Fouhy: Press Neglects State Gov.'s

Though mud-slinging in the Cellucci-Harshbarger gubernatorial election attracted a lot of press, state politics deserves more attention from journalists, said Edward M. Fouhy, executive director of the Pew Center on the States at an Institute of Politics (IOP) study group yesterday.

The recent trend in journalism has been to reduce the press corps in state capitols while the money and decision-making power of the state is on the rise, Fouhy said.

Fouhy spoke as part of the series led by IOP Fellow Marguerite Sullivan on "Power Struggles: the States vs. the Feds." He has served as a Washington bureau chief for both ABC and CBS News and as senior producer of NBC Nightly News.

Currently, Fouhy runs the Pew Center Internet Project, an information resource service that covers innovative public policy work at the state level.

"Civic journalism," which Fouhy defines as providing citizens with information to make informed decisions, is a goal of the service, Fouhy said.

The need for civic journalism in state politics arises from the decreased coverage of state politics by major news organizations such as Gannett and Knight Ridder, Fouhy said. More and more newspapers are passing from local to corporate ownership, he said.

"The bottom line is that there are now 27 states in which the press corps [at the state capitol] has been seriously down-sized," Fouhy said.

The erosion of press attention at the state level runs counter to an increasing flow of dollars and power from Washington down to the state level, Fouhy said.

"It was not until the Reagan administration that devolution really started to take-off," he said.

States are increasingly the "laboratories of democracy," Fouhy said, quoting a term by former Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis.

Top issues Fouhy says he expects to cover include welfare reform, campaign finance, utility regulation and financing public schools.

The Internet service will be a "resource for citizens and journalists," Fouhy said.

But Internet journalism poses a number of uncertainties, Fouhy said.

"It is a world in which we can only dimly see the future," he said. "It will be unpredictable, because all of our paradigms of journalism have been [based on the communication of] one to many, and online journalism is one to one."

Fouhy said he is confident that Internet journalism has the potential to influence public opinion in the future, but it must first overcome certain obstacles.

"The techniques are still being invented. We don't know how to stand out in a very crowded environment," Fouhy said. "The Internet is full of misinformation. It is hard to find facts except for in the places you always go to find facts [such as The New York Times]," he said.