To be sure, we ended up with our share of angry emails, tweets, and phone calls from journalists around the country who felt our critiques hadn’t quite found the right line. But we were pleased to discover that, far more often than not, reporters and editors were open to what our team of correspondents had to say—even when it was critical.

They were keen to employ suggestions about how local TV station records can reveal who’s spending big money to swing election results, and eager to learn best practices for beating back political misinformation. When local reporters came across outstanding journalism, they would often share it with our writers, and of course, they appreciated it when we praised their good work. Most gratifying of all, we encountered journalists who engaged with our critique of their work—who pushed us to be better critics, and who were ready to be pushed to better serve their communities.

Much has been said and written—including, fairly recently, at CJR.org—about the diminution of public-affairs coverage at the state and local level. The numbers showing a decline in reporters and in story counts are indeed grim, and, as we observed firsthand during 2012, coverage in many markets is patchy. But we also saw plenty of examples of “laurel”-worthy coverage, and an appetite for resources, tools, and know-how that will allow journalists to cover politics and policy better.

As our initiative has evolved in 2013 into the United States Project, we have tried to meet that appetite. Our correspondents in the Mountain West, the Great Lakes, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, California, Florida, and Texas monitor coverage of federal, state, and even city issues in their regions, highlighting stellar work and identifying missed opportunities. They cover the experimentation in editorial and business-side models to support this sort of journalism in a challenging economic environment. And they are building networks of reporters with which they share resources, reporting strategies, and story ideas.

Along with our regional roster, we have five “national” contributors—writers on the healthcare, tax and budget, money-in-politics, and factchecking beats, plus a roving reporter. Their subject-area expertise is a resource for our entire team, and they regularly produce primers on coverage of complicated subjects—like the rollout of the new health insurance “exchanges,” or how to tell when your congressman is skirting ethics laws to enjoy a lobbyist-sponsored junket—designed to be of use to state and local political reporters.

Going forward, we expect to find new harmonies both among the regional roster and between the regional and national teams. As we look ahead to the 2014 elections and the many policy battles to be fought (and covered) before then, our goal is that the project will serve as a second layer of editorial support—providing practical guidance and constructive criticism, and exhorting journalists around the country to set ambitious standards for their work. For many years, CJR’s motto was “Strong press, strong democracy.” It’s not just the “press” anymore—but the old aphorism still applies.

• FEC Summarizes Campaign Activity of the 2011-2012 Election Cycle (Federal Election Commission) April 19 – The FEC has released a summary of spending during the 2011-2012 election cycle with more that $7 billion being received by Presidential and Congressional candidates as well as political parties and PACs.  Additionally, submissions to the FEC for the two-year period showed disbursements for independent expenditures and electioneering communications totaled almost $1.3 billion.

• Political Polarization: In Congress or in Us? (Election Law Blog) April 24 – A new poll from the Washington Post and the Pew Research Center on the recent failure of gun legislation shows a wider view of the political polarization in the country over the last 20 years.  The report provides surprising data about the views of those who have been watching the issue most closely. 48% of those watching the issue most closely were angry or disappointed that the measure failed while 47% were happy or relived, showing that the polarization in Congress more closely mirrors the views of those most active on the issue.

• States Try to Tackle ‘Secret Money’ in Politics (LA Times) May 2 - Early last month, state lawyers and election officials around the country dialed into a conference call to talk about how to deal with the flood of secret money that played an unprecedented role in the 2012 election.  The discussion, which included officials from California, New York, Alaska and Maine, was a first step toward a collaborative effort to force tax-exempt advocacy organizations and trade associations out of the shadows.  The unusual initiative was driven by the lack of progress at the federal level in pushing those groups to disclose their contributors if they engage in campaigns, as candidates and political action committees are required to do.

• The Politics Of The Millennial Generation (Time) May 9 -  Earlier this month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University released its biennial survey of millennials, finding that 18-29 year olds trust in every public institution is down from last year, with only the military holding an above-water rating. Cynicism and negativity toward public officials are up five points since 2010 and a near majority, 47 percent, agree with the statement “politics today are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing. (36 percent said they neither agree nor disagree.)

