According to advocates of public journalism, when reporters are chiefly concerned with maintaining their antagonistic relationship to politics and are less willing to improve political discourse, news and democracy suffer. Washington Post columnist David Broder thinks that national journalists like him—through rising salaries, prestige, and formal education—have distanced themselves “from the people that we are writing for and have become much, much closer to people we are writing about.”⁴⁸ Broder believes that journalists need to become activists, not for a particular party but for the political process and in the interest of re-energizing public life. For those who advocate for public journalism, this might also involve mainstream media spearheading voter registration drives or setting up pressrooms or news bureaus in public libraries or shopping malls, where people converge in large numbers.

Public journalism offers people models for how to deliberate in forums, and then it covers those deliberations. This kind of community journalism aims to reinvigorate a deliberative democracy in which citizen groups, local government, and the news media together work more actively to shape social, economic, and political agendas. In a more deliberative democracy, a large segment of the community discusses public life and social policy before advising or electing officials who represent the community’s interests.

In 1989, the historian Christopher Lasch argued that “the job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.”⁴⁹ Although he overstated his case—journalism does both and more—Lasch made a cogent point about how conventional journalism had lost its bearings. Adrift in data, mainstream journalism had lost touch with its partisan roots. The early mission of journalism—to advocate opinions and encourage public debate—has been relegated to alternative magazines, the editorial pages, news blogs, and cable news channels starring allegedly elite reporters. Tellingly, Lasch connected the gradual decline in voter participation, which began in the 1920s, to more professionalized conduct on the part of journalists. With a modern, supposedly “objective” press, he contended, the public increasingly began to defer to the “more professional” news media to watch over civic life on its behalf.

As the advocates of public journalism acknowledged, people had grown used to letting their representatives think and act for them. More community-oriented journalism and other civic projects offer citizens an opportunity to deliberate and to influence their leaders. This may include broadening the story models and frames they use to recount experiences; paying more attention to the historical and economic contexts of these stories; doing more investigative reports that analyze both news conventions and social issues; taking more responsibility for their news narratives; participating more fully in the public life of their communities; admitting to their cultural biases and occasional mistakes; and ensuring that the verification model of reporting is not overwhelmed by the new journalism of assertion.

Arguing that for too long journalism has defined its role only in negative terms, news scholar Jay Rosen notes: “To be adversarial, critical, to ask tough questions, to expose scandal and wrongdoing … these are necessary tasks, even noble tasks, but they are negative tasks.” In addition, he suggests, journalism should assert itself as a positive force, not merely as a watchdog or as a neutral information conduit to readers but as “a support system for public life.”⁵⁰