Research
In December 2009 I completed my graduate degree at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences.
Throughout my studies I have had several research interests including news media bias, news media framing, censorship during war, terrorism, the news media and government leaks, urban revitalization, renewable energy and climate change.
Below is an exerpt from a recent research project on a unique paradigm shift in philanthropic giving and urban revitalization in Kalamazoo, MI.
The Kalamazoo Promise: Can a College Scholarship Revitalize a Community?
By Steven Russell Davy
Introduction & Description
Philanthropic economic development efforts frequently have come in the form of a wealthy donor announcing plans to build a new arena in town. The news creates a buzz, jobs are created and tourism from the athletic events, concerts or conventions stimulates the economy. The wealthy donor puts their name on the building and calls it a done deal: Economic development. Other traditional avenues of philanthropic economic development take the shape of a wealthy donor establishing a foundation with a board of directors that doles out grants for approved proposals. There are of course other examples, but what happens when you shift the philanthropic economic development paradigm? What happens when an economic development program is centered on education and strengthening human capital? Now for something even more unusual, the wealthy donors for this paradigm shift wish to remain anonymous. Just such an economic development revitalization program was launched in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
In November 2005, Kalamazoo changed forever. In what is truly the first of its kind, it was announced that anonymous donors had created a new college scholarship program so simple, yet so powerful, that the impact could be felt immediately by the entire community. It’s called the Kalamazoo Promise and it guarantees a full college scholarship (100 percent tuition and fees) to potentially all graduates of the Kalamazoo Public School accepted into any public university or community college in the state of Michigan. That’s it.
“The donors came up with this incredibly simple idea,” said, Dr. Michelle Miller-Adams, a professor at Grand Valley State University and guest scholar researching the Promise at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “And that is one of its huge strengths, that it is so simple, you get it right away and all of its ramifications.”
Adding to the weight of Kalamazoo’s new gift, it was announced that the Promise was set up by the anonymous donors in perpetuity. The scholarship has no expiration. There are rules that require a student using the Promise to carry at least a 2.0 grade point average and make regular progress toward a degree, but other than that the program is simple.
Evidence that the shockwaves of the Promise could be felt around the city was everywhere and simultaneously the Promise became the main topic of conversation: Who could have done this? What does it mean that all of our students can go to college for free? What will the impact be on the community?
While the Promise is only a few years old and the data concerning whether or not the scholarship is actually working as an economic revitalization program is not well established, the Promise has singlehandedly brought together two of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century: How do you revitalize your city to be competitive and attractive to be able to draw the kind of people you want to have living in your city? And how do you facilitate access to higher education?
Education and economic revitalization are often viewed as trade offs. People will say in a time of crisis that you can’t invest in the schools and need to work on offering tax incentives to businesses to come locate in a city. On the other side of the coin, city leaders often suggest that too much is being spent on incentives to businesses and that more should be invested in the local education system. There is this implicit tradeoff in tough budgetary times about where a city’s priorities are. What the Promise suggests is that these can be sewn together. You can enhance the community’s economic attractiveness by investing directly in education and simultaneously invest in education to help a city’s economic competitiveness. “I think what’s unique about it is that it brings those two things together and it chooses as the vehicle for making that investment a public, urban, relatively high poverty, relatively high minority, declining urban school district,” Miller-Adams said.
Below is an exerpt from a research project I recently completed on news media framing and climate change.
News Media Framing and Perceptions of Climate Change
By
Steven Russell Davy
INTRODUCTION:
News Media Framing and Climate Change
The Media-Society Relationship
One of the most important stories of the 21st century is climate change. As with other important stories, the news media is responsible for covering climate change so that society is informed and can participate in a democrat way about the issue. Climate change, or the observed long-term change in the global atmosphere beyond natural climate variations (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007), is a difficult story for the news media to cover because the story takes place over a long period of time. Unlike other environmental stories where people can see the immediacy of the impact (e.g. the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound), climate change takes place over decades and is hard to see taking place in concrete ways. Regardless of the difficulty of covering climate change, it is a story that affects government, industry and society. How climate change is covered by the news media affects society’s understanding of the issues surrounding climate change.
Climate change is in large part a story about conflict. Carbon emissions (CO2) are a major contributor to climate change. CO2 emissions come from sources like automobiles. Reducing the CO2 emissions of automobiles requires large sums of money from automobile companies to retool the mechanical design of vehicles. In order to get the automobile companies to spend money on reducing the CO2 emissions of cars and trucks, the United States Congress could enact laws that mandate the lowering of CO2 emissions. This presents a conflict of interests. On the one hand there are communities like Detroit that don’t want to anything to stand in the way of the automakers because it could negatively affect their way of living and infringe on the norms, roles and values of the region. On the other hand, reducing CO2 emissions slows the negative affects of climate change on the environment. Here is an example of a story about climate change that can be presented by the news media in a number of ways. One way is a clash of political interests. Another way is a clash of economic interests. If the news media emphasize the political clash or the economic clash they are participating in framing.
The implication of news framing is potentially significant. Researchers have found that news framing can leave a distorted impression of a story on society. When for example people read a story framed with a political clash emphasized, they are likely to only see the climate change story in terms of opposing political views. If the news media present the climate change story emphasizing an economic clash, people will think about climate change solely in terms of opposing economic values. Either of these outcomes could lead to a process of socialization, i.e. people’s belief systems are altered to reflect what the news media’s norms values and roles are (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach).
Democratic Self-Governance
Socialization affects how individuals respond through a process of constructing new meanings for belief systems. In other words socialization is a process of redefining and modifying meanings in the social environment. DeFleur writes that another aspect of socialization is how the indirect construction of new meanings affects how individuals socially interact and take part in groups.