• Excessive student loan debt drains economic engine (Politico) May 8 - Since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau highlighted a year ago that student debt had surpassed the $1 trillion threshold, others have warned about the impact on the broader economy. Last year, the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research described how student debt might impact demand for mortgage credit. The Federal Reserve Board’s open market committee discussed whether student debt is impacting household spending. And just a few weeks ago, the Financial Stability Oversight Council discussion of student debt in its annual report added to the chorus.

Almost 400 entries have been submitted. I certainly have not viewed them all, but I did look at quite a few. I found myself drawn to the videos that explore how different types of people can come together and find common ground, as well as a few very well made videos from organizations that I respect. 

Here are 7 submissions that you may want to take a look at while voting is still open (until May 16):

• Reinventing Democracy Through Participatory Budgeting: A brief video that explores how participatory budgeting has empowered people in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. Participatory Budgeting is an innovative process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives ordinary people real power over real money, letting them work with government to make the budget decisions that affect their lives.

• The Chamomile Tea Party: The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 by designer Jeff Gates to work towards a more effective dialogue about the future of America. To this end, graphic designer Jeff Gates has been remixing World War II propaganda posters with new text about the rancor so prevalent in American political and cultural discourse.

• Bring It to the Table: “Bring It to The Table” encourages Americans to stop blaming the ‘other side,’ examine their own assumptions, and take responsibility for strengthening our democracy. This project is an online platform, series of short

  videos, and community engagement campaign aimed at bridging political divides and breaking down partisanship. It is meant to spark a movement of citizens leading the charge for civil discourse.

• Purple Couples on Red/Blue Union: Meet five red/blue couples whose plight mirrors America’s: divided by politics, wedded to a shared future. But unlike red/blue politicians, purple couples realize they can’t wriggle out of this bind. When they square off, sparks fly. They stick by their guns (sometimes literally), but they move forward, together. The videos are a project of PurpleStates.tv.

•  Living Room Conversations: A video showing how the founder of MoveOn can cometogether in conversation with the founder of the Tea Party Patiots. A project of LivingRoomConversations. 

•  Civic Hacking in Pursuit of Democracy: This video from the Sunlight Foundation tells the story of a nascent community of civic hackers who are building apps and tools that benefit their communities and changing the face of democracy using open government data.

•  Work Together: A series of paintings by Keith Grace inspiring non-partisan cooperation.

 Kudos to the MacArthur Foundation for attracting some interesting and compelling art about our democracy.

A $300,000 grant to researchers from Fordham University, Columbia University, and Binghamton University will support an innovative set of field experiments that aim to shed new light on the relationship between money and our political system, as well as how well reforms like increased disclosure and the use of public funds to match small donations work.

The Democracy Fund chose to support this research because we believe that the data on many critical questions about money in politics remain unclear. The unique application of field experiments offer reformers, policy makers, and the courts with definitive answers to some of these questions that lie at the heart of current legislative and judicial debates.

The two-year research project is led by Professors Don Green of Columbia University, Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, and Jonathan Krasno of Binghamton University. Green is a leading pioneer in the application of field experiments to the realm of elections, campaigns, and our democracy.

A $50,000 grant to Reinvent Albany will support research into how regulators in New York State could use technology to modernize the reporting and compliance of campaign finance contributions under a proposed small-donor matching system that is being considered in Albany.

Working with a team of local technologists and experts, the Reinvent Albany team will assess the needs of candidates, regulators, and the public as it develops recommendations for how technology may be able to streamline the process, encourage greater accountability, and foster a stronger campaign finance system

The Democracy Fund chose to support this research project because we believe it will offer unique insight into the bipartisan application of technology to improve how our campaign finance system operates.

In the coming months, we look forward to updating you on the progress of these two exciting new grants.

• Civic Engagement in the Digital Age (Pew Internet) April 25 – A new report from Pew Internet examines the increase in political activity over social media from the 2008 Presidential election to the 2012 election.  Overall, political content postings on social media sites have increased by a factor of 6 since 2008, while engaging with political candidates through social media has increased by a factor of four.  The full report and findings can be accessed here.

