HOW A DEMOCRACY DECIDES
Throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, newspapers,
and to a lesser extent network television news, constituted the
agora in which American public life, including political life, began its
sorting-out process. The shared information they provided helped
lead to public judgments about important matters. Not everyone read
the same newspapers or watched the same newscasts, and not everyone
gave them the same level of attention and interest, but virtually
every citizen was exposed on a regular basis to the news of the day.
As a result, citizens were able to reach the public judgments that
informed, instructed, and validated the actions of their government
representatives, elected or otherwise. Absent public judgment, that is
to say when no rough consensus can be reached, important issues
remain unresolved.
Coming to Public Judgment is the title of a seminal book in which
Daniel Yankelovich explains the phenomenon of public judgment and
how it is formed. Published in 1991, it demonstrates that the democratic
way of dealing with problems is to strive for a resolution that
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everyone can live with; that benefits more people than it harms; that
recognizes and allows for differing opinions and values but nevertheless
helps settle the issue so that the public’s business can move on.
Public judgment, Yankelovich explains, is far more complex than
mere opinion. In his three decades of research into public opinion
preceding publication of the book, he developed ways to distinguish
between off-the-cuff public opinion, as reflected in most statistical
surveys, and true public judgment.
A public judgment is ‘‘the state of highly developed public opinion
that exists once people have engaged an issue, considered it from all
sides, understood the choices it leads to, and accepted the full consequences
of the choices they make.’’1
Reaching public judgment about important and complex issues can
take years or only hours. For instance, Americans reached public
judgment about women’s rights decades ago after more than a century
of debate, but aligning that determination with life’s realities is
still a work in progress. On the other hand, surveys showed that public
judgment on Operation Desert Storm in 1991 was almost instantaneous
and supportive.
And, on some value-laden issues, even a solid public judgment
does not settle them. Such is the case with abortion. For years, every
reliable survey has shown that 12 percent to 15 percent of the people
polled are opposed to abortion under any circumstances; 12 percent
to 15 percent favor abortion at will; and 70 percent to 75 percent fall
somewhere between those extremes, allowing it under some circumstances,
which is the situation reflected in existing law. The surveys
seem to indicate a strong majority have settled in the middle—a substantial
public judgment has been reached—yet the loud struggle goes
on in legislatures and the Congress every year, the initiative being
taken and the issue framed by the groups at the margins as they attempt
to alter existing law and practice. The lesson of the neverending
abortion debate may be that when opinions are deeply rooted
in core values, even a substantial public judgment cannot be permanently
implemented.
Yankelovich’s definition of public judgment distinguishes between
simply ‘‘opinion’’ based solely on instinct or information and ‘‘judg-
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ment’’ based on deliberation, which is ‘‘the thoughtful side of the
public’s outlook, the side that belongs with the world of values, ethics,
politics, and life philosophies rather than the world of information
and technical expertise.’’
In other words, public judgment contains a strong values component
that need not be based on accurate or detailed information in
order to express the public’s point of view to its elected representatives.
The lesson: It is unwise to overestimate the public’s store of
accurate information, but it is equally unwise to underestimate its
grasp of the importance of self-determination.
True public judgment, once arrived at, reflects values at least as
much as it reflects information because of the complex way in which
the public arrives at the judgment, Yankelovich contends. The process
involves three stages: consciousness raising, working through, and
resolution. He describes them this way:
◗ Consciousness raising is ‘‘the stage in which the public learns about
an issue and becomes aware of its existence and meaning. . . .
When one’s consciousness is raised, not only does awareness
grow but so does concern and readiness for action.’’ In other
words, people decide:We must do something about this.
But what? And how?
◗ Working through can be complex and time-consuming, for it involves
individuals having second thoughts—that is, ‘‘resolving
the conflict between impulse and prudence’’; accepting new (and
sometimes unsettling) realities; and resolving conflicts among
the competing values that they hold. In other words, working
through involves cognitive, emotional, and moral calculations.
◗ Resolution occurs only after successful consciousness raising and
working through, and the accumulated mass of that effort then
reflects a public judgment.
Consciousness raising—which journalists are good at and dearly
love—does not alone lead to public judgment. The working-through
phase is essential. So when newspapers, either deliberately or by lack
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of insight or public service orientation, limit their role to merely calling
attention to things and flit, hummingbird-like, from one issue to
the next, the process begins to break down; public judgments are not
given time to mature; the working-through process is short-circuited.
Helping the working-through process is time-consuming, expensive,
and full of risk. It is not the sort of thing that newspapers can do
with one eye always on the bottom line.
JOURNALISM’S ROLE IN PUBLIC JUDGMENT
Although Yankelovich argues that arriving at public judgment is more
an application of values than an application of factual information,
the process is initiated by the presentation of information. This is
where the traditional news media role is crucial to democratic processes.
In doing the job of discovering, reporting, and sorting facts, the
news media aren’t suggesting to people what to think, but they are
suggesting what they should think about. This agenda-setting role of
the media is well documented.
