March 20, 1974
Page 7464
CONGRESSIONAL COMMUNICATION
Mr. ERVIN. Mr. President, on February 20, 1974, the Joint Committee on Congressional Operations, under the chairmanship of Senator METCALF, opened hearings on a most significant issue – Congress and the media.
Because of the importance of this issue to all of us, I would like to share with my colleagues the very thoughtful and substantive testimony delivered by Senator MUSKIE as the lead-off witness for these hearings.
Drawing upon a comprehensive survey conducted by his Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, Senator MUSKIE presents a clear case for the argument that present patterns of communications between public officials and their constituents are simply not working as they should.
The Senator from Maine then proceeds to argue forcefully and convincingly that the Congress cannot afford to ignore new ways to communicate with the people who elect it. Though the price tag may be high for such projects as televising congressional debates, Senator MUSKIE concludes that the price we pay for public ignorance is even greater.
I urge my colleagues to give careful attention to Senator MUSKIE's remarks, and I ask unanimous consent that the entire text of his remarks be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the remarks were ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
TESTIMONY OF SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE
I would like to begin today by congratulating the Chairman on his timely initiative in holding these hearings. If the strength of a democracy depends in the best of times on the degree to which its people are well informed, certainly the axiom carries even greater force today. When public confidence in the leadership of all institutions, and especially government, has reached an all-time low, while the complexity of the nation's problems reaches an all-time high, communications between the American people and their leaders should be better than ever before.
But we know that is not the case. Indeed, that is why we are here – because we recognize that in general, Americans are not well informed about their government, at any level, and that we in public life are somehow failing to communicate to those we represent what government is all about today.
My testimony today contains no quick answers to this dilemma. I do try to suggest ways in which we can change some of our practices in Congress to encourage more responsible press coverage and I raise some questions for which I hope this Committee will seek answers – about the means we might consider of using television to present Congressional activities directly to the public. But before making proposals, I want to set out some of the evidence about the seriousness of the problem we confront.
In December of 1973, the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations released a comprehensive study on the attitudes and expectations of Americans toward their government. That study, prepared by the Subcommittee staff and by Louis Harris and Associates, gave us fresh insight into the state of public awareness of government and its functions in the United States today.
The general public was asked a number of questions designed to measure the degree of public knowledge of government. The answers were almost uniformly discouraging.
While 89% of the public correctly identified the Governor of their state–
Only 46% were able to correctly identify their Congressman.
Only 59 % correctly named one U.S. Senator from their state, and only 42% could name the other Senator as well.
And only 62 % correctly identified the composition of the U.S. Congress, even when given the correct answer as a choice among three incorrect ones. A full 20% believed that the Congress is composed of the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court.
A different set of the study's findings show how inadequate the traditional paths of communication between officials and their constituents are today. While a number of these specific findings do not relate directly to Congress, they are parallel to our own situation and should help us discuss alternative proposals for change.
First of all, it is apparent that public officials think they are communicating with the public better than they actually are.
When asked how up to date they would rate the people in their area on what is going on in Federal, state and local government and in politics, the state and local officials sampled gave the public a higher rating in three out of four cases than the public gave itself.
These officials were fairly accurate in their estimate of public awareness of what is going on in the Federal Government and in politics. But when asked the same question about their own level of government, they missed the mark by a mile. Local officials over-estimated public information about local government by 26 points, the same margin of error State officials showed in assessing public knowledge of state government.
Federal officials were not included in our sample, and we cannot draw any conclusions about them on this point. Nevertheless, it is obvious that for state and local officials, at least, their communications with their constituents are successful only in their own minds.
My second point is more complex, but also, I think, more significant for our discussion. According to the study, the traditional means which most public officials use to communicate with their constituencies are simply not reaching those who need most to be educated about the way government operates.
On the contrary, those who benefit most from these regular avenues of contact are those who are already the best informed, and those who have a personal stake in a particular governmental function.
In one question, state and local officials were asked what means they use to keep in touch with those they serve. They responded as follows: 42% – personal conversations and contacts; 42 % – public and community meetings; 36% through the media; 36% – answering correspondence; 29% – answering telephone calls; and 21% – keeping their offices open to people.
In a follow-up question, they were asked which regular contacts they maintain with the public and how worthwhile they find such activities. Of the 70% who keep regular office hours, 77% found doing so very helpful in getting their job done. Of the 88% who make speeches and appearances on a regular basis, 68% found doing so very helpful. Of the 66 % who attend weddings, funerals and social events, 34% found doing so very helpful. And of the 38% who send out newsletters on a regular basis, 51 % found doing so very helpful.
The citizens' perspective on these same functions is markedly different.
Measuring public contact with elected Federal officials, we asked people whether or not they had ever received a mailing from their Congressman or Senator. 74% of the public said they had received a letter from the former, and 59 % from the latter.
