BY JAMES BOYLAN
Boylan is the founding editor of CJR.

Although it was forecast to be a veritable hurricane of voter anger and frustration, the 1990 midterm election neither breached sea walls nor blew down trees. In fact, it came and went much like its predecessors: It returned to Congress more than 95 percent of the incumbents who chose to run; it earned the participation of only a little more than one in three Americans of voting age, a proportion that has varied little since the post-Watergate election of 1974; and it revealed the further growth, to almost 120 million souls, of what has been called the "party of nonvoters," those of voting age who do not show up at a polling place on a national election day.

Political scientists continue to provide a standard set of explanations for the phenomenon of non-turnout: the declining ability of the major parties to stimulate political activity or create agendas; the failure of new campaign marketing techniques to mobilize support; the apparent voter weariness when the big business of officeholding demands attention to year-round campaigns; and, not least, the discouragement created by the legal and procedural obstacles still placed in the way of those who might otherwise vote. Blame is also apportioned to the nonvoters themselves, for ignorance, cynicism, and -- the catchall term -- apathy.

Less attention is given to the possibility that many members of the party of nonvoters are not irreversibly apathetic, cynical, ignorant, or self-indulgent. Many in fact may be making a political statement of their own -- that they fail to see in current policies, as presented by the media, any connection between their vote and their political interests.

Historians have discerned an earlier party of nonvoters, persisting until the New Deal called it out of hiding. The new party-in-waiting, like its predecessor in the 1920s, is a reverse image of the present American electorate. American voters are drawn disproportionately from the better educated, better off, and elderly. In contrast with electoral democracies elsewhere, the United States has failed to gain in equal proportions the participation of the less wealthy, the less educated, the young, and, most recently and curiously, the male.

At this point, neither of the major parties appears to have a clue as to what the current party of nonvoters is waiting for; sometimes they do not appear eager to find out. Indeed, the mini-electorate has its apologists, who ask what is wrong with having those who are most interested and best informed do the voting.

One thing is certain: the causes of nonvoting are deeply embedded in our political culture and their alleviation will depend on the course of political change. This is not to imply that the problem is too vast and intractable to be addressed, but simply that it is too big for gimmicks. Specific measures can help. After all, federal legislation in the 1960s helped create the South's first black electorate since Reconstruction. Most of all, it appears, we need to rediscover what, if anything, politics is about or might be about. Which brings us to journalism. Journalism fits into the problem somewhere, maybe not as obviously as many journalists (and their critics) would think. It is a given that mass communication provides most of the contact people have with candidates for major offices. And journalism supplies a good part of that contact but, what with the growth of candidate advertising on television, by no means all. Yet there is far from universal agreement that reading and viewing political news has an important relationship to voting. A recent book on nonvoters -- Why Americans Don't Vote, by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward -- does not even mention journalism.

Still, it is probably more than a statistical curiosity that the three-decade decline in voting has coincided, almost to the year, with a similar proportionate lag in newspaper reading. Like voting, newspaper reading has become a more elite practice; in particular, the great cities are peopled with increasing numbers of nonvoters and nonreaders. This is far from saying that there is a simple causal relationship -- that people stopped voting because they stopped reading or vice versa. Nor is there necessarily support for the implication that the newer dominant medium, television, has smothered electoral politics.

Nonetheless, the two declines may share a common source -- a lessening willingness by many Americans to consider themselves engaged in what, as recently as the 1960s, constituted a sense of common enterprise, that is, a national public life. In the years since, there have been many signs of a sea change in the content and manner of national politics. A New Yorker writer recently watched a recording of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960; so startling was the decorum, the attention to issues, the seriousness of the content, that the writer felt "as if this presidential debate were happening in some other culture."

Perhaps it was. As late as 1960 national politics could still be understood in terms defined by the Franklin Roosevelt years -- domestically, the magnitude of economic entitlements; abroad, the American obligation to police the world. This rather constricted agenda held together an electorate through the middle years of the 1960s it had lost its force. There was too much else crowding the docket -- civil rights, racial upheaval, Vietnam, the environment, and more -- to which elections may have seemed too tardy and too indirect a response.