• Is the Press Too Big to Fail? (HuffingtonPost) April 25 – Todd Gitlin (Professor of Journalism & Sociology, Columbia University) examines both the financial and circulation decline in print media over the last century while question if, in fact, press is too big to fail or if it was failing long before it began to falter financially?

• Breaking news pragmatically: Some reflections on silence and timing in networked journalism (Nieman Lab) April 23 - Events in Boston showed how much the networked press needs to better understand two things: silence and timing.  The Internet makes it possible for people other than traditional journalists to express themselves, quickly, to potentially large audiences. But the ideal press should be about more than this. It should be about demonstrating robust answers to two inseparable questions: Why do you need to know something now? And why do you need to say something now?

• SEC May Require Corporations to Disclose Political Donations (New York Times) April 23 – A group of Democratic officlas have petitioned the SEC to require publicly traded corporations to share political donations with their shareholders.  S.E.C. officials have indicated that they could propose a new disclosure rule by the end of April, setting up a major battle with business groups that oppose the proposal and are preparing for a fierce counterattack if the agency’s staff moves ahead.

• Bill Would Expand Disclosure Of Political Money (NPR) April 23 – Senators  Murkowski (R- AK) and Wyden (D-OR) have proposed a bill aimed at revealing the corporations and unions that spent around $300 million in secretly financed campaign ads during the 2012 election.  Currently, candidate committees, parties, and PACs disclose contributions to the FEC, while 501(c)s have no such requirements as they are regulated by the IRS.

• Transparency Report: More government removal requests than ever before (Google Blog) April 25 – Global Google takedown requests from the second half of 2012 increased to 2,285 governmental requests to remove 24,179 pieces of content; up from 1,811 requests of removal of 18,070 items during the first half of the year.   Russia and Brazil saw the highest increase for governmental takedown requests, as well as a total of 20 countries requesting takedown of clips from the “Innocence of Muslims” movie.

• The Senate ain’t a fun place to be these days (WashingtonPost) April 23 – Max Baucus’ announcement earlier this month that he will retire instead of seeking reelection in 2014 marks the ninth senator to either retire or resign prior the 2014 election, and the 27th to retire over the previous three election cycles.  This is the largest number of Senators to step down in a six year period in more than 40 years.

Two statements made by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich exemplify what we mean by a pattern of deception. In late 2011, Gingrich claimed that “I balanced the budget for four straight years…” and last summer Clinton said, “I gave you four surplus budgets for the first time in more than 70 years…”

Instead of crying “false” (because their level of self-congratulation is unwarranted) or “partially true” (because each did play a role in balancing budgets), the Detecting Patterns of Deception page identifies the misleading move that Clinton and Gingrich share as “Overestimating an Individual’s Power.”  Each is claiming full credit for balanced budgets when the plaudits should be shared with many others, ranging from the Congressmen who supported the deficit reduction packages of two administrations to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and those who created the tech boom of the 1990s.

Efforts to reject misleading moves and deception have been around for a long time. Since Aristotle defined thirteen fallacies, theorists have fashioned primers to protect audiences from seductive errors in reasoning and machinations that cloud judgment. Flackcheck’s Detecting Patterns of Deception page has followed this tradition, defining and illustrating 28 deceptive patterns clustered into six categories: Overestimating Power, Misleading Language, Misleading Audio-Visual Cues, Not Telling The Whole Story, False Logic, and Hypocritical Attack.  

With this work, we are targeting those too young to have developed the strong partisan reflexes that produce confirmation bias. We expect that regular exposure to the Detecting Patterns of Deception page will teach even those who rationalize their own side’s excesses to spot the sorts of recurrent moves that would have made Machiavelli proud.

In the ‘more difficult but doable’ category of goals, we expect that our explanations will increase our audience’s understanding of how these inference-forging moves mislead. A tougher objective aspires, over time, to translate recognition and understanding into disapproval. In the “maybe under some circumstances” box, we hope (but with longer odds) that among at least some of our audience, our process of labeling, defining, explaining, and illustrating will lead them to reject the deceptive pattern regardless of the ideology of the candidate or cause employing it.     

