According to Pew’s new survey, only about one third of Americans care “a great deal” about climate change. That might be a matter of values: some citizens may set a higher priority on liberty or growth than on environmental protection, or they may not trust the government plus scientists to protect the climate.

But the public is also divided on a key matter of fact. In reality, there is near-universal scientific consensus that humans cause global warming, but only 27% of Americans perceive that consensus, including just over half of liberal Democrats.

If I thought that scientists were divided on the basic question of whether humans cause climate change, I would be much less confident that the problem is worth combating.

Two fairly obvious but crucial lessons:

1. Giving an impression that a topic is contested is a great way to sew doubts about it. Once just a few people who claim expertise criticize the mainstream scholarly view, the issue looks debatable. Then everyone has permission to be skeptical.
2. Scientists must take more responsibility for how their work is communicated, debated, received, and used by the public. There’s not much point to specific studies of climate change if a large majority of the public remains unconvinced about the basic problem. If the traditional division of labor–scientists conduct research; reporters cover it–ever worked, it doesn’t work now. Scientists and their institutions (including universities) must develop better ways of engaging in public life.

See also Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication; science, democracy, and civic life.

(Dayton, OH) Traditionally, politicians have spoken directly to relatively small numbers of people, and the press has reported their speeches to much larger publics. The intermediary role of the press has given it leverage that it can use for good (to enlighten and hold accountable) or for ill (to distort and influence).

For instance, at the end of the first contested US presidential election, John Adams gave a conciliatory inaugural address to a few score dignitaries assembled in a room, and the partisan opposition newspaper, the Aurora, decided to praise it. Adams, a Federalist, reached many thousands of Republican readers via a Republican publication, although the Aurora quickly turned against him.

The current election is very different. Donald Trump has five million Twitter followers, and Hillary Clinton has 4.83 million. They can reach those people directly. Meanwhile, the single most popular US newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, has 3.78 million subscribers; the most popular cable TV news show, “O’Reilly Factor,” has 2.67 million viewers. Politicians who have millions of followers exchange Tweets, and then newspapers and TV shows report what they have said to smaller numbers of people.

The change in leverage is palpable. Reporters cannot demand access and no longer have much effect when they call out errors, inconsistencies, or even lies.

Certain exceptions just reinforce the rule. For instance, the televised debates have been drawing on the order of 15 million viewers. Trump threatened to boycott the CNN debate unless CNN gave $5 million to charity–showing off his leverage. But then he realized that 15 million viewers are more than 5 million Twitter followers, and he backed down. “‘When you’re leading in the polls, I think it’s too big of a risk to not do the debate,’ [he said.] ‘I don’t think I have the kind of leverage I’d like to have in a deal and I don’t want to take the chance of hurting my campaign. So I’ll do the debate.'”

Still, if any candidate lies flagrantly to the 15 million viewers of the debate, and the next day’s cable news host reveals that lie to an audience of just 2 million, it’s still a win for the candidate.

It’s good that citizens get direct access to politicians’ speech–it’s as if we were right there in the hall with John Adams. And it’s good that presidential primary candidates feel that they must participate in debates, even if they don’t like the host network. But it’s not so great that the press no longer has enough leverage to make candidates pay a serious price for speech that violates basic norms.

The Fox News website has published four op-eds of mine over the years (“Federal citizenship test: What should a good citizen really know about America?“; “ObamaCare and Millennials: Why lessons of 2014 will last a lifetime“; “What bipartisan budget agreement suggests for future of American democracy“; and “GOP’s future could depend on Romney and your kids“). I believe I also appeared on the Fox TV network once in 2012. When people see these stories on my Facebook page or posted on other people’s pages, the venue–Fox News–draws the most attention. Some assume that the author is a right-winger and attack my position without reading it. Some are perplexed–or pleased–that Fox would run these stories.

I’ve had entirely positive feelings about appearing on Fox. (I also go on conservative talk radio for similar reasons.) But this isn’t a simple matter, and I understand where the critical reactions are coming from.

I would be the first to decry the impact of Fox on our national political culture and on public opinion about specific topics (such as climate change). Some critics may overestimate the political impact of the network; to a significant extent, a media business is a manifestation, not a cause, of public opinion. It mostly serves a market; it doesn’t create one. DellaVigna and Kaplan find that the rise of Fox News affected political outcomes, but not by much: the GOP gained up to 0.7 percent of the vote as a result of its growth.

But a case can be made that Fox has expanded the market for what my colleagues Sarah Sobieraj and Jeff Berry call “outrage,” which, in turn, has debased our political culture and made it harder for us to govern ourselves as a republic. Sobieraj and Berry define outrage as “efforts to provoke emotional responses (e.g., anger, fear moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralization, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents.” Outrage as a genre also has other notable characteristics: a celebrity voice, a purely editorial stance (no original reporting), ideological narrowness, skill at engaging viewers, and lots of mutual references among like-minded commentators. (See Jeffrey M. Berry  and Sarah Sobieraj, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility.) Outrage sells, and Fox News has pioneered and expanded that market.

Fox does not pay its editorialists or guests who appear on the air. Thus I am not guilty of taking money from the network. On the other hand, I am giving them free content. If they are a malevolent force, one could ask whether that is the right thing to do.

