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

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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