There is no longer even agreement as to what to argue about. Some scholars -- the worrying kind -- have turned recently to inquire into the nature of public life in America, scrutinizing in particular the question of whether the press has carried out its historical function of offering the raw material for public debate. James W. Carey, Daniel C. Hallin, and other media scholars have noted the long association between the press and public life. Newspapers, they point out, came into existence as an important auxiliary to political debate almost with the emergence of legislative and electoral politics. Carey, in a 1987 article in The Center Magazine, points to James Madison's conception of the First Amendment -- that the rights of free assembly, free speech, and the free press were created less specifically to guarantee individual expression than to evoke the public debate that creates a vigorous society.

"The public," Carey writes, "is a group that gathers to discuss the news." Such a notion sounds a bit wistful in a time when we think of politics on a national scale as a struggle of clashing interests, causes, and elites for ninety seconds on the evening news. But it has a point: that news ought not to be grist merely for consumption, but for discussion as well.

How well does news serve that purpose today? Stated in its most positive light, today's journalism operates largely to supply information: journalists gather the raw materials from sources and process it into attractive news formats. Theoretically, the system opens the news to all subjects, to all the voices in a society, and the press should thus reflect the full range of society's concerns. But the reality is something else, for the simplest of reasons. Information, the raw material of news, usually turns out to be the peculiar property of those in power and their attendant experts and publicists.

The main link with the non powerful, non expert population is supposed to be the opinion poll. The problem with polls, as David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman pointed out a decade ago in Media Power Politics, is that instead of finding out what is on people's minds, poll-takers usually -- barring, say, a life-and-death question such as war or peace -- find out what people think about questions of primary concern to the journalistic and political elites, issues on which public feelings may be "at best casual and tentative." Harry Boyte, director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, warns that poll results should not be mistaken for debate: "We have public opinion now, which is people's private reflexes. But we don't have public judgment. So everything is broken down into market segments. You have no public process."

Political journalism -- that is, reporting on parties, candidates, campaigns -- is a special case. Criticism of campaign reporting has chronically concentrated on the cliche that reporters focus on the "horse race" and disregard the "issues." But the difficulty may be not that politics is covered badly but that it is covered like other kinds of news and has the same constrictions. Political reporting, like other reporting, is defined largely by its sources. Political sources these days -- candidates, consultants, free-floating quotesmiths -- seem to be as addled about policy issues as the rest of us and prefer to deal in ethnic-cultural cant, marketing predictions, and tactical speculation.

Drastic measures have been proposed to bring substance to the fore. A feasibility study by Alvin H. Perlmutter, Inc., for the John and Mary Markle Foundation proposed the creation of a company, The Voters' Channel, to stimulate new political programming, primarily through public radio and public television. The study envisioned four main types of effort: (1) to present voters' feelings and concerns; (2) to scrutinize the truthfulness of political communications; (3) to present a state-of-the-nation agenda; and (4) to provide national candidates and parties air time for direct communication. Programming is now being planned.

Robert Entman goes farther: in his Democracy Without Citizens, he proposes the restoration of the politically underwritten press of 160 years ago -- the creation of "national news organizations run by the major parties and subsidized by the government," to foster the dissemination of "more analytical information, more diversity, more readily accessible ideas." Entman does not make clear how the palsied hand of present-day party bureaucracy can be sufficiently reinvigorated to take on such a task. Nor is there much encouragement to be found in one predecessor effort, the Democratic Digest of the 1950s, a pocket-size organ of no great depth designed to rally the faithful while the party was out of power.

Such proposals, while valuable in charting new political channels outside mainstream journalism, do not directly address the issue of journalism itself. In the rhetoric of journalism, "the public" is frequently invoked; functionally, however, news organizations rarely go beyond treating the public as consumer. Journalism produces news; the public eats it -- or not, as it chooses.

