–– John Lennon and Paul McCartney

“All transformation is linguistic.” This declaration from Werner Erhard landed on me decades ago and has been the focus of my work in the world since that moment. Whether it is completely true or not, this stance is useful if we have a desire for real change. It holds that the context or narrative we choose to live within is decisive in guiding our actions and producing outcomes. It recognizes the importance of the words we choose, which are the visible face of our narrative. The task is to choose where to put our attention and which narrative and conversations best serve us in any search for real change.

Some focus and conversations keep us wedded to the very things we want to change. We remain stuck by what Werner calls limiting “speech acts” such as opinions, complaints, blame, highlighting deficiencies and what is missing. There are other conversations that are liberating. These are the speech acts of declaration, choice, possibilities, ownership, promises, gifts, and refusal. We constantly choose which conversations either lead us to remain in place or shift something forward.  

Werner says that transformation is initiated when we first name, without judgment, the story that we have been living into and then choose a new story for ourselves that takes us into an alternative future. An example is my transition from a story of being a gypsy, belonging nowhere, to the moment I declared to be a citizen of the place where I reside. Werner’s thinking has primarily been applied to individuals, but here I want to explore how it is just as powerful for our collective conversations as the path to real change.  

A primary delivery system for shaping our collective conversation is journalism. It has an important role in either facilitating our desire for transformation or holding in place our stories, even if they do not serve us as a society. Reporting the news has a long history of paying primary attention to what does not work and who is to blame. We are in a moment of opportunity where this might be reversed. For the past decade journalism and its ways of constructing the news have been suffering through a crisis of survival, so now might be a good moment to question its linguistics. What it pays attention to and its speech acts.

The Crisis of Journalism

This field has experienced dramatic and ongoing change in this age of the internet. Here is a brief summary offered by Nick Hrkman and his colleagues at The Journalism Lab in Dayton, Ohio:  

The growing scarcity of local news is accompanied at the national level with billionaires purchasing and redirecting the editorial stance of journalistic pillars such as The Washington Post, CBS News, and CNN. Add to this the growing presence of social media outlets that are functioning as the primary source of “news” that favors the echo chambers of the like-minded and the extremes.

All of this has triggered widespread efforts to create alternative journalism delivery systems, innovations such as philanthropy funded news, localized digital news, citizen journalism, solutions journalism, and generative journalism.

The Crisis Is an Opening

From the earliest days of our country, journalism has been a major player in sustaining democracy, caring for equality, and supporting human rights. At times, like the lead-up to the Spanish-American war, the news industry has taken us in unfavorable directions, but this only underlines how important it is.  

What concerns me is that, in the midst of all the changes in form, the question of the editorial patterns of the news is getting too little attention. With some exceptions, the current editorial content of the news, no matter the form, is still reporting on a narrative or story of what is wrong, what is failing, who is at fault, and declaring we are divided. In addition to this focus on failure, the constant story is about the actions of the people and institutions in charge. On any given day, the front pages of the major national outlets like the New York Times, LA Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian give major attention to the tweets of a president, supplemented by reports of war, political drama, government missteps, and celebrity weddings. All reinforce a narrative that the world is dangerous, people are untrustworthy, aggressive competition is built into our nature, economic scale matters most, and that our future is primarily in the hands of the people in charge and the well-known. The argument has been that journalism’s primary role, as the fourth estate, is to protect democracy from authoritarian and dishonest instincts.

In the local news that remains, after covering the national scene and reporting on crime, weather, and sports, attention is focused on the mayor, the CEO, and supposed centers of power like city and neighborhood councils, boards of education, city planning and development efforts, county and state commissions.

This version of our narrative carries the message that, with respect to our well-being and societies’ well-being, citizens are simply witnesses to others’ actions and are left with the occasional vote to shape our future. The side effect is to breed helplessness and the entitlement and resentment that goes along with it. If we believe the dominant narrative and context is decisive, then reframing the journalistic stories, specifically the editorial decisions of what and who is considered newsworthy, calls for a major change more profound than the form in how it is delivered.