Put more technically, the Detecting Patterns of Deception pilot project assumes that IF:

a)    We craft clear definitions that schematize the relationships among our Patterns of Deception,

b)    Identify cogent exemplars from both left and right to populate those schemas, and

c)    Over time familiarize those who have not yet formed strong partisan attachments (i.e., high school and first year college students) with the categories embodied in the labels, the explanations of why each is problematic, and illustrations of the misleading moves from both left and right,

THEN WE WILL: 

d)    Enhance audience political acuity by increasing recognition, understanding of the misleading nature, disapproval and  rejection of misleading moves  in ongoing campaigns and issue debates regardless of their source and do so without activating cynicism.

To see how well the categories illumine the gun control debate take a look at the rhetoric we’ve labeled “out of context”. “overgeneralization,” “ad hominem,” “slippery slope”, “red herring”, “false categorical” and “guilt by association.”

• Reince Priebus, RNC Chair, Says Journalists Will Moderate Fewer Debates In 2016 GOP Primary (HuffingtonPost) March 22 - Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Friday that his party will have fewer debates moderated by journalists from mainstream news outlets in the 2016 primary. The 2012 primary featured more than 20 debates and candidate forums that started eight months out from the Iowa caucuses and lasted until late February 2012. The televised debates gave the candidates with less money more public exposure and forced the candidates to spar with one another on policy proposals.

• TV Will Tear Us Apart: The Future of Political Polarization in American Media (Smithsonian.com) April 5 - Imagine a world where the only media you consume serves to reinforce your particular set of steadfast political beliefs. Sounds like a pretty far-out dystopia, right? Well, in 1969, Internet pioneer Paul Baran predicted just that. In a paper titled “On the Impact of the New Communications Media Upon Social Values,” Baran (who passed away in 2011) looked at how Americans might be affected by the media landscape of tomorrow. The paper examined everything from the role of media technology in the classroom to the social effects of the portable telephone — a device not yet in existence that he predicted as having the potential to disrupt our lives immensely with unwanted calls at inopportune times.

• LA County developing a voting system for the digital age (SCPR) April 4 –  Los Angeles County is re-inventing the nation’s largest electoral system, which serves nearly 4 million registered voters. The goal is a more flexible, user-friendly system that county officials hope will increase turnout.  Currently, LA County represents one of the lowest wait times to vote in the country, averaging a 3-minute wait in the 2012 presidential election. To design the system from scratch, county officials started in 2010 by surveying voters and stakeholder groups. They added observations from poll workers. The county registrar of voters also co-sponsored a design challenge on a crowdsourcing website that drew responses from all over.

• Corruption case further sullies Albany’s reputation (Center for Public Integrity) April 3 - A New York state senator and five other political officials have been named in a sweeping federal corruption case — the latest in a series of scandals that helped earn the Empire State a D grade from the State Integrity Investigation.  At the heart of the complaint unsealed Tuesday: federal prosecutors say Sen. Malcolm Smith, a Democrat from Queens, used a series of contacts in an attempt to bribe New York City Republican Party officials to approve his bid for mayor on the GOP ticket which has since resulted in an additional arrest since the case broke earlier this month.

• About those ‘Glory Days of American Journalism’ (Steven Waldman, Columbia Journalism Review) - March 25 - Matt Yglesias has more or less conceded that there is a flaw in his argument—that we are living in the “Glory Days of American Journalism,” as the headline of his piece in Slate put it last week. “Ignore the doomsayers,” the subhead advised. “The news-reading public has never had more and better information at their fingertips.” The boo boo was that he forgot about state and local coverage.

• Deeper data dive finds $5.5 billion in uncounted newspaper industry revenue (Rick Edmonds, Poynter) April 8th – Rick Edmonds summarizes an important report on newspaper income suggesting a more diversified income base is emerging “The Newspaper Association of America has just completed such an exercise and found some solid gains that have been overlooked previously in its own measurements,” says Edmonds.

One of our grantees Face the Facts USA has just wrapped up its daily facts. Check out the infographic below to get a sense for what they have accomplished so far. 

In just eight months, the Face the Facts team found creative ways to educate the public about 204 facts that are at the center of political discussion. They covered everything from our nation’s debt to the state of our infrastructure and education system. Face the Facts also hosted a wide array of different types of forums to give people a chance to engage with the information more deeply, including Google Hang Outs, interactive cable television events, and one-on-one discussions. 

