Newspapers by their very nature like to keep local members of Congress at arm’s length. Whether the forum is straight news or an editorial, they don’t want to appear to be too close to politicians or the positions they espouse. But they have tossed this practice aside on at least one piece of current legislation, the transportation bill.
The bill, which is known as the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (IS TEA), represents the federal government’s prime commitment to highways and transit and, at $175 billion over six years, is one of its largest programs overall. This year’s debate has once again split Congress into regional camps sparring for highway dollars. But what’s been instructive for media watchers has been the way newspapers have lined up with local congressmen, parroting their “we’re right, they’re wrong” battle cry in editorials around the nation.
Commenting on how Southern politicking for transportation dollars would “Balkanize the nation” and “deny” New Jersey its due, The Asbury Park Press praised its senators and likened their adversaries in the Sunbelt to “5-year-olds complaining that their slice of pizza isn’t as big as their sister’s.” The Dallas Morning News declared that “the funding needs of Texas and other rapid-growth states can no longer be ignored” by those who “receive far more federal highway dollars than they put in.” The “we want ours” chant sounded out West as well, where The Idaho Statesman insisted the Gem State should not be penalized just because fewer people live there than in New York or Pennsylvania. “Idaho deserves its fair share of federal highway money,” the newspaper wrote.
These editorials seem awkward, almost unseemly. We’re not used to seeing newspapers cheer the home team and boo the opposition in quite this fashion.
This hyper-parochialism extends to news coverage as well. As this reporter can attest from personal experience, we who report on IS TEA tell the tale in the narrowest of terms. Our stories assess whether ISTEA will enable local officials to widen the interstate or repair the bridge that gives commuters the chills. They almost never include any discussion beyond “How much?” and “What can we do with it?” (If the state’s funding level is low, the main question is “Who screwed up?” Invariably, the story also gets better play than its good-news counterparts.)
To be sure, newspapers must keep an eye on how local lawmakers fare in delivering federal dollars for local projects vital to jobs and the economy. It could even be argued that members of Congress have no obligation more important than serving their districts and newspapers no greater responsibility than evaluating that service. And for all their shortcomings, at least these newspapers are watching ISTEA.
The same cannot be said of the major national dailies, which have almost entirely ignored ISTEA. As with previous transportation bills, the national press is avoiding ISTEA presumably because many transportation stories so clearly involve metro priorities, metro officials and metro decisions. What’s more, the sheer vastness and diversity of America and its landscape dictate against one-size-fits-all coverage as much as against one-size-fits-all government policy. Still, ISTEA touches on numerous national matters, from the environment to the smattering of social problems associated with sprawl. And then there’s the biggest national matter of all: the money — lots of it, especially when one considers that billions in private and state funds are leveraged on federal dollars. Indeed, the most chilling implication of the lack of ISTEA coverage may be the following fact: Congress will spend $175 billion largely ratifying the status quo with nary a question asked.
Instead, the coverage is dominated by the regional press, which reports the issue strictly from a local point of view. This intense focus on the impact back home distracts reporters from questioning basic assumptions and discourages more creative lawmakers from thinking big because they know the hometown paper only cares about the bottom line. Lawmakers spend countless hours poring over funding levels in arcane charts and haranguing each other to allot a few more dollars to their states when they could be using the time and energy to examine issues that affect all or many congressional districts, such as the pluses and minuses of high occupancy vehicles or the reasons Amtrak and other transit systems lose money. Even more importantly, they don’t ask the big questions that should be obvious. Does our transportation policy address our infrastructure problems in the most sensible, efficient, environmentally sound way? Will ISTEA help or hurt local and national transportation? Could it be made better?
As the early coverage of ISTEA suggests, the media, like lawmakers, will avoid these questions at all costs. We will write dozens of stories about congressional earmarks, either to chronicle local projects, or to dismiss the whole rat race as the latest quest for old-fashioned pork. Forgotten will be the fact that these projects collectively amount to less than 5 percent of the total spending in the bill. Shouldn’t we also cover the other $165 billion? Another typical piece is the fake-transportation story. These usually popup when lawmakers seek to amend ISTEA on the floor of the House or Senate with a proposal on a hot-button issue, like affirmative action and the drinking age.
Formula fight stories are also perennial favorites, but they do not get at the key issues either. As Clifford Winston, a transportation specialist at the Brookings Institution puts it, “The state which gets the money is not the important issue. Who cares whether Chicago or Los Angeles gets the money for the bridge? The important issue is not how they’re divvying up the money, it’s the underlying philosophy.”
So far, our legislators have not articulated any underlying philosophy beyond the everybody-wins scenario of more money for everybody — a politically popular panacea that history suggests does not always result in better transportation policy. Part of the problem here is that the country is in a period of transition with regard to roads and transit systems and no one is quite sure where it will lead.
Some policy experts believe we have already begun to “devolve” power back to the states for transportation whether we fully realize it or not. Though widely praised, the first ISTEA did not revolutionize federal transportation policy for the next generation. That 1991 bill maintained the federal government’s role of providing funding for the 50 states, while enhancing somewhat the power of local communities to influence state departments of transportation. It didn’t really fit comfortably into the devolution model and represents either an interim step toward some long-term policy or a detour. But what?
