issues. More U.S. news-
papers feel a responsibility to provide a range of views in their pages because few major
cities have more than one daily newspaper these days.
Television provides scarcely any help in extending the public forum function of
news. Television news still tends to convey a naive impression that there is only one way
to see the world—Walter Cronkite used to close his CBS News broadcasts, “And that’s
the way it is.” here is more room than there used to be for a degree of spontaneity and
subjectivity in the live reports from journalists in the ield. If one looks more broadly
at cable television, various opinion shows have advanced this public forum function of
journalism. Opinion, perspective, passion, and anger, even if it is often more theatrical
than sincere, have enlivened the television screen. he most popular and pervasive of
the voices, however, are clearly from the political right.
he public forum function of journalism has cracked wide open with the creation
of the world wide web; the internet opens up this journalistic function in the most
wide-ranging and profound way. Its virtue is not individual but social: the virtue of
interaction, of conversation, of an easy and agreeable democratic sociability.

15 Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon,
1994) 140.
16 here is a very instructive study by a physician, Barron Lerner, on media presentations of famous people
with serious illnesses—a good example of how the public’s frequently disparaged fascination with celeb-
rities becomes an avenue to useful public education. See Barron H. Lerner, When Illness Goes Public:
Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

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6. Mobilization

Historically, no form of journalism has been more important than partisan jour-
nalism. Even in U.S. journalism, widely recognized for its powerful commitment to
notions of non-partisanship and objectivity, party-based journalism dominated the
past. Partisan journalism seeks to rally only those who share the journalist’s political or
ideological position. his was the dominant concept of journalism in the U.S. through-
out the nineteenth century.
Why was the partisan press so pervasive? Not he intent of the newspapers
because the press failed in an efort to be fair and
objective; the nineteenth-century press never tried to was not to create an informed
be fair or balanced. Newspapers were subsidized by citizen but a party-loyal citizen;
political parties directly and indirectly. he publish-
ers, editors, and reporters understood their job to be
the intent was not to reveal
political cheerleading and mobilizing, not political government scandal but to reveal
reporting. As one historian puts it, nineteenth-century
newspapers were much more interested to reach citi-
government scandal if and only
zens’ feet than to reach their minds, eager to get them if the opposition party was in
into the streets marching, parading, and going to vote
control of the government.
rather than to persuade them by argument or facts or
reasoning to share an opinion, let alone to think for
themselves.17 Top editors looked forward to political appointments if their party won
the White House. Abraham Lincoln appointed newspaper editors as ambassadors or
consuls in Switzerland, Holland, Russia, London, Paris, Elsinore, Vienna, Bremen, the
Vatican, Zurich, Turin, Venice, Hong Kong, and Ecuador; he also appointed editors
who had supported his campaign to run the post oice or the custom house in New
Haven, Albany, Harrisburg, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis, and elsewhere.18
Was there information in nineteenth-century newspapers? Yes, there was, but it was
doggedly partisan. he press did not at that time endorse either of the irst two demo-
cratic functions of journalism I have discussed in a way familiar to Americans today.
he intent of the newspapers was not to create an informed citizen but a party-loyal
citizen; the intent was not to reveal government scandal but to reveal government scan-
dal if and only if the opposition party was in control of the government.
here is much to be said for this model of journalism as partisan cheerleader, jour-
nalism as propaganda, journalism as exhortation and incitement to participate. If dif-
ferent partisan viewpoints are well represented among institutions of journalism, then
a journalist-as-advocate model may serve the public interest very well. Partisan journal-
ism enlists the heart as well as the mind of the audience. It gives readers and viewers
not only information but a cause. In contrast, the objective, information-providing,

17 David Ryfe, “News, Culture and Public Life: A Study of 19th-Century American Journalism,” Journalism
Studies 7.1 (2006): 60–77.
18 Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York: Free, 1998) 121n2.

