TCNJ School of the Arts and Communication welcomed NYU Professor and author of PressThink Jay Rosen to TCNJ on Sept. 26 as a part of the Communication for the Common Good Series.
This special event was arranged by Program Coordinator of Journalism and Professional Writing and Professor Kathleen Webber and Professor Kim Pearson. Derek Wan ‘01 also contributed a donation to help bring this event into fruition.
The day began with a Student Media and Local Election Coverage Workshop, where students involved in various forms of TCNJ student media had an open discussion with Rosen about how to best cover the 2024 election.
Rosen’s afternoon presentation, “The Case for Pro-Democracy Election Coverage,” focused on how to cover the election with democracy in mind.
He began by comparing when Gerald Ford ran for president in 1976 and said a blatant lie during the presidential debate that contributed to him losing the election to how former president Donald Trump lied over 30,000 times across four years and still got the presidency. This example was to show how the news landscape has changed when covering elections and he wants to show people a different way to cover elections.
Rosen said another way to cover the elections is to use the “citizen’s agenda,” which involves news outlets to turn their attention to asking citizens what they want for political candidates to talk about during campaigns.
Asking citizens this question allows them to deeply think about what issues are important to them and their community. It also may get people to consider issues they never thought about before.
With this approach, Rosen said it could help candidates really listen to their voters, which in turn would help their campaign. This also helps put power back in the hands of the voters.
Rosen created a mantra, “Not the odds, but the stakes” to get people to think more about what is truly at stake when it comes to elections rather than thinking about who is going to win.
“Not the odds but the stakes – that is my recipe for better election coverage at the national level. The citizen’s agenda rebuilds from the ground up because it starts in a different place: with the voters, not ‘the race.’ The mainstream press is not as powerful as it was when Gerald Ford made his mistakes. Thirty thousand lies cannot be fact checked. Something stronger is required,” Rosen said.
Rosen believes that this approach will ensure a more “pro-democracy” election coverage. By taking the focus off the politicians and extremist ideologies, the power is given back to the people, and journalists can report on what people actually care about.
“We were hoping that [students] would think about the citizen’s agenda and to go back to their newsrooms and say ‘How can we use this model for our coverage?’” Webber said. “Going out to students and asking them what they want candidates to be talking about and then developing stories around that.”
“I thought it was a great experience to be able to have an outside professor come to TCNJ and elaborate more between journalism and politics and how that relates to the upcoming election,” Amy Parris ‘25, a Communication Studies major, said.
-Ashley Peng ’25 and Kaitlin Bavaro ’25