Are you ready for the Democracy Channel?
Good evening, citizens. The electronic town meeting is about to begin. Everyone take your seats and make sure your voter ID number is handy and your touch-tone phone or remote control device is by your side. Those of you tuning in via computer please click on the "start" icon on the top of your screen.
Today's topic is gun control. We assume everyone has read the issue brochure sent to all of your electronic mailboxes one month ago. Our first speaker will be Robert Corbin, executive director of the National Rifle Association, followed by Sarah Brady, president of Handgun Control Incorporated. We will follow that up with a discussion among a panel of twelve randomly selected citizens and an impartial moderator. At the end of the meeting, we will ask you to vote on the proposed legislation.
Ever since Ross Perot made the concept of an Electronic Town Hall a central part of his stop-and-go bid for the presidency, the idea has been catching on. The Texas tycoon is still talking up electronic democracy as something that would not only restore the American Dream but also give us something useful to do after work. "If we ever put the people back in charge of this country and make sure they understand the issues," Perot has said, "you'll see the White House and Congress, like a ballet, pirouetting around the stage and getting things done in unison."
The idea of holding these events regularly is now being carried into the future by people not associated with Perot. In September, the Public Agenda Foundation, a nonprofit group, hosted a two-hour electronic town meeting (ETM) in San Antonio, Texas over that city's new interactive cable system (special software and set-top boxes allow the user to send signals upstream - "I'd like to order this," or "I disagree with that.") That forum allowed the locals to deliberate the health care crisis and use their remote controls to vote on solutions. Future forums all over the country could attack everything from the federal budget deficit to abortion to foreign policy.
And Public Agenda is hardly alone in its quest to popularize such events. There are now dozens of foundations and entrepreneurs forging an entire ETM industry. There's even a cable executive at John Malone's Denver headquarters who is quietly planning to launch the Democracy Channel as a sort of 24-hour branch of government.
Mixing television, politics, and interactive electronics could be a formula for either new public enlightenment or a country run by push-button impulse. It all depends on how the concept is executed.
No doubt, it will run into some opposition. Big Media hates the idea of giving the public too much of a voice because that would diminish its own role as arbiter of opinion. Fully half of registered voters don't even bother to show up to pick their president, press veterans argue. Why would anyone think the public would be interested in, not to mention capable of, wading through complex issues? When the idea was broached on his Sunday morning talk show a while back, David Brinkley's lips crinkled. "What do we do with all the senators and congressmen?" he asked. "Send them home?"
But ask the average person on the street whether he or she can do a better job than the average politician, and the answer will usually be: Hell yes! In fact, Eon Corporation of Reston, Virginia did something of that sort. One of several companies planning a 1994 rollout of interactive TV in major media markets, Eon commissioned a survey of 1,465 random television viewers and found that people are substantially more interested in using two-way TV for political opinion purposes (85 percent) than they are interested in using it for electronic shopping (70 percent) or playing along with game shows (64 percent) or sporting events (42 percent). The public seems to be saying this: We are already deluged with results from opinion polls in which uninformed people are abruptly telephoned and questioned. Why not give us a chance to take part in voting on topics we have taken the time to understand?
Madison and Hamilton might retch at the vision of sofa spuds choosing to ratify or eradicate NAFTA with a click-click of their remote controls or a beep-beep of their touch-tone phones. Our Founding Fathers, in their white wigs, feared that the lower classes would vote to seize their property. So they intentionally created a representative republic, not a full-fledged democracy, to keep power out of the hands of the masses. But others at the Constitutional Convention were notably less paranoid. Thomas Jefferson might find electronic town meetings an absolute scream.
Since those heady days in Philadelphia, the trend has been to expand the power of the people, not limit it. First, non-property holders were given the right to vote, then African Americans, then women, then those between ages 18 and 21. Twenty-three states have amended their constitutions to allow referenda on election ballots. With California leading the pack, citizens now commonly vote directly on a few issues per year. Sometimes, they vote in favor of what may well be harebrained ideas, such as Colorado's 1992 choice to turn back the clock on homosexual rights. But Congress has also passed some clunkers in its day. It's all part of the inherent messiness of democracy.
The notion of a nationwide network for participatory politics goes back to the 1940s, when scientist Buckminster Fuller first proposed voting on the issues of the day via telephone. Psychologist Erich Fromm, in his 1955 book The Sane Society, wrote of "a true House of Commons," where citizens would vote on the issues "with the help of the technical devices we have today." In 1982, futurist Alvin Toffler wrote that such a system "would strike a devastating blow at the special interest groups and lobbies who infest most parliaments." Perot, in fact, has been advocating the electronic town hall for twenty years. It's just that no one took him seriously - that is, until public frustration with ineffective government reached a crescendo in 1992.