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and non-partisan investigative functions of today’s leading news organizations may have
de-mobilizing efects. hey provide people with information, but they do not advise
people what to do with it. If anything, they seem to imply that nothing can be done,
that politicians are only interested in their own political careers. he undertone of cyni-
cism in news reports may be a factor in encouraging an undertone of cynicism in the
general public.19
If the partisan press was so pervasive in nineteenth-century United States, where did
the modern American idea of news as a professional, balanced resource for an informed
citizenry come from? his is a long story.20 But, in short, it begins with reformers at
the end of the nineteenth century who attacked party politics. hese reformers sought
to make elections “educational.” hey sponsored civil service reform rather than illing
government jobs with loyal party workers. In a variety of ways, they tried to insulate
the independent, rational citizen from the distorting enthusiasms of the party. In the
1880s, political campaigns began to shift from parades to pamphlets, and so put a
premium on literacy. Newspapers broke free. he attractions of the marketplace cap-
tured more and more newspapers—a danger, to be sure, but a danger that freed the
press from subservience to the parties. In the 1890s, the Australian ballot swept the
nation, and so, for the irst time in American history,
If the partisan press was so literacy was required to cast a ballot. he novelty of the
Australian ballot was that the state took responsibility
pervasive in nineteenth-century
for printing ballots that listed the candidates from all
United States, where did the parties that qualiied for the election. his meant that
modern American idea of news voters received their ballots from state election oicials
at the polling place, not from party workers en route to
as a professional, balanced the polling place; it meant that the voter had to make a
resource for an informed choice of candidates by marking the ballot; and it nor-
mally meant that provision was made for the voter to
citizenry come from? mark the ballot in secret. With this innovation, voting
changed from a social and public duty to a private right,
from a social obligation to a party, enforceable by social pressure, to a civic obligation or
abstract loyalty, enforceable only by private conscience. In the early 1900s, non-partisan
municipal elections, presidential primaries, and the initiative and referendum imposed
more challenging cognitive tasks on prospective voters than ever before. hese changes
enshrined “the informed citizenry” in the U.S. political imagination.21
Between 1880 and 1910, the most basic understandings of American politics were
challenged. Reformers invented the language by which Americans still judge our poli-
tics—a language that stresses being informed, while it dismisses or demeans parties and

19 See Michael Schudson, “The Concept of Politics in Contemporary U.S. Journalism,” Political
Communication 24.2 (2007): 131–42.
20 Telling that long story is the aim of Michael Schudson, Discovering the News, told again more briely
and with more theoretical self-consciousness in Michael Schudson, “he Objectivity Norm in American
Journalism,” Journalism 2.2 (2001): 149–70.
21 Schudson, The Good Citizen, 144–87.

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partisanship. To put this more pointedly, the political party, the single most important
agency ever invented for mass political participation, is the institution that current civ-
ics talk and education regularly abhor and that is rendered almost invisible in the way
we conduct the actual act of voting. Insofar as the way we do vote is a set of enduring
instructions to us about the way we should vote and the way we should think about
voting, the civic lesson of election day, as the U.S. has organized it for the past century,
recommends contempt for parties and partisanship.
Almost all nineteenth-century electoral rhetoric was not about informed choice
but about loyalty and fraternity. All U.S. electoral rhetoric in the twentieth century
and since insists that people make their choices among candidates, parties, and issues.
Independent, reasoned choice is the ideal. Non-partisan groups get out the vote. Non-
partisan groups try to elevate the state of politics by analyzing the issues. In California,
the state provides every registered voter an extensive printed information guide, rou-
tinely over one hundred pages of dense print. (he voter information guide was a
development of the same reform period, 1910s–20s.) In Oregon in 2004, the voter
information guide was so long it had to be printed in two volumes.
his does not mean people are in fact well informed. But it does mean that the
collective ritual of getting the news in the press and obtaining information from other
sources over the past century has been very diferent from the century before.

Conclusion

here is—at least, there should be—a seventh function for the news media in a
democracy, although I did not see this until reading a thoughtful essay by Kent Asp,
“Fairness, Informativeness and Scrutiny: he Role of News Media in Democracy,” a set
of relections based on studies of the Swedish media. Although there is much in this
essay that I found instructive, I found myself in sharp disagreement when I came to
Asp’s most general formulation of the function of news in a democracy: “in a democ-
racy media should work for the realization of the will of the people by facilitating the
free exchange of ideas.”22 Instantly I wanted to add, at the least, “within a system of free
and fair elections and with protection of civil liberties and human rights.” I wanted, in
other words, a role for journalism that was democratic but not populist, that regarded
and respected constitutionalism and the strong role in representative democracies for
the protection of minority rights. I wanted not just democracy but liberal democracy.
“Realizing the will of the people” does not provide the best government, even assum-
ing one had some reliable means (which we do not) of determining what that will is.
No means that I can imagine for ascertaining and then realizing the people’s will can
provide as fair and just a system as a mixed mode of government with constitutional
protections in place. Even this messy arrangement I am advocating can and does mis-

22 KentAsp, “Fairness, Informativeness and Scrutiny: he Role of News Media in Democracy,” Nordicom
Review, Jubilee Issue (2007): 32.

