“Who is this for?”
If the media wants to responsibly engage the public on the 2020 election, we need to first take a look in the mirror.
According to a 2016 study from the Pew Research Center, 57% of Americans get their news from watching television, be it local (46%), 24/7 cable (31%), or nightly network broadcasts (30%). (Somebody once told me never to start off writing anything with a statistic, but ‘learn the rules to break the rules’ blah blah blah…hear me out.)
The above statistic skews largely toward older demographics, with young Americans aged 18–29 having a significant preference for online news consumption over TV. In the budding enterprise of social journalism and its philosophical underpinning in community engagement, I find it difficult to conceptualize television as a medium for engagement in the increasingly digital world. We readily explore and attempt to innovate with design thinking exercises how we can engage with news audiences through platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok (looking at you, Washington Post,) but so much of our audience doesn’t exist in that sphere. If we want to go ahead and worry about the role of the media in a democratic society, I’m sure there’s a hypothesis in here somewhere about millennial voter turnout and the elusive grasp of the reliable, TV-watching 50+ demographic.
All of this floats around in my mind as I attend the “Citizen by CNN” forum in Manhattan this past Thursday. The event is a day-long series of interviews that is marketed as:
“Citizen by CNN is the network’s civic engagement platform designed to bring people together to discuss issues that matter, the motivations to vote and the importance of being informed and engaged in the political process.”
I was one of a few different Newmark J-School students in attendance, listening to CNN anchors and correspondents interview people like Anita Hill, John Dean, and Samantha Power.
The morning started off with introductions from CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, followed by an interview with Peter Navarro, Director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy for the Trump Administration, by CNN’s Jim Sciutto. While Navarro questioned the legitimacy of journalists using anonymous sources for stories instead of getting quotes from government officials, and then declined to answer a question about whether the Bidens came up in trade talks with China, I couldn’t help but ask myself: “Who is this for?”
The question came back, panel after panel, “who is this for?”
The audience was largely CNN/WarnerMedia employees, guests of those employees, and other people in business, finance, media, philanthropy, academia, and the non-profit sector.
I understand that according to their own internal statistics, CNN Digital receives more unique viewers than does its own cable broadcast, but even though the broadcast was limited to the more “online” demographic, I still fail to see where the engagement angle came into the event.
Sitting in the audience, it felt like I was watching a perpetual motion machine that fed on conflict, polarization, and outrage. There are valid arguments to be made about how the broadcast media can inform the public, but this event felt entirely internally focused, without a coherent strategy to reach the people who that information could actually be useful to.
If CNN wants to have a forum about being engaged in the political process, why doesn’t it bring real American voters from all walks of life into the event? I’m going to make a judgment call and say that if you sacrificed the latte bar and the cold-pressed juice blends, you may be able to afford at least a few people’s expenses to get there. America’s changing demographics necessitate bringing people into the political process who don’t look like the media pundits of yesteryear, and the overzealous whiteness of the in-studio audience simply did not reflect who the media ought to be focussing on in a civic engagement strategy.
I wanted this event to be an introspection and a post-mortem, looking at the mistakes made by horserace political coverage in 2016, and resolving to cover them differently going forward. But frankly, that wasn’t what happened. We operated on business-as-usual, and anyone in the audience who could’ve challenged that modality of media operations was unable because the Citizen by CNN forum lacks a single opportunity to ask a question to any speaker.
Instead, we’re limited to the punditry of Twitter hashtags, with simple reporting on the event being coopted by the James O’Keefe’s of the Internet and their troll armies, and all opinion stays amongst people who already are working in the media.
Plainly stated, I’m disappointed. I’ll give credit to the network for their extensive amount of issue-based town halls during the Democratic primary, but I don’t think CNN’s Citizen event added to the productive conversation we need about how the media ought to cover the 2020 election. Honestly, I don’t think it was even designed to reach the people who could’ve benefited most from listening in on a more productive version of this conversation.
Going forward, we must ask ourselves: what is our responsibility to inform the public about the political process? After determining that responsibility, how do we authentically engage with the public both via the Internet and television broadcasts?
We all know how high the stakes are, so it’s important that every day between now and November 3rd, 2020 we ask ourselves…who is this for?