On the surface at least, these figures are fairly impressive. But they are misleading. While 83% of the college educated said they had received a mailing from their Congressman, only 61 % of those with an eighth grade education had. While 74% of those with an annual income of $15,000 or more had received a letter from their Senator, only 50% of those in the $5,000-10,000 income range had. While 72 % of those the study designated as "active citizens" and 67% of those who said they voted in the 1972 election had received a mailing from their Senator, only 38% of those who did not vote had. And while 78% of whites had received a letter from their Congressman, only 42% of blacks had.
At the state level 37% of the officials reported keeping regular office hours, and 74% found this service very helpful in getting their job done. However, when the people were asked if they had ever visited a state legislator in their state capital, only 14% responded affirmatively. Among professional, college educated and active citizens, this percentage rose to over 20%. However, for blacks it was only eight percent; for those with an eighth grade education, five percent.
Among local officials, 27 % volunteered that responding to their mail is an important way for them to keep in touch with their constituents. However, for the people they seek to serve correspondence is far less significant. Only 19% of the total sample said they had ever written a letter to a local government official. For the wealthier, the better educated and the "active citizen," this percentage rose substantially to 30% or better. For blacks, however, it sank to six percent, and for those who did not vote in 1972, to 11 %.
I could cite more statistics from the study on this point, but the message is already clear. In almost every case, the means of communication elected officials use primarily reach those who are already best informed – the college educated, the upper income group, the active citizen. Likewise, in every case, the less educated, the poorer and those who did not vote do not participate in the communications process. While most of these figures relate to state and local officials only, I would guess that we in Congress are equally trapped in the same pattern of two-tiered communication.
On a related point, the Subcommittee study also reveals that those in our society who actually go to their government directly to get it to do something for them are the same well informed and active people. Moreover, they generally go to their government for a particularized, personal service rather than on broader policy issues of concern to the general community.
Only 24% of the general population reported ever having gone to their local government. Among the college educated the figure was 38%, 42% among professionals, and 39% among active citizens. For blacks, the figure was only nine percent; for those who did not vote in 1972, 15%. And the same pattern holds for those who have ever gone to State or Federal Government, though the percentages of contact are much lower across the board.
The concerns that take people to their government are varied, but primarily personal. At the local level, traffic-related problems and zoning questions elicit the greatest public action. At the State level, the most common motive for contact was financial assistance of one form or another, with scholarship aid often listed as a specific concern. Of those who contacted the Federal Government, the largest number said they sought help on such matters as citizenship, disability insurance payments, social security, and passports, followed by persons seeking Federal grants or research aid and individuals with military-related problems.
By and large we found that citizens do not go to their government to communicate with officials about broad policy questions, but rather to seek help on problems which involve only the mechanics of government. With the sole exception of the Federal Government, where 23% of those who said they had ever gone to the Federal Government to get it to do something had written to express an opinion on an issue, in no other instance did a substantial number of persons cite the expression of their viewpoint on a public issue as a reason for going to their government.
The lengthy, detailed analysis I have presented of the communications gap between the government and the governed is only helpful as a diagnosis if we can go beyond it to prescribe some curative measures. I hope I am not mistaking the symptoms for the illness when I insist that relations between officials and the press are the key to restoring public contact and – ultimately – public confidence.
Television and the printed press are the megaphones which carry our thoughts outside this room. It will be months, I would imagine, before these hearings are printed, and even then, most of the records of your Committee's work will end up on library shelves. If we have a message to transmit, we must rely on journalists to amplify it for us or find new means to go directly to the people.
The Subcommittee survey found, to no one's surprise, that Americans rely overwhelmingly on television and newspapers to inform them about public issues and the conduct of government. Yet, as I already observed, the public knows itself to be poorly informed.
The survey also found – in the wake of the journalistic enterprise that went into investigating the Watergate scandals – that television news and the press were the only major institutions with a higher standing among the public in 1973 than they had in 1966. These levels of confidence are less than awe-inspiring: 41% for television news and 30% for the press. Nevertheless, the public rating is at great variance with the view of state and local officials, 17% of whom accord television news a great deal of confidence and 19 % of whom give the same respect to printed reporting.
Those figures define the problem. The men and women who know most and best what government is doing also trust least the only reliable means they have for communicating their knowledge, for eliciting a public judgment on their performance and, most importantly, for developing a public role in the work of government.
In passing, I might suggest some reasons for that lack of trust. It does not stem from the sensitivity of officials to criticism and exposure. We are all sensitive; we are all, in many respects, secretive. But no one who runs for office in a democracy now nearly two centuries old can be so naive or vain as to expect universal praise or think himself immune from probing inquiry.
Our problem with the press is not that it investigates too much, but that it reports too little. We all know that conflict makes news. But we also know that a televised shouting match usually concentrates more on the exchange of insults than the exchange of ideas. A Congressional investigation receives more attention when important voices – but not necessarily significant questions – are raised.
