Jamelle Bouie Keynotes Symposium On Journalism and Democracy

On Wednesday, March 15, Boston College hosted journalist Jamelle Bouie for a talk in Gasson’s Irish Hall. The address, sponsored by the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy and the Journalism Program, served as the opening keynote of the Clough Center’s two day symposium on “Journalism and Democracy” on March 16 & 17.

At the outset of his speech, Bouie asserted that we are living through a crisis of American democracy. He immediately went to the familiar reasons that are given for this crisis: misinformation and fake news. However, while he decried the problems that arise from these two, he argued that they were not new nor unique.

Instead, he said that the real anomaly in American media was the idea of objective news which arose in the post-war period. The promotion of a national consensus had its downsides, Bouie suggested, because it resulted in sensitive topics not being discussed at all in the news.

Back to the early days of the republic, Bouie pointed out that newspapers had an open political bias. Every political party had its own newspapers which promoted conspiracies about its opponents. The 19th century was rife with political bias and conspiracy theories in the news. The present day is no different.

For this reason, Bouie did not think that misinformation was the real cause for the crisis in American democracy, although it might have been a factor. Instead, he pointed to another commonplace of the 19th century (and every time up until recent decades): local and regional news coverage.

Quoting Alexis de Tocqueville, Bouie noted that “newspapers both provide information for the people and are constitutive of the people themselves.” That is to say, the responsibility and benefit of the journalist is to provide their communities information about what is happening amongst themselves. This then enables the community to form an opinion about itself and take corrective actions.

He gave an example from his own city, Charlottesville, Virginia. Some woman that lived there decided to begin recording every meeting that the municipal government held, reporting about them on Twitter. By providing this information, Bouie said, “I realized that I had an opinion” about issues of local politics, like the number of parking spaces in downtown Charlottesville.

Newspapers “create the conditions necessary for democratic action” by letting citizens know what is happening around them. However, many places around the country are “news deserts,” so called by Bouie because they do not have any significant presence of journalists or newspapers reporting on local issues.

Instead of focusing on local and regional news, more and more national questions have come to dominate the average American’s attention. Bouie did not discount the importance of national news, but pointed out the perils of its dominance. Whereas local news covers local problems that the community can deal with by itself, the same cannot be said about national news. National news, Bouie said, tends towards entertainment rather than a call to action because the problems are so large and removed from the average person. Instead of focusing on improving their own lives, by watching national news people pick a team to root for, making politics less concrete.

Bouie ended his talk with a potential, if unsure, remedy of providing federal subsidies for local newspapers and other civil associations. He implored his audience to consider that, if our system of government is to work, then it has to inform our lives and actions.