As Maxwell McCombs wrote:
Not only do people acquire factual information about public
affairs from the news media, readers and viewers also learn how
much importance to attach to a topic on the basis of emphasis
placed on it in the news. Newspapers provide a host of clues
about the salience of the topics in the daily news—lead story on
Page 1, other front-page display, large headlines, and length,
for example. Television news also offers numerous clues about
salience including placement as the opening story on the newscast,
length of time devoted to the story, and promotional
emphasis put on it. These cues, repeated day after day, communicate
the importance that journalists attach to a small group of
issues.
Because of this unavoidable influence on the public mind,
the values journalists apply in their decision-making process become
critical. When the traditional news values are applied,
one sort of influence occurs. When, however, other values intervene
in the process, such as anxiety over ratings or confusing
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entertainment with substance, quite another sort of influence
happens.2
Broadly shared information becomes a dubious proposition in today’s
media environment in which the audience in search of news is
fragmented across a media landscape consisting not simply of evening
network news shows and printed newspapers, but also twenty-fourhour
cable newscasts, Internet Web sites, blogs and chat rooms, and
online presentations of newspapers and broadcasters.
The twenty-first century’s ‘‘on demand’’ culture and the infrastructure
supporting it offer many advantages to individuals; for the
democratic collective, however, those blessings are clearly mixed. Can
shared relevance, the starting point for democracy, reach the critical
mass necessary for public judgment to emerge in an ‘‘on demand’’
world? Can the agenda-setting role of the news media continue to
work to the public’s advantage when everyone with a personal computer
and Internet access is both a potential source of ‘‘news’’ and a
potential consumer of everyone else’s ‘‘news’’?
Opposites Attract
The 1974 merger of Knight Newspapers, Inc. and Ridder Publications,
Inc. brought together two newspaper companies founded and
operated on radically disparate ideas. By the standards of today’s
media mergers and conglomerates it was no big deal, involving only
hundreds of millions of dollars rather than billions and only about
three dozen newspapers and a handful of television stations. But in
the context of 1974, it was major news within journalism and, as it
turned out, a precursor.
Observers of the newspaper business were curious, and many insiders
were anxious, about how this marriage of opposites would
work. The deal certainly had some attractive aspects in addition to its
size. There was a good geographic spread with no important overlaps.
Each company had gone public in the 1960s and the stocks were solid.
Each had grown substantially through acquisitions over the years, and
each was run by family members who held controlling interests.
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But under the sweet harmonies of the deal, two cultural dissonances
could be clearly heard.
First, brothers John S. and James L. Knight had only two direct
male heirs, while Bernard H. Ridder, chief of Ridder Publications,
was surrounded by brothers, sons, nephews, and uncles, many of
whom ran various Ridder operations. Second, Ridder Publications’
newspapers were rated generally in the profession (and specifically by
Bernie Ridder) as effective business operations but, at best, indifferent
journalistic products, while the Knight-owned newspapers, even at
that early date, were in many ways the gold standard for journalism,
particularly in medium-size cities, but were not among the better financial
performers.
‘‘Merger’’ was the term of corporate art used by the companies in
their official handouts, but the deal was in fact an acquisition by
Knight Newspapers, a reality affirmed by the makeup of the original
board of directors, with Knight appointing ten members and Ridder
five. It was clear who was in charge, a point of some comfort to the
journalistic employees of Knight Newspapers, who took great personal
pride in their newspapers’ dedication to journalism as the driving
force of their enterprise.
How the dynamics of the Knight and Ridder merger played out
over the next three decades is a story that reflects the trends that
affected, often negatively, all of newspaper journalism in the last three
decades of the twentieth century.
Ridder Publications and Knight Newspapers were hardly the only
newspaper companies going public in the sixties. In fact, most of the
seventeen largest newspaper chains had taken that step by 1975, and
life changed drastically for many of them. Most of the ones going
public, notably The New York Times Company, The Washington
Post Company, Media General, and The McClatchy Company,
structured their stock in two tiers—voting and nonvoting—so that
operating control was tightly held by family members and trusted
compatriots. Some, including Knight Newspapers and Ridder Publications,
did not establish two tiers of stock and over time, as Jack
Knight predicted, would ‘‘lose control of their destiny’’ as institutional
stockholders, motivated solely by profit considerations, became
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the effective owners and Wall Street analysts the effective goalsetters.
In a cruel juxtaposition of trends, during the 1960s and 1970s, a
majority of American newspapers were falling into the hands of public
companies at the same time that the newspaper stranglehold on the
delivery of news and advertising was being loosened. Television became
much more of a player in news, the explosion of self-contained
suburbs hollowed out cities and created traffic patterns that doomed
afternoon newspapers, and shopping-mall sprawl and the accompanying
development of huge retail chain stores changed the dynamics of
shopping and thus of advertising. For the first time, newspapers faced
truly serious competition for their core dollars, not just for peripheral
dollars, and for the time of readers.
