As the 250th anniversary of America’s founding approaches, American democracy suffers from a lack of trust and imagination.
So declared NPR CEO and president Katherine Maher during a TED event on the future of modern American democracy at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center on Tuesday.
“The United States was a revolutionary act of politics; but it was also a revolutionary act of imagination,” Maher said. “A nation is an imagined community and no nation has ever been more thoroughly imagined, perhaps, than this one … its future citizens had to build a vision of what it meant, they needed an idea to bind the nation together beyond tribal or religious or legal ties.”
The event is the first in a series of “fireside chats” announced in May by Visit Philly and TED to, as Gov. Josh Shapiro said, “celebrate Philadelphia and to celebrate the inclusive society we have strived to build.”
Though the country in its founding was imperfect and incomplete, America built its political culture through a national discourse carried out in the press, with citizens engaging in dialogue with each other, Maher said. But times have changed and a fault has developed, with Americans no longer feeling they have a stake or equal say in democracy.
“We’ve seen a stunning collapse in public confidence in many institutions: education, the ballot box, the rule of law, and independence of the courts because among Americans there’s just this real sense that democracy is not working for people,” Maher said.
Disenfranchisement across the political spectrum, she said, has spawned a belief that the system picks winners and losers. To reverse that trend, Maher argued for renewed civic engagement to rebuild local trust.
“But key to democracy is collaboration and coexistence — not when the choices are clear, but when they’re complicated,” Maher said. “To agree to disagree, to see each other as equals … it only works when we show up. But to do that, we have to believe, just as our predecessors did, that democracy is worth the effort. It’s hard to ask people to work hard for institutions that aren’t working for them or that they don’t believe in them.”
Restoring that “sense of imagination,” she said, starts with working in community-rooted and local places. Maher warned about what places lose when they lose a local newspaper, which has “a cascade of other negative effects,” from lower voter turnout and community engagement to more mischief by public officials and business leaders.
She warned of misinformation and manipulation from social media, compared to public media, which can connect local concerns to national issues and act as a “vital scaffolding for our democracy” — engaging every one in “a cultural fabric that weaves us together in this complex, textured nation.”
The job of a journalist, Maher argued, is “finding the universal in the particular.” They find authenticity, reduce generalization, and shorten the distance of potential disagreement.
“Today, our democracy feels like it’s in need of a little imagination and a lot of elbow grease because people have real frustrations,” Maher said. “When you’re frustrated, it is so easy to capitulate to cynicism cloaked in pragmatism … but this is such a failure of imagination and it’s a failure of pragmatism, too.”
She called on Americans to honor the imagination of the nation and have an “almost embarrassing confidence in one another” to reimagine the national community.
For NPR’s role in American democracy, she saw it as a trusted, unbiased source.
“I start by rejecting the premise that local news is partisan because we don’t see that reflected in people’s confidence, trust, or engagement with it,” Maher said. “Local news is not ideological or seen as ideological. Part of the gap that exists today is less about a gap in terms of some sort of bias one way or another, but the ability for people to have familiarity with local journalism in a way that helps contextualize the practice of journalism, which then allows them to apply or interpret that at the national level.”
In April, NPR was publicly criticized by Senior Business Editor Uri Berliner for losing America’s trust and by “telling listeners how to think.” His critique angered his colleagues and earned him a formal rebuke with a five-day suspension. Berliner then resigned from the network.
“As is often the case when employers punish their workers, Berliner’s transgression was not as much about what he did (write an outside piece without permission) but what he said,” Jack Shafer wrote for Politico. “Let’s not kid ourselves. He was docked a week’s pay for his message, not his conduct.”