What do these writers do beyond merely informing the public?
Last December, Rolling Stone’s “A Rape on Campus” — a bombshell feature story about a supposed gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity — became the most publically discredited piece of journalism of the year. A story that held the potential to change our country’s broader discussions on college sexual assault and galvanize readers into taking a stand against this complex problem quickly became an obstacle to progress; it generated the perception that the magazine and the author were attempting to play up or even fabricate a problem. Rolling Stone’s shoddy investigation and fact-checking negatively colored its audience’s perceptions of college sexual assault and potentially diminished its readers’ taking action. The story calls into question two fundamental questions crucial to journalism: What are the roles writing plays for civically engaged writers and readers, and what constitutes civic engagement for both the creators and consumers of an article?
Civic engagement — this nebulous, fancy-sounding concept — can be both intellectual as well as active. It is simply engagement with the people, processes, events, and ideas that affect and shape the greater society around one. Intellectually, it can involve learning more about these phenomena, expanding one’s perspective or knowledge on an issue, or becoming motivated to take action. Actively, it can be sparking intellectual engagement in others or, more broadly, directly participating in efforts meant to foster change (without necessarily being successful). Civic engagement’s targets are anyone who can be more civically engaged or have the potential to effect change. Success means either finding oneself in a different place with the world intellectually or putting forth effort in making a difference with the people, processes, events, and ideas that shape society.
Richard Ross, a professor and activist at UC Santa Barbara, achieves this relationship with society with his photographs and writings about juvenile incarceration — a phenomenon that greatly impacts a subset of society and stems from our broader ideas of punishment and behavior. In the afterword to his Juvenile in Justice, Ross explains that “I learned how to speak to children in detention and confinement. I learned how to neutralize the authority of my age, height, and race by sitting on the floor and allowing the children to have control over the conversation.” His becoming more aware of his status over his subjects through his efforts to document youth incarceration allow him to better engage with this phenomenon.
Poignant first-hand accounts of incarcerated girls’ horrific life experiences frame his preface to the book; passages such as “They gave me drugs when I was ten…when they wanted to have sexual contact with me and not fight back” bring awareness of these significant issues to readers, sparking intellectual civic engagement. The power of his words contain the ability to motivate active engagement in his audience. The use of his photos in testimony to Congress on this problem were intended to effect change, targeting and influencing those in government with the most structural power to enact any sort of change.
For civically engaged writers, the role of their work is this spark for intellectual or active civic engagement in their readers. The goal is to leave readers in a new intellectual relationship with the people, processes, events, and ideas that shape society or to motivate them into taking physical action meant to have an effect on these phenomena. For readers not already civically engaged, writers’ and journalists’ work is the spark that gets them involved mentally with the world; for those who already are, writing is a direction-setter or extra catalyst for their civic engagement.
In a recent feature article on her role as a civically engaged writer, journalism graduate student Anjali Shastry discussed the roles her writing plays with the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service and American Journalism Review and how she sees her writing as a window to the world. She connects readers in one part of the country to issues and concerns facing another part of the country with an article highlighting differing opinions on the media’s approach to covering the May 2014 Isla Vista tragedy. Her own words in the story serve as a skeleton and guide for the direct quotations from a local reporter and a student. These quotations relay a community’s differing perspectives on the media’s role in tragedies and allow readers the opportunity to connect directly to those involved in important issues that might not otherwise affect them. Shastry’s assembling and framing her two subjects’ opinions gives her the opportunity to facilitate others’ connection to a broader community and its issues.
Her writing plays the role of a window between readers and real-world issues they wouldn’t otherwise be connected with while also serving as the platform and groundwork for others to comment, develop, and debate their own burgeoning ideas — to cultivate their intellectual civic engagement. She asserts that her writing’s not just about being this window to the greater world, but a place for readers to leave their thoughts and discuss the topic with others, herself included. “You want the article to lay the groundwork for the information that they have, and you want them to be engaged—you want them to have discussions about it,” she said in the feature story. “I want there to be [on the part of readers] some sort of ‘Well, I think this because of this’. And I want people to be able to see other sides of the story that I can’t necessarily put in it.” Her articles provide a space for readers’ expanding intellectual civic engagement and mental relationship with the broader issues around them.
Mark Strong, a writer and teacher attending UC Davis, describes the roles his writing plays in a feature article by Michael Berton. An op-ed from his time at UCSB’s Daily Nexus newspaper tackles the seemingly hopeless political atmosphere in Washington and motivates readers to want to take action. Stating that special interests are “hijacking” our representatives’ votes and asserting that politicians’ unwavering commitment above all else to irrational ideology is a “suicidal” trend not only serves as a wake-up call for readers regarding what their government is doing, but is meant to incite a shared passion that is necessary to all forms of active civic engagement.
According to Berton, Strong’s work is “passionate” and “always has a call to action plan.” This blend of passion and concrete action are the ideal ingredients for planting this seed of civic engagement in readers; it gives his audience not only the emotion that underlies action and the desire to make a change, but gives them the blueprints to structure their newly inspired efforts. The informative and empowering nature of Strong’s writing allows readers the opportunity to find themselves in a different intellectual place with the issues he covers and gives them a direction and course of action.
The work and responsibilities or writers — and journalists in particular — embody both sides of writing’s civic engagement potential: it is active in its creation and intellectual in its consumption. Journalists further their own civic engagement as they simultaneously facilitate others’. This is perhaps best illustrated by Shastry, whose tracking down of politicians in Annapolis to learn about the subject of her articles is her own form of intellectual engagement, which facilitates the composition of her articles — an active form of engagement. On the other side of her articles are her readers, who become intellectually engaged (and thus potentially actively engaged). Intellectual engagement enables active engagement, which then enables others’ intellectual, and then their active, and so on down the line of public influence.
But writers’ and journalists’ work remains a vital, early-on link in facilitating the rest of this chain of civic engagement. The general populace’s ability to maintain an informed intellectual understanding of its society and participate in constructive change often hinges on journalists’ ability to inform, persuade, inspire, and be civically engaged themselves. For journalists, being cognizant of the roles and social impact they and their work have is imperative to informing and broadening ordinary citizens’ knowledge and perspectives as well as their capacity to actively engage with the people, processes, events, and ideas that affect and shape society. Had the author and fact-checker behind “A Rape on Campus” appreciated the social impact a discredited article on rape would have, the country might have witnessed a more constructive and positive wave of intellectual and active civic engagement.
From Ideas to Paper 