Privately held newspaper companies and those with two tiers of
stock and devoted to quality and public service had choices: Accept
less profit and put more money back into the news and business operations
to match the new media competitors; accept less profit per
newspaper and grow through acquisitions; or decide to simply adjust
profit expectations to meet the changed environment. Publicly held
companies with only one class of stock did not have the choice of
accepting less profit. In fact, as the competitive pressures grew, so did
the demand from Wall Street to not simply maintain profits but to
increase them annually. The ironic effect of this was that newspapers
owned by profit-driven corporations, which tended to be of lesser
journalistic quality to begin with, were better able to meet the fiscal
demands while newspapers owned by quality-driven corporations
were drawn inexorably toward the standards of the profit-driven companies.
The dedication of quality-driven companies and individual
newspapers was harshly tested by the changing circumstances.
For Knight Ridder, those trends from the sixties and seventies
were often magnified, even distorted, as the new company’s leaders
tried to establish a lasting culture out of the clashing philosophies of
its parents. It was a struggle that would last for almost thirty years.
Concerns and Conceits
In 1975, it was still possible to meander around the streets of Miami
in a car, and that’s what Batten and I did that crisp fall morning,
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talking about our new assignments and new relationship. (I would
report to Batten.) ‘‘Merritt,’’ he said with a chuckle, ‘‘all you have to
do for the first two years is what you already know how to do and
you’ll be a hero.’’
Easily said. The family-owned Wichita morning and afternoon
papers had been purchased by Ridder Publications in 1973, the year
before the merger. Just over a decade earlier, Time magazine had
called the Wichita newspapers, then family-owned, ‘‘the bottom of
the barrel of American journalism.’’ Batten made clear he would be
constantly available and supportive as I set about to escape that unfortunate
heritage and establish new standards.
We discussed the concerns being voiced by our Knight Newspapers
contemporaries about the just-accomplished merger, concerns
fed by a certain arrogance. The conceit from the Knight journalists’
side was that we had inherited a group of second- and third-rate,
profit-driven newspapers that we’d have to whip into journalistic
shape while managing to negate the money-grubbing instincts of the
new partners. Confidence in our ability to do that was high because,
after all, we were in charge, so journalistic purity would surely prevail
over what we saw as pure materialism. Like most conceits and generalizations,
that one would prove to be not wholly true.
But as it stood that day in 1975, the core cultural values of the
new company were brightly outlined because they had been directly
transferred from the Knight portion of the arrangement.
The idea of a high, thick wall between journalism and the countinghouse
permeated the organization. Most Knight newspapers were
operated by the equal partnership of an editor and a general manager.
The editors ran the newsrooms and were responsible for the journalism;
the general managers were in charge of the business side, including
advertising, circulation, and production. The editor and the
general manager reported separately to corporate officers who would
resolve any conflicts that could not be resolved locally. Ideally, the
editor and the general manager would be able to balance the natural
tension between the newspaper’s business aspirations and its journalistic
responsibilities without involving corporate. The journalists were
so sheltered from the business side that newsroom staffers below the
WHY THIS MATTERS / 25
top editor rarely discussed or concerned themselves with such annoyances
as budgets. Their focus, from the top corporate officers through
the editors to the freshest newsroom recruits, was on doing the best
possible journalism. Everything else in the organization existed to
support that effort.
A piece of the meandering conversation in Batten’s car that morning
in 1975 reflected that journalism-business tension as we reminisced
about some of our Charlotte adventures, including a punishing
advertising boycott by local car dealers over a syndicated column they
considered unflattering to car salesmen. Auto advertising is a heavy
percentage of a newspaper’s annual revenue and the boycott would
cost The Charlotte Observer several hundred thousand in 1960 dollars.
But the word from the president, Lee Hills, had been, ‘‘You did the
right thing [journalistically], don’t worry about the budget.’’ That
1960s sanguine (if simplistic) view of journalistic independence from
fiscal pressure, cultivated over the first half of the twentieth century,
would not stand the tests of time and changing circumstances in its
last quarter. Twenty-five years later, when a similar boycott was aimed
at The Wichita Eagle, the corporate response would be quite different.
Even in 1975, currents that would erode the prevailing Knight Newspapers
philosophy were already running beneath the surface. Viewed
from the perspective of 2005, the prevailing idea that journalism
could maintain its exemption from the worst pressures of the marketplace
looks, at best, wildly naive.
At that moment, however, we were full believers in both the rectitude
and importance of the principles upon which Knight Newspapers
was founded and operated. In the words of Jack Knight:
We endeavor to meet the highest standards of journalism.
We try to present the news accurately with a high priority
upon fairness and objectivity.
We don’t play politics, are not beholden to any political
party, faction, or special interest. . . .
Our chief executives and the policy makers studiously avoid
conflicts of interest. We serve on no corporate boards or com-
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mittees other than appropriate civic and cultural organizations,
or in the fields of education and communications.
We believe in profitability but do not sacrifice either principles
or quality on the altar of the countinghouse.
As responsible purveyors of information and opinion, our
newspapers are committed to the philosophy that journalism is
likewise a public trust, an institution which serves, advances,
and protects the public welfare. . . .
The role of the press in a free democratic society demands
total involvement in and dedication to the problems which
beset that society.
We accept that role as vigorous defenders of our traditional
liberties and as ardent advocates of purposeful progress for all
men.3
