What’s the big threat to democracy? Distraction
TheStar.com – News/Insight – Personal technologies are shifting young people’s focus off politics, creating a power vacuum special interests are eager to fill. It’s not good for democracy, John Cruickshank argues, urging creative action ‘for a new flowering of democratic spirit.’
Oct 10 2014. By: John Cruickshank, Publisher
Since you’re here at a Toronto Ted talk you’re likely a voter. Good education, good occupation, political engagement, they all go together. And following the news. Playing an informed part in the daily community conversation. News, it turns out, is a gateway to an active civic life. So, congratulations! You’re an emerging power minority. And condolences. You’re an emerging minority! And ultimately, that’s probably not going to be so good for any of us.
Fewer than four in 10 Canadians aged 18 to 21 voted in our last national election. That’s not really news. It’s just another low point in a downward trend that’s been going on for decades. Unless it changes — and it won’t if we don’t do something about it — the future of Canada will rest in the hands of a tiny minority. Well, the U.S. youth vote was practically identical in the last presidential election. Around 38 per cent. We are not alone.
And don’t think that this will change as those young people get older.
Participation rates in news and politics are pretty much fixed early in adult life. Because I’m convinced this trend has something to do with the public’s knowledge about the community, I asked my friend Michael Cooke, the editor of the Toronto Star, how he thought things were going for journalism and democracy. Politics has been very hot at the Star lately with investigative reporting on Rob Ford (open Rob Ford’s policard)’s drug-fuelled rule, exposés of Crown corporations and pharmaceutical manufacturers. Sum it up in one word, I said to Michael. “Good,” he said. But he looked a little anxious, so I pressed him. Asked if he had two words to express how it’s going with younger readers, digital initiatives and all. “Not good,” he replied.
We know that cynicism is already crippling our politics. So, who’s going to believe in the future that a tiny fraction of the voters can deliver fairness for us all? Nobody! The majority rule principle may still be in force in this disengaged future. But what’s the majority of a minority called? An elite. There’s a name for the system we’re sleepwalking towards, too — and it’s not democracy. But you are the rising elite. You’re active and engaged. Why should you worry? Because, over the long run, unfair states are unstable. People aren’t stupid. They see how the world’s dividing into a tiny clique of haves and a big crowd of have-nots. And if they don’t believe the system’s fair, they’ll fight it.
That’s why unfair regimes secure themselves by some forms of repression. We’re already familiar with the softer instances — the state surveillance systems that now have access to all our emails. All our phone calls.
We caught a glimpse of the harder edge of repression here in Toronto at the G20 demonstrations when police squads rounded up a few window-busting anarchists, and hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and unlucky passersby, and threw them in pens for hours. This is how it starts. In the end, you won’t like being authors of this world.
Voting isn’t the issue. Voting’s just the marker. More critical are civic interests, habits and knowledge: The debates in the lunchroom about taxes and spending or public meetings over a new airport or a mega-quarry. The less visible indicators of democracy’s vitality. It’s no coincidence youth voting is so similar in the U.S. and Canada.
It’s not a question of national culture. And don’t blame “the kids today.” It’s a decades-long shift. It spans generations and geography. And it appears to be driven by the devices and content that now dominate and consume our waking lives — our smartphones and tablets, our laptops and PCs and, at least for a little while longer, our TV screens. We have made technology that has remade us. And we have been remade as a society in ways none of us ever imagined.
That’s why I’m so passionate about reaching out to the TED community now. Nobody’s better equipped to think about shaping tools for re-engagement than you. Who better to imagine social media that will encourage curiosity and consensus, and not polarization and prejudice? Who better to design games that will draw children into community activities, not lead them to zone out alone?
I come to you with fragments of this story gleaned from 40 years of investigation and observation as a reporter, editor and publisher. There’s much more to learn. No single perspective is adequate. But from my experience, this is the biggest political story of our lives. I first raised these issues 20 years ago with the great Vancouver civil liberties leader John Dixon. He was just emerging from a stint in Ottawa advising future prime minister Kim Campbell. He’d seen the inner workings of Canadian politics close-up and raw. He concluded then that: “The civil service is very good. “And most of the politicians are there for the right reasons . . . Our real problem is with the citizens.”
Dixon’s insights were electrifying for me. They started to help me make sense of my experiences in the visitors’ gallery. By the early 1990s, attracting young readers had become a growing challenge at the Globe and Mail, where I then worked. One grim day, the circulation manager stormed into the newsroom demanding to know why. We had no answers. We hadn’t changed. The world had. We didn’t know how or why. That’s when my investigation really began.
It’s taken me years, working in newspapers, digital news, television and radio in Toronto, Vancouver and Chicago, to reach firm conclusions. In the end, I found that the vanishing news audiences and the vanishing voters were one and the same. In Canada, the United States, England, France, Germany . . . wherever technology has taken deep hold.
Those who have learned to pursue the news become politically active. No news habit. No engagement.
Our goal is a world of democratic vitality, one that can come to grips with the great challenges of our time: the fate of the earth, economic fairness, peace. But that vitality depends on informed public participation. And our civic conversation has grown less robust over the years. In its hush, you can hear the voices of special interest lobbyists echo ever louder along the corridors of power.