The main worry among the ETM crowd is that Perot, in popularizing the idea, has also co-opted the concept. When he bought a half-hour of time on ABC last March and asked millions of people to fill out ballots in TV Guide, the information he presented and the way he worded his questions amounted to a form of teletyranny. A typical ballot question was: "Do you feel trade agreements have cost this country jobs?" Ted Becker, an Auburn University political science professor who has been running experiments on ETMs for fifteen years, calls what Perot does "electronic town manipulation." Becker also notes that what President Clinton has been calling ETMs are simply glorified versions of Donahue, as there is no real interaction with viewers. Any legitimate ETM, he believes, must be based on the New England town meetings of yore, when ordinary citizens debated the issues of the day and then voted yea or nay.
What distinguished the San Antonio forum on health care was its form of interactive deliberation. Eight ordinary citizens were selected to appear on a panel, which was moderated by two people from Public Agenda. The panel, and the wider TV audience, reviewed seven options for cutting health care costs, from regulating drug prices to rationing expensive procedures to eliminating fraud and waste. Viewers watched mini- documentaries on each option and then saw the panel debating them.
Of course, this form of ETM has its drawbacks. First, the typical channel- surfer would not find these panelists the most telegenic or articulate folks on the dial. Second, of the 18,000 San Antonio households watching, only 200 were selected to be part of the cross-sectional sample whose votes were tabulated by computers and quickly flashed on the TV screen. All the others could have voted with remote control - or a mail-in newspaper ballot if they didn't have the latest cable gear. But they weren't part of the immediate action.
Still, the experiment yielded some interesting results. As the panel discussion raged on, the group at least seemed to appreciate what a bitch the health care issue is. And many among the voting sample - during the course of the event itself - actually changed their minds on certain options as they learned more about the issues. The first time they were asked, only 27 percent said that hospitals should ration expensive procedures like organ transplants. But by the time all the information was presented, when the same question was asked again, that number had jumped to 43 percent. This suggests that many people are willing to accept limits when they understand the reasons for them. Says Public Agenda's Jean Johnson: "Some of the worst problems in public policy arise when people think there is a cost-free solution."
The ETM in San Antonio represents only one of many models for interactive politics. Electronic bulletin boards on the Internet and other computer networks already allow people to voice political views, take part in electronic polls, even send e-mail to the White House. The Community Service Foundation, a non-profit group in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, has formed the Electronic Congress. Citizens call an 800 number, punch in their ID codes, and register their opinions on national issues. In the city of Reading, Pennsylvania, the locals use video-conferencing and cable call-in shows to debate city, state, and national issues. And under an agreement with Eon, ABC's World News Tonight and Nightline programs have plans to pose instant opinion questions on the day's events to the viewing audience.
Then there's Jeffrey Reiss, the man working with Malone. A former Viacom executive, and co-founder of the Showtime and Lifetime cable networks, Reiss has already drawn up plans for the Democracy Channel. He is now in the process of tapping Malone's Tele-Communications Inc., the world's biggest cable company, for the tens of millions of dollars it will take to get the venture off the ground. The venture will also be partly funded by advertising and membership fees from a new organization in charge of lobbying Congress with poll results from the channel's ETMs.
The very thought of living in an electronic democracy raises fundamental issues. While Reiss and other proponents see it as a way to create consensus, democratize debate, and energize the electorate, the sticky questions remain: Won't it be harder than ever for Congress and the President to stand up for what's right, rather than what's popular? Can voter privacy be maintained, or will marketers get hold of everyone's voting records? Will everyone have access to the latest technology? Will the people really be getting their say, or will the whole process by controlled by moguls like Malone? And perhaps most important, what would happen if votes somehow became binding, rather than just advisory?
Most advocates of ETMs, including Reiss, see the technology as a way to supplement, not supplant, the existing system. Yet, could it be possible that we've simply outgrown our current model of government? In the early days of the republic, each House member represented about 30,000 people. Today, each member represents an unwieldy 575,000 constituents. To better represent the views of all those people, the US Constitution could be amended to place national issues such as gun control on federal election ballots - to be voted on either electronically or in the conventional way. In fact, there was an ill-fated bill to do just that in the late 1970s. The bill, which never made it to a floor vote, specified that an issue could appear on the ballot if 3 percent of the public signed a petition to place it there. It was co-sponsored by 55 members of Congress, including Jack Kemp, who wrote in a 1981 book: "I feel strongly about this reform because I believe it goes to the heart of our national malaise."
One thing most everyone agrees on is this: Democracy in America has always been a living, breathing experiment. And no one knows just where the experiment will lead. Reiss, for one, says, "I would not rule out transforming our government into a direct democracy. Maybe that's where government evolves, when we truly have an enlightened public." How will we know when the public is at last enlightened? That's hard to say. But if the electronic town meetings of the future start pulling better ratings than Roseanne, Seinfeld, or Beavis and Butt-head, watch out!
