Ex-publisher on a mission to reengage the citizenry

Jay Harris triggered debate and soul-searching throughout the newspaper industry last year when he abruptly quit as publisher of the San Jose Mercury News. Continuing reductions in staff and news space mandated by the paper’s owner, Knight Ridder, were leading to an erosion of quality, and Harris said he could no longer tolerate the company’s willingness to sacrifice its longtime commitment to journalistic excellence on the altar of higher corporate profits.

Overnight, Harris became every journalism organization’s first choice for after-dinner/lunch/breakfast -- not to mention seminar/conference/campus -- speaker.

But Harris thinks he’s been preaching to the choir. He thinks journalists talk too much to each other -- and not just in speeches. He thinks many stories they write and broadcast, ostensibly to enlighten the public, are also -- even if only subconsciously -- aimed primarily at their colleagues and their sources, rather than the reading and viewing public.

“Reporters ... covering Iraq from the United Nations, the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House are basically covering it for the people who are already part of that debate, not for the average reader,” Harris says. “They cover every nuance, every turn of the screw in the process, but there’s nothing to connect to the reader or enable him to feel a real part of a public debate.”

Coverage of Iraq is but one symptom of what Harris sees as a general failure of the news media to engage ordinary citizens in a discussion of important public policy issues. In an effort to address that problem, he recently became the director of the newly created Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. There he hopes to read, ask questions, write for general-interest publications and grope his way toward a brand of journalism that will link the news media and the body politic -- and reinvigorate both of them.

Harris is not alone in either his concerns or his efforts, but I think he’s right when he says, “Democracy is less vital now than it once was. Not only are voting and the level of civic engagement and participation down, but even among those who vote, the level of discourse has declined, in quantity and quality, on issues related to the common good.”

There is considerable ammunition for Harris’ argument in “The Vanishing Voter,” the new book by Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, one of several institutions examining the role and state of the modern media.

Patterson points out that despite higher education levels, despite the addition of millions of blacks and women to the voter rolls and despite the relaxation of voter registration laws, voter turnout has declined almost steadily for 40 years. Indeed, he says, since 1960, individual “participation has declined in virtually every area of election activity” -- not just voting but watching televised debates, campaigning for a candidate, contributing to a candidate or party, attending campaign rallies and reading about campaigns.

Harris thinks the news media bear a large measure of responsibility for this.

“We just don’t do our craft in a way that makes people want to participate in the democratic process or see that it’s important to do so,” he says.

Only 39.3% of the country’s voting-age citizens turned out for the recent election -- the second-lowest total since 1942 -- and Harris thinks the turnout would have been better (and maybe the results would have been different) had the news media done a better job of covering the Bush administration’s foreign and economic policies.

“There are forums,” he says, “where you’ll hear very thoughtful discussions about how America, as the one hyper-power in the world, should conduct itself, what our guiding principles should be. This raises important questions of national security and of empire, and yet these issues were not discussed much during the campaign.

“I would say the same about the tax cut that was passed last year. Were articles written that would be interesting to members of various relevant elites? Yes. But did we really write about the consequences of the tax cut so that it became a matter of central concern to the American people? Not really.”

Although the media have addressed these issues in election post-mortems, they’ve largely done so, Harris says, by “laying much of the responsibility on the Democrats’ doorstep ... for their decision not to campaign on those issues and not to draw serious distinctions between themselves and the president.

“But I think it’s fair to wonder ... no matter where you come down on the issue itself: If we had covered all this in a more compelling way, would it have shifted the focus of the debate?”

Making time for Aristotle

Harris doesn’t claim to have any answers yet. But he’s determined to look for them. At USC, he hopes to “contribute to the public dialogue by working with all parts of the university, drawing together political science and sociology and business and other disciplines” and, ultimately, by writing -- magazine essays and, when he’s learned enough, a book.

But before writing, he’s reading. He thinks the secret to re-creating a public dialogue may lie in the works of some early thinkers, men who wrote about the political system as if it were a living, evolving organism, rather than the corrupt, moribund process we see depicted in the media today.

“I’m going back to Aristotle and the writers of the Enlightenment and Locke and Mill,” Harris says. Then he chuckles self-consciously, acknowledging that this seems an unlikely mid-career curriculum for a 53-year-old who’s spent most of the past two decades as a business executive.

But Harris majored in English in college and had planned to study philosophy in graduate school until he fell in love with journalism.

He sees a “fundamental connection” between his recent rupture with journalism and his current mission. Newspapers, he says, are “trapped inside corporations that are competing for capital. The corporation has a profit ethic, but newspapers have no legitimate, well-developed competing ethic to act as a brake on the drive for profits.”

Editors and reporters at good newspapers do operate from principle and do try to serve their communities by fairly and accurately reporting the news.

“But part of the core ethic of American journalism is to create an informed citizenry, and we’ve largely stopped performing that function,” Harris says. “I want to help develop a philosophy of journalism in the public interest.”

The ivory tower of academia may not seem the ideal base from which to create a dialogue between elite journalists and disengaged citizens, but as Harris points out, “The legal scholarship that led to cases being filed in the South against segregation in the 1930s and ‘40s -- and which ultimately ended up before the Supreme Court in 1954 as Brown v. Board of Education -- proceeded in large measure from the law school at Howard University, which was among the preeminent ivory towers in black colleges.

“That sure had an enormous impact on ordinary people.”

It did indeed. And with so noble an exemplar in his personal memory bank, Harris is setting the bar awfully high. I think his criticisms are worth serious consideration and his objectives are admirable, but as Locke himself said more than 300 years ago, “It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth.”

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.