Do you see how this vicious circle spins? Young people fail to join the civic conversation. A power vacuum forms and interest groups rush in to fill it. People grow even more cynical about the fairness of government. They don’t feel represented. They don’t feel they can make a difference. The vacuum for special interests grows — and is just as quickly filled. Lobbyists may be cynical about democracy. About power, they’re not.
So what’s at stake? What are we losing?
Well, when you ask why global warming solutions have been stalled so long, why economic inequality is still growing, why the authors of the financial disasters of 2008 and 2009 are back in charge of the global economy. Think about the power vacuum that’s been created by the disappearing citizens.
I was drawn to journalism by my passion for political life. I’ve had the opportunity to question Mikhail Gorbachev about the revolution he unleashed in the U.S.S.R., to seek answers about austerity from Britain’s pugnacious Margaret Thatcher, and to treat a young Illinois senator who’d just lost a U.S. congressional primary to a consolatory lunch at a chophouse on the Chicago River — neither of us imagining how quickly he would rise to the White House.
But Barack Obama has not been able to get all the young progressives he needed to the ballot box. And without them he’s been unable to break the deadlock of political polarization. The result has been a presidency of great intentions and hopes, disappointing compromises and half-measures.
Here’s the paradox I see: We live in a news junkie’s paradise. We can move seamlessly between hyper-local and global content in real time. Anyone with a smart phone can be a reporter, an editor or a publisher. And it’s all shareable. No generation has ever had such news tools. But the number of people paying attention and participating continues to shrink, as it has for decades.
Eighteen- to 21-year-olds are three times more likely than those 65 and older to say they don’t need to know the news today. And those who do follow the news spend little more than half the time their elders do.
We become conscious of the social rituals and routines that create valuable skills when they’re under stress. We can see now that newspaper reading and TV news viewing represented the daily accumulation of a massive reservoir of public knowledge.
News skills were inculcated without a lot of conscious thought, through teaching and coaching in our homes and schools. Our shared skills and knowledge enabled a deep daily civic conversation and a high degree of democratic participation. But with the emergence of network TV in the early 1960s, the percentage of young people who learned to be newspaper readers began to fall. Most became TV news viewers. In those days, there was nothing else to watch at 6 or 11 p.m.
In the mid-1980s, TSN, MuchMusic and a host of other television choices became available. And cable programming did to television news what TV had done to newspapers. Those who had learned news-watching skills and habits remained loyal. But a growing percentage of young people began to choose entertainment over news. With the digital revolution the number of dropouts has accelerated.
In hindsight, it seems likely that some of the vast newspaper and television news audiences of the past were really not very deeply engaged in the news. They were just killing time. As soon as alternatives emerged, more and more younger people failed to learn news skills and habits. They were looking for distraction, not information about the world. But even if this population only reluctantly followed the news, their political behaviour was just like that of the most committed news junkies. They voted: 80 per cent of eligible voters went to the polls in the Canadian federal election of 1958 — the year the CBC television signal first went coast to coast.
Canadian citizens aged 65 and older were still voting at the 80-per-cent level in the federal election of 2011. But the participation rate of each successive age group Boomers, X’ers and Millennials were lower by a greater and greater margin. Mirroring their increasing failure to develop news skills. So, what do we do about this?
First, we’ve got to decide that we’re actually going to do, to act in the public interest. For some decades now, we’ve let market forces determine more and more about how we live — even how we govern. What’s lobbying if not the work of the market on government? And the market works great for some things. But it hasn’t been much help with global warming or the cause of peace. And in the industrialized world, it’s been making the gap between rich and poor worse and worse. We have to come at these issues as citizens, not consumers. Through our governments.
So, here’s what we know. People can be taught to engage in their society. Good citizenship’s a habit as much as anything else.
Woody Allen once said that 90 per cent of life is showing up. It’s the same with democracy. So how do we get Canadians to show up? Start with the kids. News is the gateway. Schools are the path. But in recent years, we’ve treated our schools as glorified employment academies. Their job has been to teach the 4Rs, reading, writing, rithmetic and resumés. Now they’ve got to teach students how their communities work.
That means students will need news skills because they’re a kind of literacy. It’s a literacy that’s fundamental to becoming an active citizen. These skills have to be taught in the classroom and must be reinforced by frequent testing. This effort must be supported by local media and public broadcasters. And technology can play a part as we look for tools to remake ourselves into more active, collaborative citizens. There’s a place for churches and unions, volunteers and every level of government.
This will take a lot of teaching in the schools and coaching in the community. But with genuine political will and a lot of creativity we can raise up a generation that is informed about civic life and enthusiastic to be involved.
Think about this. We can be responsible for a new flowering of democratic spirit.
Ask yourself how you can contribute. Talk about this with your friends. This is the biggest political challenge of our lives.
Creating the answer would be the greatest gift we could give the future.
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… TED is an international series of conferences on ideas, whose aim is to be a platform for positive change. From a talk given Oct. 2 by Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank at < http://www.tedxtoronto.com/ TEDxToronto 2014END > one venue in an international series of conferences on ideas whose aim is to be a platform for positive change.
< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/10/09/note_of_caution_about_brimming_federal_coffers_goar.html >
Tags: economy, featured, globalization, ideology, participation, rights, standard of living, youth
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