Is America "Voting Alone?" -- Breaux Symposium probes issue of declining voter participation
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMarch 21, 2001
BATON ROUGE -- According to panelists at Louisiana State University's second-annual John Breaux Symposium, there are far worse things than a dangling chad. A decline in voter participation, according to panelist and political journalist Curtis Gans, threatens the health and well-being of America's democracy.
A standing-room-only crowd gathered on Thursday, March 15, at LSU's Lod Cook Alumni Center to listen to five nationally recognized panelists discuss the issue of "Voting Alone." The evening's discussion was moderated by LSU Chancellor Mark Emmert.
Gans and the symposium's other four panelists - journalists Jack Germond, Tom Rosenstiel and Ben White and former White House communications specialist Ann Lewis - discussed issues surrounding the recent presidential election, namely voter turnout and the media's role in the political process.
Gans, who is vice president and founding director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate in Washington, D.C., said that, although voter turnout in this year's presidential election actually increased from 49 percent in the 1996 election to 52 percent, it was not enough. The election was still one of the closest in history, being the third-closest numerically, the second-closest by percentage and the closest in the electoral college, he said.
According to Gans, the problem of low voter turnout is based highly on Americans' lack of motivation. "We have a lower level of trust in our leaders," he said, citing Vietnam, Watergate and Iran Contra as examples of why many Americans have lost faith in the country's political system.
But should it be the media's responsibility to restore the faith and increase voter participation?
Germond, political analyst for CNN's "Inside Politics" and a 40-year political reporter, said he doesn't think so. It's not the function of journalism to serve the public by urging people to vote and participate in democracy. The media's responsibility, he said, is to report what happens.
He referred to the 2000 presidential campaign as one with "two candidates that were really bad," emphasizing that media are not to blame for the election's turmoil.
"Journalism didn't do this by itself; the American people chose what they got," Germond said.
Germond did admit, however, that the media are not irreproachable. " We have done a bad job in many ways," he said.
Rosenstiel agreed. Rosenstiel, who is vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and the author of Strange Bedfellows: How Television and the Presidential Candidates Changed American Politics, said a growing emphasis of press coverage on tactics and campaign strategy instead of on the candidates themselves and the power they might possess to change citizens' lives has driven people away from the polls.
But the media have only reacted to a new trend in the management and execution of political campaigns, Rosenstiel said. Today's campaigns are run by professionals who conduct research and who are paid to insert adjectives and adverbs and other rhetorical devices into a candidate's speeches, he said. In turn, the press have become like specialists with gigantic microscopes, he said, looking into the many intricate aspects of a campaign. The consequence still remains, however: Americans seldom get to see a candidate for who he or she really is.
Lewis, who helped organize First Lady Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign, attributed the media's move from reporting to analyzing to the recent explosion of different types of media technology.
She said the profusion has caused a tremendous amount of competition, which has, in turn, encouraged an emphasis on campaign strategies and tactics. Each media outlet wants to be the one to have that edge, she said, but this comes at the expense of addressing the real substance of political campaigns.
Rosenstiel's prophecy: "Political journalism will destroy itself, and something else, the Internet perhaps, will replace it."
But does the Internet really have the potential to become a major player in the political arena? Perhaps, according to White, a Washington Post reporter who focused on the Internet's impact on this year's election.
White said the Net has the potential to play a huge role in getting people involved in a campaign but, unfortunately, didn't do that this past year, citing the failure of political dot.coms as one example. The Internet did not turn out to be, as many had suggested, what television was for the 1960 presidential campaign and election, he said.
The Gore campaign used instant messaging software extensively, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was able to raise campaign funds via the Net, though it didn't ultimately help him win the primary. But beyond these two examples, White said, there isn't a whole lot of innovation to point to where the Internet is concerned.
Campaigns still are not putting much money into the Internet because it still hasn't proven it can do what television and radio can, White said. White said as far as he knew, the Net had no positive impact on voter turnout. Many just used it as another resource in addition to newspapers, television and radio.
"Journalism does have an important role in shaping and providing information to the electorate," Gans said, "but [the electorate] is not getting that information."
But the idea of voters being either informed or uninformed, Rosenstiel said, is a faulty notion and one that has been oversimplified. Different people are just knowledgeable in different areas, he said. And the notion that "the knowledgeable" should handle the democracy is wrong, he added.
"It's the pluralistic mix that tells us what things are important to society," Rosenstiel said. "If we leave people out, it distorts the agenda."
Rosenstiel said instead journalists need to do a better job of figuring out what it is people care about and which candidates want to work for that.
The symposium was sponsored by LSU's Manship School of Mass Communication and the Riley Center for Media and Public Affairs.
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Contact Jennifer MelanconLSU News Service, Feature Writer225 578-5685[email protected]
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