The informed citizen

As the intel­lec­tual battle to provide busi­ness mod­els for journ­al­ism con­tin­ues, so that the informed cit­izen can carry on being — well — informed, I thought you might like to see the latest from my favour­ite Amer­ican soci­olo­gist Michael Schud­son on journ­al­ism and democracy.

And whilst I was look­ing I came across this burst of Schud­son wis­dom from 1999:

“[T]he informed cit­izen” model itself is ripe for recon­sid­er­a­tion. We have to find a place in pop­u­lar rhet­oric and demo­cratic the­ory for the use of spe­cial­ized or expert knowledge.

This is a task that mer­its renewed atten­tion: the quest for a lan­guage of pub­lic life that recon­ciles demo­cracy and expertise.

Civic journ­al­ism will be mak­ing a mis­take if it opts for a kind of sloppy pop­u­lism. Any­thing the experts do must be tain­ted. Any­thing that hap­pens at the grass roots receives the bene­fit of a doubt.

That, I think, is the wrong impulse. I think we have to rely on expert know­ledge. We just have to know — and we don’t — how and where and in what man­ner that expert­ise fits into a demo­cratic process.

Tagged as: Bob Dole, democracy, informed citizen, Journalism, Michael Schudson, San Diego, Ted Koppel