Even when the function of journalism is considered to be education, the public role is still likely to be conceived as passive. No uncommonly, news media try to find out what their readers and viewers have learned. Always the students are revealed to be failing; every one of the polls designed to reveal Americans' grasp of what are called, in schoolroom terms, current affairs finds that most are ignorant of such facts as the date of Earth Day or the name of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The implications of such polls are alarming, not because of what the subjects answer but because of what they show about the assumptions of the press: first, that people should look to the press for correct answers rather than raw material for argument; second and worse, that the press itself thinks of news as what it too often appears to be, just a jumble of unconnected facts. In practice, American politics has come to be run by full-time insiders, and to a degree the press has aspired to be one of the insiders. It has taken on itself the task of scrutinizing and, on occasion, disqualifying candidates. It engages in as much speculation about campaign strategies as does any political consultant. And it has frequently made those consultants more central in the story of campaigns than the candidates themselves.

To change things around, to point the compass needle toward the public rather than the insider political networks, will be difficult, but it is a worthy challenge. Not because it implies vast upheavals in journalistic practice; it doesn't. But it proposes something more tortuous -- a change in thinking.

Prescriptions from scholars of the public arena tend to be vague. What they have in common is their sense that journalism should be viewed as communication in which the recipient counts for something. Carey puts it: "The public will begin to reawaken when they are addressed as a conversational partner and are encouraged to join the talk rather than sit passively as spectators before a discussion conducted by journalists and experts." Indeed, the panel -- a conversation conducted by journalists and experts -- is one of the quintessential twentieth-century forms, and one of the most deadening; much of journalism is like a panel discussion in which those in the audience never get to ask a question. The subject here, however, is not the public-access gimmicks that the news media adopted so widely in the 1970s, and often abandoned later. The question is whether political news as such can be written for a public instead of for participants, and in public language rather than codes.

It may be time, in the 1992 campaign, to try to break up familiar patterns. There are several ideas in the air that may point in the right direction.

In an essay in Critical Theory and Public Life (1985), Daniel Hallin urges that reporters become more "sensitive to the underlying message their reporting conveys about politics and the citizen's relation to it." That message, he contends, is that money and expertise count for everything and the citizen for little or nothing. For example, in an article in the January/February issue of CJR ("Whose Campaign Is It, Anyway?"), Hallin notes the virtual disappearance of voters from television campaign coverage in 1984 and 1988 and the influx of insiders and consultants.

The columnist David Broder suggests that one way to break the hold of insiders is to go first to the voters. In a speech last November, he proposed that journalists should "start each election cycle as reporters in the precincts with the voters, themselves, talking to them face to face, finding out what is on their minds. . . . Let their concerns set our agenda and influence the questions we take to the candidates . . . and help determine how we use the space in our newspaper and the air time on our broadcasts."

These may be another underlying message in political coverage -- an implication that politics is either so esoteric or so dog-eat-dog that individual citizens should keep their distance. The political scientist Robert D. McClure has charged that journalism has taken on itself the task of becoming the chief interpreter of campaigns but has performed the task in a way that excludes "the reality of principle and moral purpose that forms the soul of a people's politics." Could there be a place in the political diologue for those willing to discuss the moral-ethical dimension?

Another aspect of the problem may be journalistic specialists themselves, many of whom have long tenure and write with an air of magisterial entitlement. News organizations could vary their practice of consigning big-time politics to this aristocracy, not only by bringing in specialists from other fields but also, if such animals survive, generalists who write well, with a warning that they will be quarantined at the first sign of pontification.

It is, of course, not up to the media alone to reinvigorate American public life. But journalism remains the one nonofficial institution that is not, or at least should not be, itself a special interest. As such, it may in the long run be able to occupy a critical role in re-establishing a sense of common interests and common welfare. It can begin by seeking to emphasize its role of widening and deepening public discussion, of providing a record of its time, of doing no further harm to political life, if indeed it has done such harm.

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