If using frames in the news media could lead to socialization, this in turn could lead to extensive diverseness in society, i.e. people only understanding climate change in terms of opposing political ideologies or economic perspectives. A divided society incapable of finding a middle ground will halt forward democratic progress.
Additionally a divided society will likely group itself explicitly with people that agree with each other i.e. those that think in terms of opposing political views or opposing economic views. This cult like mentality in society is poison for the democratic assumption that people need competence to understand important issues like climate change. If people only understand issues from polar extremes, they will likely be unable to compromise which is one essential element in bringing people together with opposing views.
Below is an exerpt from a research project I recently completed on the news media and government leaks.
Government Leaks and the News Media
The culture of anonymous sources: A defense and criticism
By Steven Russell Davy
Introduction
Democracy in the United States remains healthy because of a series of checks and balances built into its framework to ensure vitality. These checks and balances begin with a society that cares and participates in the democratic process. Keeping society informed of what its government is doing is critical to whether people care and participate. This check and balance is one of the basic functions of the news media. The second critical function of the news media is its watchdog role. If the government abuses its power, it is the role of the news media watchdogs to report the abuse so that society is informed and can act accordingly with its voting power.
If the government, society, or the news media don’t fulfill their role, then democracy will fail. For example; if the news media neglect to report abuses of power by the government, then society cannot act and the government abuses will likely escalate threatening the health of democracy. The same is true for society. If people in society do not care or participate, then the government will do whatever it wants and democracy will fail. Finally, if the government does not fulfill its mandate to create laws and keep society safe, then democracy fails.
The challenge of keeping democracy healthy requires a lot of work. The government would like it if the news media did not report its abuses because lawmakers generally like to stay in power. However, as I have mentioned above, the watchdog role is critical to ensuring that the government remains honest. However, the government is made of up thousand of employees that support lawmakers, so if there is an abuse of government power, the fractious nature of the government infrastructure will likely include someone who is willing leak inside information to the news media. The media can then use the leaked information in reports to expose government abuses and to inform society. The risk of leaking secret information can lead to serious consequences for the person leaking the information and the journalist reporting the information. Because of this, sources with secret information are often granted confidentiality.
A problem with anonymous sources is that on the one hand, people have a right to know if their government is abusing its power. But on the other hand, who decides what secrets should be told? If the anonymous source coming forward with a leak is breaking the law by providing information to a reporter, should this information still make the front page of the morning newspaper or the top story in the six-o-clock news? What are the motivations behind a government employee who leaks information? Are government insiders simply using the media as tool for their own grievances?
There are equally difficult questions that should be raised about the role played the news media using anonymous sources. If a reporter learns of secret information about the government, what are the ramifications for publishing anonymous information without accreditation? Reporters are citizens like the rest of society. What gives the news media the power to take the law into its own hands and report a story with anonymous sources? Does the use of anonymous sources place journalists above the law? The powerful position that the news media hold in American society has garnered it the title as the fourth estate. The nomenclature was made famous by Edmund Burke, who looking up at the Press Gallery of the British House of Commons, sarcastically said, “Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all.”[1]
Yet, anonymous sources can provide information that can be critical for keeping democracy healthy. The information anonymous sources can provide can help reveal a massive government cover-up of a crime as was the case in the stories published about the Watergate burglary. One of the critical sources for Watergate was Mark Felt, famously known as Deep Throat. Felt was granted anonymity to protect him from retribution. Without anonymous sources like Felt the public may never have known about the corruption of the Nixon administration. In cases like Felt and other anonymous sources like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers which revealed that the government was misleading the public about the true nature of the Vietnam War, the news media published government secrets for the greater good of democracy.
Another important aspect of the relationship between confidential sources and the news media is that a reporter who grants anonymity is granting an enforceable agreement according to the U.S. Supreme Court in Cohen v. Cowles Media.[2] If called by the Grand Jury, then because of the enforceable agreement, the reporter must refuse to testify which can send the reporter to jail. Granting anonymous status to a source should be a decision made with this understanding.
Anonymous sources have also helped undermine the credibility of the news media. In 1980 Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke published a story titled “Jimmy’s World” in which Cooke wrote a profile of the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict. Cooke reported “Jimmy’s World” using anonymous sources. The story, which won Cooke a Pulitzer Prize, was also entirely false. Here use of anonymity proved disastrous and severely damaging to the Washington Post’s reputation and credibility.
Beyond the extremes of the Cooke debacle and the opposite heroic reporting of Watergate, the news media’s use of anonymous sources is ingrained into the practice of journalism. Anonymity is so commonly granted that it is almost impossible to read a front page story without seeing phrases like “said a government official close to the negotiations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.” Why shouldn’t the reporter have demanded that their sources be credited?
In the wake of the Janet Cooke scandal, it is fair to say that anonymous sources aren’t trusted by the public. Yet, reporters argue that they can’t do their job without using anonymous sources claiming that without anonymity, a source will simple go to another reporter with the information.
Anonymous sources are part of the culture of both the news media and the government. The use of anonymous sources is critical for exposing government abuse. Anonymity can also be abused by the news media and the government. The role of government leaks and the use of anonymous sources as a function in American democracy is the focus of this paper. The subject is clouded with ambiguity as the number of questions raised above indicates. But its also is critically important to address the issue in order to gain an understanding of the seriousness of using anonymous sources in modern journalism.
[1] Brewer
[2] Associated Press, (2007) p. 344
If you would like to read more about these research projects please e-mail me at stevenrdavy@yahoo.com