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ire. No system is immune to damage from deceit or avarice or even so moderate a sin
as chumminess.
But what role does journalism have in advancing a liberal democracy rather than
a majoritarian democracy as such? I do not know that anyone has articulated a broad
normative function for journalism in these terms, and it may be that the task of liv-
ing up to the irst six functions of news in a democracy is more than enough without
journalists dedicating themselves to teaching political philosophy and encouraging a
fuller, richer vision of liberal democracy than one normally hears articulated in public
life when politicians dedicate themselves to pandering to populist sentiments. Still, to
the extent that journalists or scholars who study journalism articulate democratic vir-
tues while omitting discussion of liberal and constitutional virtues, journalism’s role in
democracy is left unmoored.
I do not suggest that journalists become evangelists for a more sophisticated under-
standing of representative democracy—except, perhaps, on the editorial page. What
I propose is that greater sophistication about representative democracy should lead
journalists to cover more carefully some institutions and relationships that news takes
for granted or ignores. In the United States, the past forty years have seen signiicant
growth in institutions of government transparency—open records laws at state and local
levels, for instance, and the Freedom of Information Act nationally. here has also been
growth in a variety of systems of accountability in government and in politics from the
Federal Elections Commission that requires candidates for national oice to disclose
the amount and source of campaign contributions; the Government Accountability
Oice that takes responsibility for the iscal accountability of federal agencies; and the
inspectors general assigned to many federal agencies and responsible for reporting to the
President and the Congress on investigations of the propriety and lawfulness of a wide
variety of agency actions. he inspector general of the F.B.I., for instance, produced a
very critical report of his agency’s failures in tracking the men who, on September 11,
2001, committed the bloody acts of terrorism in New York and Washington.
All of these government oicials help provide a set of informational checks and bal-
ances within the government; none of them are widely known to the general public or,
so far as I can judge, even to a well-educated and attentive public, on the whole. And yet
the ways in which democratic government is held accountable operate not only through
“vertical accountability”—a direct accounting to the public through elections—but also
through “horizontal accountability” in which one branch of government holds another
branch accountable. hese are not just details. hey are the ways in which democracy
works—or fails to work. Voter turnout is a matter of great interest to U.S. journalists
and a matter of great concern to all who worry over the health of U.S. democracy, but
the vigor of horizontal accountability should be of interest once one recognizes that
liberal democracy is not plebiscitarian democracy but representative democracy with a
large executive branch that the press by itself is in no position to monitor closely.
Where will journalism be in ten or twenty or ifty years? No one knows. We do
know that it will be more online than it is today. It will be more online next week!
I think we can be conident that some varieties of television news will continue and
radio news will continue. here are more concerns about newspapers, it is fair to say,

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but at this point there is no online news gathering organization of any scope and
substance that is not part of a print-based (New York Times, Washington Post, or other)
or television-based (CNN, BBC, or other) media organization. here are all sorts of
bloggers, all sorts of aggregators, all sorts of opinion columnists whose presence exists
only online, and many of them are making impressive contributions to public discourse
and to several of the democratic functions discussed in this essay. But none of them has
invested in news gathering the way that hundreds of newspaper publishers have done.
he eforts of these newspapers cannot be dispensed with, even though the economic
model that sustains them has to be redesigned.
With the arrival of the web and the growth of the blogosphere, the public forum
and mobilizing functions of journalism have grown relative to the informing, investiga-
tive, and social empathy functions. he web also helps create an incipient new function
of journalism for democracy, one in which the divide between the journalist and the
audience for journalism disappears. Some people talk
about this as “citizen journalism.” It has always existed We should…recognize that the
to a degree. Every time a citizen calls up a news orga-
nization and says, “I have a hot tip for you,” this is a unruliness of a decentralized
form of citizen journalism. Every letter to the editor is and multi-voiced informational
a form of citizen journalism. But now citizens can sim-
ply go online and publish the tip or the letter on their system may be among democracy’s
own.23 here is a new self-organizing journalism, then, greatest assets.
already making waves, already enacting something new
and exciting.
I am neither alarmist nor utopian as I survey the present sea-change in the mass
media. We are not about to see the end of journalism, but newspapers are in for a very
rough ride and some of them, even some very distinguished ones, will not survive.
he informative, investigative, and social empathy functions that journalism has some-
times ofered democracy may get redistributed across diferent journalistic and non-
journalistic organizations. hey may not be as centrally concentrated in newspapers and
television networks as they once were. In the long run, this is not something to fear.
It is something to work with. We should be open to its possibilities and recognize that
the unruliness of a decentralized and multi-voiced informational system may be among
democracy’s greatest assets.
Journalism tomorrow cannot produce democracy where democracy does not exist,
but it can do more to help democracies along if it recognizes the multiple services it
afords democracy, encourages the virtues that endow those services, and clariies for
journalists and the public the many gifts news ofers to humane self-government.

23 SeeJan Schafer, Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? (College Park: J-Lab, 2007). his report is
available online at <www.kcnn.org/research/citizen_media_report>.

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