Commonweal Institute Blog

Although our nation was founded on the concept of citizen lawmakers and town meetings in which everyone had a voice, politics in the US has evolved into a highly professionalized activity in which citizens are expected to contribute money and volunteer in campaigns under the direction of the pros, and then go away until the next election. The media have also been professionalized beyond the days of the citizen broadsheet of Ben Franklin and pamphlets of Tom Paine. Political information has become the province of professional journalists, pollsters and commentators, who themselves have become the property of giant media corporations. Citizens are expected to watch, listen to and read what they are given and not ask questions reporters have not thought of (or been brave enough to ask).

Democratizing American politics and media.
The Internet is changing this. The internet holds the promise of re-democratizing American politics and media, enabling citizens to recapture the peoples' democracy envisioned by the nation's founders. It promises a democratic process in which all citizens who want to can apply their particular talents to the aspects of politics and media that they are attracted to. As in Balinese art, some will be better and more effective than others, but all will have access. Michael Cornfield of the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University, describes this as a loosening of terms "activist" and "newsmaker":

"[because of the Internet] the definition of “activist” might continue to loosen, to include people who do little more than what ten minutes a month at their computers enables them to do; parties and groups will devote more energy and creativity to aggregating these actions into grassroots power. The definitions of “newsmaker” and “news” will also loosen, both because of what grassroots campaigners can do with the Internet, and what bloggers, web video-makers, and others with things to say to the public can do through the Internet to distribute their messages. These changes could herald a major reconfiguring of the most public aspects of the American political process.

Cornfield wrote this before the beginning of the 2006 campaign, when his reference point was a study that showed "at …the 2002 midterm elections …political cyberspace was populated mostly by tentative campaigners and wandering citizens." In fact, in 2002, only 22% of Internet users searched the Internet for campaign news during the mid-term election and just 7% relied on the Internet as their primary source of political information. But these numbers doubled during the 2006 campaign: 15% of all American adults named the Internet as the place where they got most of their campaign news and 31% of all Americans - more than 60 million people - relied on the Internet for political information and to discuss the elections.

The 2006 election produced something else far more important, a new class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the Internet did so for political purposes by creating or forwarding online original political commentary or politically-related videos or organized online. These citizens were pioneering the re-democratization of American politics and media.

Richard Rogers argues in his book, Information Politics on the Web, that the Internet is the best arena for unsettling the official and challenging the familiar. He describes the web as a disruptive technology in which official versions of reality and policies to shape it are routinely shattered by citizen journalists and activists. It is this capacity for disrupting the status quo and undermining elites that is the key to re-democratizing American politics and media because it changes the nature of political participation - it removes the barriers of professionalization.

What does "political participation" mean in the internet age?
The bulk of the political activity on the Internet has been directed at political campaigns. But American democracy is really an unending series of battles over the allocation of resources and the domination of values - who gets what, who pays for it, and whose values rule. Campaigns are only a small aspect of this ongoing struggle. Engaging in campaigns is only one aspect of democratic "participation". The real battles take place in the Senate cloakroom, in lobbyist-packed House Committee rooms, in off-limits markup sessions, closed-door House-Senate reconciliation meetings, White House conference spaces, and on golf courses, corporate jets and in private ballrooms. The public has no input to the real, daily battles of who gets what and who dominates who in America. Participating in all of democracy requires democratizing all of American politics.

Democratizing American democracy involves:

• elections, including campaigns and election monitoring


• political information and the news cycle


• the legislative process, from the city council to the Congress


• holding government accountable for implementing laws and regulations

Elections
Table 1 lists some of the ways in which campaigns and citizens engaged one another in 2006. Deprofessionalizing election process ranges from tracking and revealing campaign finances, on-line fund raising, decentralizing campaign structure, and on-line referenda, to keeping candidates honest with citizen video & blogs "outing" hidden critical information ignored or buried by the mainstream media, and citizen investigations of voting processes, voting machines and their hackability. As Cornfield notes his 2006 article, "there are innovations yet to come as more Internet tools … make it out of the lab and early adoption phase."

Political information
Political information is also rapidly being deprofessionalized by the Internet, but less effectively than campaign activity because of the continued dominance of television. The Raines and Horrigan study showed that 66% of Americans still rely on television as their primary political information source. They also found that only 23% of those who used the Internet for political purposes created information - blogs, videos, comments. While this is a impressive 1.38 million people, it pales next to the 60 million who access the web for political information and the million more who rely on television. Unless television is linked to political participation on the Internet, Americans will not be fully engaged in this aspect of democracy, either as creators or consumers of political information. With exception of the non-profit channels LinkTV and FreeSpeech TV and occasionally on PBS, this linkage will be rare in the corporate media world. Growing these non-profit television channels should be a priority for progressives.