The Illusions of Democracy and the Common Good

What reinforces the need to shift our attention is that the historic places where democracy was enacted are often hollow. Our institutions can claim representation, citizen engagement, civic engagement, bottom up, grassroots, but they too often are now forms of lip service. This calls us to question the belief that these are the places to look for an alternative future. If you have shown up lately, you notice that “hearings” of legislatures, planning commissions, boards for our parks, school, and the like are a ritualized two minutes of presentation and then “next.” My local neighborhood council meeting saves ten minutes at the end for “citizen comments.” Legislative structures, including the election campaigns to populate them, are not designed to listen to constituents. They mostly function to sell us an ideology of what they think is best for our schools, health, land use, and livelihood and tell us what will get them chosen. Even if we have local news agencies, they are giving their attention to structures that are interesting as far as what people in charge are deciding but failing as instruments of a representative democracy.

The meaning of all of this is that strengthening our well-being and our democracy and care for the commons will rarely come from new or more effective leadership of our existing structures. The people in charge do matter, but mostly in their power to stop, contract, or cancel budgets where innovation had a chance. Nor will our common good be served by more editorial attention given to traditional institutions like police, social services, chambers of commerce, and large enterprises.

The chance for transformation begins when we see clearly, without judgment, that our structures designed to care for our well-being are important and serve a function, but they are not equipped to create an alternative future. They are organized to value control and predictability, not surprise. As for journalism, innovative ways to serve our well-being, which democracy is designed to support, cannot come from where we are looking. In Werner’s terms, transformation cannot come from continuing to live into the old story.

A shift will occur when we accept that reporting on the school board and highlighting its new members does not impact learning as much as attention to what is happening in classrooms and where teachers are succeeding regardless of the administration. The planning commission is not designed to care for the environment or target development aligned with the interests of local citizens. Giving major attention to the new police chief does not impact safety. The expansion of health care facilities has not impacted infant mortality or access for low-income people. It expands disease services, but the source of our health lies elsewhere. All of these have importance, but our attention to them is way out of balance.     

The New(s) Story: The Power of Local Action and Connectors

The most encouraging part of the shifting news landscape is growing attention to the importance of what is occurring in neighborhoods where democratic engagement by everyday people is on the rise. Where innovative efforts are committed to caring for all that democracy promises. It is the shift from passive, entitled resident/ consumer to active citizen.  This is where our journalistic attention can reinforce and give visibility to the resurgence of democracy and the growth of well-being. This is where citizens are choosing to be actually engaged in caring for each other, protecting rights, distributing assets and power, being safe. This is where the historical benefits of associational life are being revived in profound ways. This is not just ending isolation, but where new thinking is occurring even about fundamentals like capital, debt, land, enterprise, and food.

This is our challenge: to report on the transformational work of citizens, uncredentialed and without a formal franchise, as real, above-the-fold, front page news. To have journalism celebrate dramatic and scalable innovations in our lives where debt is not usury, ownership and wealth are available to moderate- and low-income people, where there is an abundant food supply, where uneasy streets are safe, income and mortality rates are equalized across zip codes, futures for youth are not schooling dependent, where churches are centers for neighborhood economic growth. These are most often led by citizen connectors and touch every aspect of civic life.  

What’s New in What’s News

A shift in journalistic attention is occurring both in what we consider news and who reports it. There are efforts to develop resident journalists by training citizens to listen, observe, and write about the structures of community that are working to assure the promise of liberty and justice for all. There are new models leading our attention to a new story. News organizations that seek out and report where socially isolated people’s gifts are becoming central, cooperation is occurring in surprising places, where measures of trust and social capital are replacing reporting on average income, school graduation rates, empty store fronts, new malls. Examples are Soapbox and the Issue Media Group in the Midwest, The Journalism Lab in Dayton, Next City on neighborhood well-being and equity, The Main Street Journal on building local economies, Faith and Finance on innovations in capital, the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, the Engaged Neighbor Program at the University of Missouri. Underlying many of these are the methods of solutions journalism and generative journalism.

These examples are just ones in my field of vision. They are transformative, not by their business model, or just their local attention, but by reporting on what citizens produce and letting the typical centers of power and wealth rest in peace. All in dramatic contrast to the affection of major news organizations for institutions, people in charge, and what is not working. 

Democracy is well served by following the lead of these emerging examples of what constitutes news. It might not be as entertaining as the traditional news, but we each have enough screens for that. It is not by oversight that I have given little attention to social media and AI. They are entertaining, impactful, and convenient, but they do not have the capacity to preserve democracy and deepen our real relationships with each other, which is where our core interests and common good reside.

Article by Peter Block