The media vs. the people: please tell us what we need to know.

Should I continue to boil my water? I haven't been able to find the answer in my community newspaper, the Washington Post. Some months ago a story about the bacteria in our drinking water caught my eye. There were problems at the treatment plant, it reported. Bacteria had been allowed to accumulate in the holding tanks, as far as I could understand it, and they were being flushed out. But not to worry - it was not a "boil-water emergency." Having experienced several "boil-water emergencies" in the last two years, I nevertheless began boiling water to fill the ice cube trays and cook vegetables. (I had long ago taken to drinking bottled water.)

Weeks passed and I saw no further news about the water. Then on December 19, 1995, an article appeared in Section E, not exactly the important news section of the paper. A coalition of environmental and health groups had reported that tap water in our area posed a health risk that should be investigated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The chief of the agency running the water-treatment plants countered that the coalition's report was "a compilation of facts, near-facts, and absolutely incorrect data" and that "there is an attempt to frighten the public unnecessarily."

The rest of the story is a tissue of quotations from authorities and experts disagreeing with each other. Classic conflict journalism. And I still don't know whether I should boil the water or not. Apparently whether a threat to the general health does or does not exist is not important enough to verify for the readers.

All this is prelude to some thoughts about a large question just beginning to be debated nationally. Are our media outlets, and the journalists they employ, destroyers of community? They tend not to serve it well, as my anecdote implies. Nor, say the critics, do they do much to build it. And worse, say self-critics among them, they encourage a cynicism that causes people to withdraw from community.

The Washington Post's omsbudsman lists the problems that motivate the leaders of a several-years-old movement called "civic journalism": "Newspapers concentrate too much on the negative. They are wedded to presenting each story as a conflict. Reporting has grown insiderish; the voices and concerns of the public are excluded. The effect of all this is corrosive, leaching from our society hope and the will to act."

To correct this, advocates of civic journalism say journalists should move beyond mere reporting to active concern about the community. Journalists used to be perceived as acting for the public. At some journalism schools, graduates subscribed to a creed that read, "I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their ability, trustees for the public; that acceptance of lesser service than public service is a betrayal of this trust." Author and magazine writer, James Fallows, whose book Breaking the News (Pantheon) is just out, believes they have betrayed that trust.

Citizens need information in order to cast their votes intelligently. They need it to be able to take part in the governing of communities at all levels. They need information if they are to find common ground on complex issues. They have to depend on journalists for that information. Instead of presenting information the press concentrates on conflict. "By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders," writes Fallows, "all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the press helps bring about that very result."

In an excerpt from his book ("Why Americans Hate the Media," Atlantic Monthly, February 1996), Fallows says that when ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions, they rarely ask about the game of politics with which the media seem obsessed: Who's up, who's down? Will this law, issue, or stand help an office-holder or candidate or his or her opposition? Rather "they [the citizens] want to know how the reality of politics will affect them - through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars." He accuses the elite reporters of "limited" curiosity in the questions they ask and the stories they write. He documents the way in which their "analysis" of events, such as the State of the Union speech, is often diametrically opposite to the opinion of members of the public who heard or watched it: "The point is not that the public are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions."

Add to this the fear generated by the decline in circulation that has caused media outlets, especially newspapers, to cut back on news and concentrate on entertainment.

A corrective may lie in a study of a thriving section of the media world - the weekly newspapers of America, all 7,437 of them. In the past twenty-five years, according to an article in Smithsonian, their circulation has more than doubled, to 57 million nationwide. While the big dailies have cut back on gathering news, using only 8 or 9 percent of their revenues for it, the weeklies in general spend 15 percent - some of them as much as 25 percent.

The news in the recent issues in the weekly I read regularly (and which my family once owned),the Wabasha Country Herald, is of real and immediate interest to its readers. The stories included the solution of a murder unsolved for twenty years; the featuring of the community in a new movie; the prospect of the state's natural resource board buying up more private land in the county and its effect on tax rolls; the report of the actions of the county board; news of surrounding communities, obituaries, etc. All reports were factual, respectful of public officials, giving credit where credit was due and blame where necessary, and stressed the effect of the story on the community.

But, more important, the paper encourages and celebrates community at every turn. It hails the opening of new businesses and the successes of the town's children, in the military or chosen work place. It reports the school plays and concerts and all football, basketball, and hockey games, and urges attendance. Meetings of every organization, from veterans' groups to the Prairie River Homemakers, are important enough to rate reporting. Every donation to area services, activities, or charities merits a picture. Volunteers are noticed and praised. Festivals, town music events, and fairs are covered extensively. This is civic journalism and it works to help people come together on the grassroots level. Big media can find ways to do the same on the state and national levels.