“In the 1920’s, we needed to get America out of the mud and in the 1950’s, we wanted the interstate,” observes Frank Francois, Executive Director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “There is very little vision as to where America should go.”
One visionary figure did speak up earlier this year, but his idea wasn’t exactly what Francois and other transportation interests had in mind. Representative John Kasich, the iconoclastic Ohio Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, proposed simply killing the federal highway program in favor of devolution a Ia welfare reform. His bill would have solved the formula dilemma by allowing states to keep their gas receipts and by revoking most federal mandates. It died, not because national highway proponents articulated an airtight defense of the status quo, but because they ignored Kasich’s initiative.
The media might have seized upon Kasich’s proposal as a springboard for debate over what our transportation policy ought to be. This objective sounds abstract, but it need not be. Readers understand what it’s like to slog through rush-hour traffic — a universal problem that will only get worse as more among the nation’s booming immigration population take to the roads. They live with smog and other environmental problems stemming from road use and they’re beginning to develop a better sense of the causes and effects of sprawl, thanks in part to some strong coverage of the subject in both local and national newspapers.
One probable reason Kasich’s proposal didn’t stimulate more discussion is that the media was caught off guard. The original ISTEA bill pumped $155 billion into transportation over six years. Yet, there has been little if any follow-up on that legislation. How can we assess where we should go if we don’t know where we are?
These stories don’t need to be dry bureaucratic yarns. The 1991 bill allowed but did not require states to shift up to 70 percent of their highway money to mass transit.
Some states took advantage of this flexibility far more than others. One story might compare states and contrast how the communities view the next round of funding. Another story might assess how frequently states invest in old roads as opposed to constructing new ones; the latter is usually more popular for politicians but not necessarily better for transportation.
The media also needs to illuminate the link between what Congress does or fails to do and the effect back home. Sprawl is a good example. Some transportation experts credit the 1991 ISTEA bill with placing the issue on the public agenda in the first place.
Prior to ISTEA, the common assumption was that market forces drove the unfettered expansion of roads that exploit the environment, deplete the cities of citizenry, increase traffic congestion and dissipate community resources overall. By empowering local community planning organizations, ISTEA has been credited with helping policymakers and the media understand how federal and state highway spending has also encouraged this growth. Some versions of the current ISTEA bill seek to strengthen efforts to counter sprawl. They include requirements for states and local governments to fully disclose their transportation spending by political jurisdiction and to reward states that practice “smart growth” with $25 million in extra planning. The media should question if these proposals go far enough and track their progress.
Privatization is also gaining ascendancy as a long-term transportation strategy among some prominent analysts. Noting that public buses and rails have lost billions, Winston of Brookings favors privatization to heighten competition and end some of the least economical practices of the status quo. Rather than continuously offer service, a firm might run trains or buses at peak times, leaving competitors to serve the community at other times. These changes would harm numerous vested interests and haven’t even made it on to Congress’s radar screen, but a well-versed media might ask lawmakers why they haven’t saved a few million dollars for some pilot projects.
Responsibility for many of these stories primarily falls on the national media. The big papers possess the platform to force lawmakers to take transportation seriously and are the best situated to track the issues both in Washington and around the country. Although the big papers sometimes write on sprawl and other issues, they fail to close the loop in avoiding IS TEA. They write about ISTEA only when it finally passes, or if it bubbles over into hot political stories. For instance, there were plenty of stories when Transportation Committee Chairman Bud Shuster challenged Speaker Newt Gingrich’s tenuous hold of his speakership over his plan to increase transportation spending.
The big papers have not covered the substance of the bill nor have they sought to influence the national agenda with investigative reports. At the very least, it would seem the big dailies would want to shine the spotlight on innovative transportation programs and compare projects in different regions the way they have done with welfare or education. Certainly they should follow the money.
Some of the reasons for this oversight are not unique to transportation. Issue-based journalism is almost always given short shrift in favor of conflict. And within transportation reporting itself, highways and rail lag far behind aviation in terms of sexiness. Moreover, transportation does not lend itself to quick mastery.
Reporters who try to cover ISTEA will quickly discover that much of the debate is not conducted in English. “You have to have a Ph.D. to understand what they’re talking about,” observes American Automobile Association spokesman Bill Jackman. Indeed, when attending ISTEA hearings, repor ers will continually need to backtrack mentally to try to remember the difference between “vehicle miles traveled” and “highway lane miles.” As soon as they figure it out, they’ll discover the discussion has shifted to the “minimum allocation.”
As with other debates, we need to remember that the vocabulary of ISTEA — including the inscrutable name of the bill itself — has been designed for a reason. “Maybe it isn’t in the best interests of the people on the Hill to make it understandable,” Jackman suggests. “If they keep it in jargon, they can continue to run it the way they like. It’s basically a system where the people in power are rewarded for their ability to get more money for their states. Making it easier to understand may be somewhat threatening.”
The transportation committees remain popular on Capitol Hill because they have proven to be tickets to reelection. If they aren’t given a whole lot of media scrutiny, the campaign becomes that much easier. Whether or not our transportation system is the better for it is quite another question.