Legislative engagement
If citizens are allowed full information and tools to engage with the legislative process, they can change the contours of the American democracy. Currently, bills and budgets are written, introduced, amended, passed or killed often totally out of view of all but the most persistent citizens (and even then, many critical legislative processes are off limits vent to most Members). The Internet could change this with such innovations as:

• Members posting drafts of bills and asking for input from their constituents


• Allowing anybody to video committee hearings on the web


• Posting bill-relevant information (e.g., sources of campaign funds for committee members, bill supporters and opponents, and their contributions, plus analysis)


• Posting all committee votes and floor votes in real time with explanations


• Opening up all markup and House-Senate conference sessions to citizen video


• Enabling citizens to testify with video at committee hearings


• Establishing online text/video conversations regarding bills


• Taking online polls of ongoing legislation and posting results on public sites available to the Members, the news media, and the public

Many of these innovations will require Congress to change how it does business, something it hates to do. But as citizens understand how to use the Internet to aggregate their power, share information and apply pressure during campaigns, websites that look beyond the elections to legislation can focus on these. Some of them do not require Congressional action - data on contributions are available now and can be posted on sites tracking bills, sites can be set up to collect citizen input on bills now and pressure Members to pay attention. John Edwards has already launched online video conversations with supporters - this can be extended to every Member's website.

Monitoring and Enforcement.
The Bush White House has been aggressive and successful at blocking both citizen and Congressional access to its decision-making process. The failure of the 106th Congress to conduct oversight demonstrates how a Congress and a White House with similar political aims can collude to deny the people their Constitutional right to monitor their elected government. The White House, in a case challenging its faith-based funding schemes, has moved to exempt itself from Supreme Court oversight by arguing that it should be immune from lawsuits challenging the Constitutionality of its policies. Already, two justices have signaled they agree with the White House - if three more agree, citizen oversight of the Executive will be virtually gone. The Internet can and should be engaged to reverse this trend with tools such as :

• Online aggregation of litigation (now done by law firms for class action liability) challenging policies and programs launched by the Executive without Congressional authority or that appear unconstitutional


• Online aggregation of performance data from internal and external program monitors (i.e., the GAO)


• Wiki and video sites for leaks that allow citizens and government employees to anonymously post inside information on policy making in the executives.


• Online aggregation of pressure on the Executive, including publication of embarrassing information by sites that move rapidly to avoid being shut down

A Citizen Democracy and Punditry for 2008
Every citizen cannot be engaged in every one of these phases of Democracy, but we each have individual inclinations and skills that we can put to work in the phase we want to be involved in. What is needed are tools that allow citizens to be part of the full Democratic process. The Internet can enable this by de-professionalizing politics and media.

Table 2 lists ways in which the Internet is already being used by candidates and citizens to engage in the 2008 campaigns. The early activity promises substantial increases in the numbers of Americans who engage in the elections online, who get their information online, and who create information online. It also promises that 2008 will likely be the turning point in online engagement, establishing the Internet as the enabler of Citizen Democracy and Citizen Punditry with substantial political impact in the election and in the future. A new generation of political activists, hinted at in the Pew studies, will emerge with the tools, knowledge and determination to break down the professional barriers that have grown around American democracy.

Television: closing the loop
The emergence of citizen-generated video in 2006 as a reporting and commentary tool, along with cheap cameras and new technologies that will eliminate download and buffering times, will likely create a critical mass of online activists - that is, the online world will become as important as other venues, such as television. The challenge will be to link them together. In 2006, 66% of Americans got their political information from television. Videos on YouTube or ThePeopleChoose received thousands to millions of views over the months they were up online, but stories on network news, CNN, FOX, were seen by millions each night. Television is still and will remain the central conduit for political information for most Americans in 2008 and beyond. As DSL penetration rises above the present 45%, the Internet's presence will grow, but it will take considerable time to reach the current 66% penetration of cable television and the 99%+ of television use in American homes.

But it is the Internet that provides a two-way street - it is the tool by which Americans can re-democratize politics and media. Television is a one-way medium that is only now giving viewers a little control over their choices, but no opportunity to create those choices. The promise of re-democratizing American democracy can only be realized by linking the two media.

In 2006, Current TV and Link/ThePeopleChoose offered some opportunity for viewers to create the viewing options through uploaded video chosen for broadcast. Today television networks and cable stations, national ad agencies, and some local stations are now experimenting with user-generated video to TV. None of these efforts have been undertaken within a larger strategy to link TV and the Internet to move ahead citizen participation and citizen punditry. The technologies and the understanding of them were not mature enough in 2006 to think about this. But we know enough now about creating and using online tools, unleashing citizen intelligence and energy through the Internet, and the pressure points in the political system that respond to the Internet. A critical key is linking the Internet's capabilities with television's reach to re-democratize America's democracy and create a broad and active citizenry. As indicated above, this will not happen in the profit-oriented corporate media, and it is rare in the partially corporate-supported PBS world. The answer for progressives is to build non-profit television broadcasting and link it to the Internet. Progressive donors should add to their strategies funding programming on non-profit channels, funding website-broadcast projects, and underwriting the overhead expenses of non-profit channels.