I believe the answer is yes, for these reasons:

1. It’s not a one-way relationship, with me giving them content. They are giving me and my organization a platform. It is an especially valuable platform for engaging people I might not otherwise reach.
2. One of our problems as a nation is “outrage,” which is practiced on both the right and the left. Another national problem is the kind of right-wing politics exemplified by at least some of Fox’s hosts. But a third problem is polarization. If we stop trying to reach across the partisan divide, we are giving up on that third problem, which I am not willing to do.
3. I endorse Archon Fung’s argument in “Deliberation Before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World?” (Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 2005). I’ve written at greater length about this piece before, but the basic idea is that you should presume that a powerful entity will deliberate with you until it specifically demonstrates that it won’t, at which point you are free to be strictly adversarial. You shouldn’t write them off because of their overall record or structure, but try to engage them until they fail to reciprocate. In game-theory terms, this is not a losing strategy, because you are free to disengage. It is rather a strategy for spreading deliberative norms as far as they will go.

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(National Airport) After a day with colleagues at the American Press Institute, I am reflecting on changes in my own habits of news consumption. A decade ago, I used to read almost the whole of the New York Times every day. That gave me one institutional perspective on the world–and I spent more time than I should have on ephemera. On the bright side, I daily explored a wide range of topics, from obituaries to human-interest stories, from tech to the arts. I still subscribe to the Times, but I find my attention span much shorter online; the temptation is always to click on something different. I tend to focus on a few developing stories–lately, the Israeli election, the temporary absence of Putin, and the congressional budget process–and obsessively read lots of largely repetitive news and opinion. I think sometimes I am just looking for a more positive angle on the same troubling story. I am not sure whether the total amount of time I spend/waste on daily news is more or less than it was in 2005, but I am pretty sure the total amount of daily learning is lower.

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Reading a daily newspaper is a classic example of a generational habit. Since 2002, members of the “Greatest Generation,” Baby Boomers, and Gen-Xers have all reduced their reading of daily newspapers a bit. But the real reason for declining readership is generational replacement. Going back to the 1970s, we see a strong pattern that each generation reads the newspaper much less than its predecessors. That means that as succeeding generations compose larger shares of the population, total readership falls.

(Unfortunately, the GSS doesn’t provide a lengthy time series on Internet news, which would make an interesting comparison.)

On the other hand, people’s confidence in the press is not a generational story at all. Everyone lost confidence, with the biggest decline occurring between 1977 and 1993. The generations that were old enough to be surveyed during those years sang in unison. Millennials were at first slightly more confident than other generations, but now they have the same views as all the older people.

Basically, this is a story of an industry losing the public’s trust (fairly or not)–it is not about the Millennials or any other generation.

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Robert Gutsche reports that South Florida news outlets are not covering the rise of sea levels, even though they pose an existential threat to Miami and its environs. Partly as a result of the news silence, “civic and economic leaders in South Florida aren’t talking about what’s ahead for us.” In response, Florida International University journalism students are building Eyes on the Rise to fill this important news gap. Working, in part, with local high school students, the FIU journalism students are collecting their own hydrological data with remote sensors, producing original reporting, raising awareness, and engaging public audiences. This project is a promising approach to educating the college students, and it turns the journalism program into a local news asset–much as medical schools provide health care through teaching hospitals. It thus falls at the intersection of citizen science (and Civic Science), experiential civic education/service-learning at both the college and high school levels, public journalism, media reform, and civic environmentalism.

This, by the way, is one of a dozen projects being funded by the Online News Association that my colleagues and I are currently evaluating. Stay tuned.

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(St Louis) The traditional model of paying reporters by selling subscriptions and advertisements is broken. John W. Henry paid $70 million for the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, less than the $110 million he pays Justin Pedroia of the Red Sox (which he also owns). When one second baseman is worth more than two newspapers, you know the news business is in trouble. Yet information about public issues is a public good, and the people who collect it have to be paid and supported, or we will be an ignorant and manipulable electorate.

Yesterday, in DC, I got a chance to visit the newsroom of the Center for Public Integrity. It is a full-scale news operation with a whole staff of seasoned reporters. The newsroom is quieter than most because CPI’s reporters do more number-crunching than traditional newspaper journalists do and spend less time calling people for quotes. Their business model also differs from that of traditional newspapers, in that CPI raises grants and donations for investigative journalism and then gives away the results. You can read CPI’s stories on their own website, but a lot more people read them as syndicated items in other publications or come across their findings in other reporters’ work.

This is the emerging nonprofit model for journalism in the public interest.

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(near Tarrytown, NY) If you want to know the latest development in journalism that relate to civic engagement and democracy, Jan Schaffer from the J-Lab is the person to ask. Here (shared with her permission) is her PowerPoint presentation entitled “The Death and Rebirth of Journalism.”

The big trends she sees are:

• Metro dailies’ disappearing portfolios (Not only do the metropolitan daily newspapers lack revenue, but they are not covering foreign news, national news, or arts & culture; and their suburban readers don’t need their city hall coverage)
• New owners – new rules? (The new newspaper owners made their money in technology and may expect entirely different models.)
• Media entrepreneurship is at an all-time high (Lots of startups and new models)
• Calls for new models of journalism (from reporters themselves)

And her reasons for optimism:

• Investigative news startups (ProPublica, the Investigative News Network, etc.)
• Indie news startups (lots of small online news sites, often devoted to neighborhoods, sometimes profitable.)
• Niche sites (specialized, expert sites on politics, arts, climate, etc.)
• Tech sites with news portfolios (companies like Yahoo are bringing real journalists onboard)
• Non-narrative news (games, interactive maps, searchable databases as alternatives to news stories)
• Soft advocacy sites (advocacy organizations for issues like smart growth or school reform that start producing genuine news without making it all narrowly subservient to their agenda.)

Much more detail in the PowerPoint.

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