The opposite is true for the activities which constitute the bulk of our productive work in the Senate – the actual exercise of legislating. Until this Congress, of course, we did not permit public scrutiny of the committee mark-up process, the occasion when most legislation takes final shape, when disagreements are sharply drawn and frequently reconciled.
But I am confident that a poll of those committees which have opened their doors during mark-up sessions would reveal that private interests have been well represented in the audience – as lobbyists – while the public interest – in the form of journalists – has been noticeably absent.
You and I know, Mr. Chairman, from our own experience how little publicity was given the recent mark-up sessions of the Senate Government Operations Committee which resolved difficult problems on executive privilege, on reforming Congressional budget procedures and on revising the government procurement practices which account for billions of dollars in annual outlays.
Now why are there dozens of reporters and three television network cameras covering testimony on government secrecy and none at the committee meetings where laws are written to deal with those problems? The answer, I suspect, is that a clash of opinion is innately more newsworthy than the resolution of those differences.
That judgment of what makes news is one we must live with while we do our best to alter it. To the extent that committee members – and even special committee staff – engage in a constant attempt to brief journalists in advance of a mark-up session, or a floor debate, on the issues involved, we may be able to increase the informative coverage our work merits. Such activities will take time from us and money from our committee budget. We ought to give them a try.
In a column last May in the Washington Post David Broder intimated that responsible journalists recognize their profession's shortcomings. He suggested that newsmen should say "publicly what we know to be the case: that every day, we print a partial, incomplete version of certain selected things we have learned, some of them inevitably erroneous, all of them inevitably distorted by the need to abridge and by the force of our own preconceptions and prejudices. If we acknowledged that fact of journalistic life, perhaps we could act more quickly – and with less coyness – to correct yesterday's version with today's fresh evidence."
A second problem, however, is that one leak is often worth a thousand releases. A fact – or a prediction – that has been kept secret sets the adrenaline of editors pumping faster than an announcement made in broad daylight and delivered to their offices days ahead of their deadlines. Occasionally – if not seriously – I wonder if we might not get more attention if we stamped our material "Confidential" or "Eyes Only" and passed it out with whispers instead of with messengers to the press gallery.
In fact, however, our only proper course is to invite more publicity, not less, by exposing ourselves more to the public than ever. If a committee inquiry into the problems of federalism or environmental policy or health care cannot compete for attention against all the other news events in Washington, we should take the committee to the expert witnesses in the States, where the presence of a few Senators is more likely to arouse interest.
The financial differential between paying our fares out of the Capital and the expenses of the men and women we bring here to testify will not be great. And the added attention we can promote for an issue by taking the issue to those who must deal with it will often be worth the price.
When Lou Harris presented his findings in formal testimony to the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, I introduced him by saying, "The dialogue – in which the press is the essential intermediary – between the people and their leaders is being interrupted and distorted.
"To restore it will take a change of manners, not laws, on both sides. The change will have to begin with a new acceptance by officials of the necessity of submitting their public conduct to continual scrutiny and a new willingness by journalists to conduct that scrutiny with an eye to information as much as sensation."
That is, I realize, a broad and imprecise prescription. While we are trying various means to fill it, I would only urge, in addition, that we explore the other option: that of finding new ways to inform the people directly, without intermediaries, of our activities. Obviously, television is the only medium that can carry such a message for us effectively.
Equally obviously, the use of television by Congress to present itself more fully to the public raises a number of questions. I cannot answer them, but I can and do urge that your committee give them thorough study.
From the practical point of view, we need to be able to estimate the cost of televising floor debates either continuously or optionally, according to the importance of the issues under discussion. We need to know what staff would be required for such an undertaking. We need to examine the cost – and value – of a Congressional service covering committee hearings and mark-up sessions, either to offer videotape footage to the commercial networks or for use in preparing programs the Congress itself sponsors as legislation comes to the House or Senate floor for decision.
I can imagine programs, properly supervised, which would give viewers the essential background on important bills, present excerpts of actual debates and even make the chief sponsors and opponents of such legislation available as a panel to answer telephoned questions from all over the country about the issues involved. I can conceive, even, of a public television network controlled by Congress offering nothing but views of Congress at work.
I cannot, however, begin to estimate the cost of such an undertaking. I can only wonder aloud what agreements between the majority and minority parties in each House – and between the Houses – would be necessary to control such programming. And I have to ask, quite frankly, what audience we might reach with daytime broadcasts of the proceedings on Capitol Hill.
I do not, however, put these questions forward as extravagant fantasies. If such broadcasts – such a network, perhaps – could perform a truly informational role, the considerable cost of establishing it should be weighed against the price we now pay for public ignorance.
I hope you will give these questions serious study. It is time they were asked. I hope they can be answered.