The North Carolina Experiment

 When the national press used words like "dangerous" and "dishonest" in their reporting on two North Carolina election contests - the race for governor and the charged rematch between the controversial Republican Senator Jesse Helms and his Democratic challenger, Harvey Gantt - they were not referring to campaign tactics. This election season, visiting reporters lavished more attention - and heaped more abuse - on the local press than on the local candidates.

The focus of their fury was "Your Voice, Your Vote," a seemingly mild-mannered experiment in civic journalism launched by a coalition of six of the state's major newspapers and nine commercial and public broadcasters. The coalition described the project as an effort to move beyond traditional "horserace" coverage, explore issues in greater depth, and connect more closely with readers' concerns. "During the 1994 campaign we didn't feel we were plugged in," said Anders Gyllenhaal, senior managing editor of The News &AMP Observer of Raleigh. "There was a need for more voices, and a better sense of what voters are all about."

But the flashpoint of the national media attacks was the way the project partners went about plugging in: by polling their audience, asking them to identify the issues they most cared about. The coalition then chose four of the top five - crime and drugs, health care, taxes and spending, and education. They interviewed the major candidates for senator and governor about where they stood on those issues, and jointly put together lengthy "issue packages" that each partner was free to edit. Most of the newspapers supplemented these packages with other reporting of their own, but the packages themselves tended to look similar from paper to paper.

The Critics.

The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Financial Times of London all weighed in with examinations of the project - and most of their conclusions were not pretty. They contended that by relying on polls to guide their coverage, journalists were pandering to readers, abdicating their professional responsibility to assess the newsworthiness of events, undermining the candidates' own political judgments, and ignoring the equally important public issues that didn't show up in the polls - race, say, or trade.

 Especially scathing was Jonathan Yardley, a Washington Post columnist and alumnus of the Daily News (now the News Record) of Greensboro, N.C. Calling civic journalism "an insidious, dangerous idea," he blasted the "Your Voice, Your Vote" project as an attempt by a "cabal" of news organizations "to control the political agenda rather than to report on the candidates' activities and positions," and as a "self-serving" strategy to "make journalism essential to public affairs and thus to ensure its customer base." And Michael Kelly, writing in The New Yorker, called the project "anti-democratic," "dishonest," and at its core a "fraud" that ended up seriously limiting the public debate.

The Defense.

 Journalists involved in the project argued that "Your Voice, Your Vote" was never meant to dictate to readers or control candidates, but simply to provide information that voters felt they needed. And the jointly produced packages - twelve all told over the course of the campaign - were nothing more than enhancements, they said, meant to supplement their normal campaign coverage.

"We succeeded in what we set out to do," maintained Rick Thames, public editor of The Charlotte Observer and a coordinator of the project. "That was to find out what were the major issues in this election and make sure the candidates for Senate and governor addressed those issues early in the campaign. And that happened."

Jennie Buckner, the Observer's editor, replied to Yardley in a Post op-ed piece almost as scathing as Yardley's own. She confessed herself "astonished by the number of journalists who seem offended by the suggestion that they might learn something valuable by listening to citizens."

The Political Operatives.

 Questions were also raised about the practical effect the project had on the election results. Jim Andrews, the campaign manager for Harvey Gantt, who is black, complained that the project's narrow focus was unfair to his candidate. By virtually ignoring the more loaded issues of race or Helms's trademark "family values," he said, the coalition did not present voters with evidence of the starkest ideological differences between the candidates. "There are serious disagreements here, but all the disagreements are sanitized, everything is put through the washing machine," Andrews told Kelly of The New Yorker. Helms, who refused most interviews by project reporters, handily beat Gantt.

 But Harrison Hickman, a political consultant who helped re-elect Governor Jim Hunt, maintained that the project didn't influence the public one way or the other. The Hunt campaign conducted thirty focus groups last fall. "Out of those," said Hickman, "maybe two people even mentioned having read any of the stuff or exhibited any sense of having read it. And the two people who did, both said the same thing: it was confusing."

The Citizens.

 A freak of nature, Hurricane Fran, which hit on September 4, distracted North Carolina voters from the election in a big way. It downed telephone lines (and therefore polling), disrupted electricity (and therefore television ads), and caused billions of dollars' worth of damage.

 "Hurricane Fran blew a hole right at the time when people would start to focus on the campaign," said Gyllenhaal of TheNews &AMP Observer. "The Gantt campaign was not doing very well early on. That story was one of the hurricane victims."

 But other observers argued that the project itself contributed to a lackluster campaign season. Thad Beyle, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that while it was a noble effort, the project, by homogenizing issues, "took away the notion of what politics is all about - working toward coalitions, seeing what motivates voters and getting voters to the polls," he said. And when Kelly of The New Yorker visited North Carolina in October he found "candidates muted, the press disengaged, the public looking elsewhere for its entertainment."

The Future.

 Don't look for the "Your Voice, Your Vote" effort to go away. Key players - many of whom continue to defend the project with a religious fervor - said this first effort showed them some pitfalls to avoid next time. All said they will do more with the campaign on television - with ad-watch coverage, for instance - and with campaign finance. But as consultant Hickman saw it, the project, while not in itself a bad effort to improve campaign reporting, deflected too much time and energy from the more traditional kinds of campaign coverage - profiles of candidates, examinations of their backgrounds and character - that the press does do well. "Every time they think they have to reinvent the wheel they throw away the car," he said. "They need to use all the components to provide more complete coverage."

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