The facts were disseminated on 70 radio stations, 75 news web sites and cable channels, and in over 400 McClatchy Tribune publications.

The Face the Facts team talks about what they hope they have accomplished so far on this brief video. 

Congratulations to everyone involved!

Government “by the people” depends on voters having the information and skills needed to govern. Media must combat misinformation, expose voters to different points of view, and inform the public debate. New technology must provide the public with better access to information and better filters for making sense of the news. Our education system must equip citizens with the skills required to decipher the messages they hear from political leaders and through the media.

In order to begin to develop our approach in this area, the Democracy Fund has supported research along with a small number of other projects to create a more informed electorate.

The research we have supported through the New America Foundation has focused on how the media can correct misinformation and hold political leaders accountable for what they say. Additionally, the New America Foundation research has experimented with how media can expose people to alternative points of view and increase the civility of public engagement online.

Parallel to this research, we have supported the following projects:

• Blogginghead.tv’s Good Fight project, cultivates respectful dialogue across ideological divides by inviting prominent journalists and intellectuals to take part in civil dialogues and places the videos of these dialogues on the websites of partisan media outlets. The objective of the Good Fight is to break people out of ‘echo chambers’ and to model civil discourse. We have just passed the mid-way point in this grant and are learning a lot about the different ways audiences respond to such dialogues.

• CJR’s United States Project (formerly the Swing States Project) helps local reporters do a better job covering politics and policy. During the 2012 campaign, CJR placed media critics in key states across the country to encourage local media to improve their coverage of the campaigns. Now that the election is over, they have added national correspondents to the team. This work has been well received by the community of political journalists and editors across the country and the external assessment we have commissioned indicates that it has encouraged journalists to improve how they cover issues.

• Face the Facts, a collaboration between GW University and America Speaks, has sought to insert exhaustively researched  and vetted facts into the national conversation through partnerships with online media outlets, radio, and television stations. This has been supported by a set of public engagement tools (quizzes and dialogue tools) to engage the audience more deeply. While the integration of public engagement practices, online technology, and broadcast television is at a relatively early stage we expect to learn a lot from this project about how to incorporate such innovations into our future work.

• Flackcheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has sought to identify deceptive and misleading advertising, while supporting television stations and others to counter these deceptions. Among other things, Flackcheck has produced parody videos to raise public awareness about the types of deceptions that are taking place. It has also worked directly with local stations to encourage them to reject deceptive 3rd party ads. In parallel, Flackcheck has provided guidance to stations to support news reporting that educates viewers about deceptions within ads that are being broadcast.

• The Healthy Democracy Fund has developed an innovative reform to ensure that voters can make more informed choices about ballot measures. The Citizens Initiative Review convenes random groups of citizens to deliberate about ballot measures and share their assessments with voters via the official state voter guide. To learn more, you can read a recent blog post by Professor John Gastil that describes his evaluation of the Citizens Initiative Review.

We expect to extend the number of people and organizations with which we work to address opportunities to increase the diversity of viewpoints to which the public is exposed as well as foster more sustainable and effective journalistic institutions.  Additionally, the Democracy Fund will continue to seek out new innovations in technology and media.

The Democracy Fund team is excited to welcome Adam Ambrogi to the organization. Adam will be leading our work to create a more responsive political system with a focus on our campaign finance system and election administration processes.

Adam is a perfect addition to the team. He most recently worked as Chief Counsel for the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, where he worked on a wide range of issues related to election law, campaign finance, and legal matters facing the administration of the Senate. Adam was the lead staffer for the Rules Committee on passage of the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act, worked on the DISCLOSE Act of 2012, and led the committee’s legal team in examining and making changes to the Senate Rules related to the filibuster.

Before working at the Senate, Adam served as Special Assistant and Counsel for Commissioner Ray Martinez of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission where he helped establish its policies and procedures to build that organization, including the Help America Vote College Program.  

You’ll be hearing more from Adam after he gets his feet on the ground. Over the coming weeks, he’ll begin working with many of our existing portfolio organizations, like our three grantees who are conducting research on our campaign finance system, the Campaign Finance Institute, the Committee for Economic Development, and the Meridian Institute.