A privilege that comes with running one of the largest grassroots voter registration campaigns in the U.S. is occasionally being invited to speak for the youth voter movement itself. So when producers from ABC’s 20/20 called and said they were putting together a segment (view or read the segment) that would ask whether attracting new voters to the electorate was a good thing or not, we eagerly agreed to represent the “pro” side of the argument.

In preliminary interviews, the producers showed great enthusiasm for our viewpoint. We argued that democracy is, by definition, inclusive and functions best when involving the broadest number of citizens. We argued that the notion of only an educated elite deciding who should lead is an age-old idea that is still championed today in totalitarian regimes, but that one only needs to look toward the stark differences in quality of life between those countries and ours to support the merits of a republic where all individuals have equal say.

When we were told that John Stossel would be conducting the on-air interview, it probably should have alerted us that the final segment would be more of an editorial representing a contrarian view than a piece of actual journalism that strived for quality. But in extensive conversations with the producers, we were promised a balanced piece.

So when the producers then explained they’d been doing “man on the street” interviews testing people’s knowledge about the election, and would like to conduct some at one of the concerts where we register voters, we were more than happy to help. We suggested several concerts on our schedule, and they selected the festival Camp Bisco, hosted by our co-chair Marc Brownstein.

When the camera crew began an afternoon of shooting these interviews, something pretty funny happened. The producer, Harvard graduate Andrew Sullivan, read a list of questions from a piece of paper – “How many states are there? Who is the vice president? How many Senators are there? What is Roe v. Wade?” The first interviewee answered some correctly, some incorrectly. Sullivan then came to the next question on his list – how many years a member of the U.S. House of Representatives serves in each term. The interviewee answered “two.” Sullivan, with a smug smile, said “No, it’s actually four.”

“Uhm,” I said uncomfortably. “It’s two.” He shook his head no, insisting it’s four. Was this really happening? I mean, were we actually going to debate this? One of our volunteers went to his Blackberry to verify, but that was farcical in itself. The answer was obviously two and has been since the birth of our country. The fact that an ABC producer was reading off a sheet of questions and had it wrong was just – well comedy and tragedy all at once. We corrected him and moved on. According to Stossel’s argument, Sullivan should not vote (we respectfully disagree).

We then spent several hours interviewing fans as they came to the concert. They were not, as the ABC piece would falsely assert, people we registered to vote. They were simply entering the concert grounds. Some answered almost all the questions correctly. Some knew very little. Interestingly, the segment that aired on ABC showed interviewees struggling with two of the questions that the majority of people answered correctly (all but two people, out of dozens, knew how many states there are, and most were familiar with Roe. V. Wade). Not surprisingly, the question about how many years a U.S. Rep serves for never made it to the air.

In hindsight, it was naïve of us to believe that 20/20 would do anything but use the worst interviews of the dozens at their disposal. The purpose of the segment was to entertain, not to win any awards. The goal is to generate ratings and probably nothing more. And it’s certainly more entertaining to watch someone get stumped than correctly recite a 7th grade government lesson.

The fact that ABC quizzed people on civics and not their awareness of issues in this election pointed to just how tone deaf Stossel and his crew are. Had they asked how young people felt about the economy, the War in Iraq, and the environment, they may have gotten a very different reaction. Their little “test” was more an indictment of the American education system than a cogent or credible argument against voting.

That aside, what the segment did not properly represent is how seriously HeadCount takes the education piece of our mission. They left out, for instance, that we printed and distributed 10,000 voter guides. They even chopped up a quote from Brownstein where he acknowledge that there are large numbers of uninformed voters, but cut off the next sentence where he detailed our efforts to educate as well as sign people up – the classic “out of context quote” that’s a sign of weak, and agenda-ridden, reporting.

But we conclude by pointing out that, if indeed we accept the notion that the electorate and particularly young voters are not as well informed as we’d hope, it only speaks to the need for organizations like HeadCount that encourage civic engagement. Voting is, almost by definition, the first and most inclusive step a citizen can take toward participating in democracy. HeadCount addresses those who may not see politics as personally relevant to them, and reminds them that in this country we all have a voice and that people have died to defend our rights to use it. On Election Day, over 100 million Americans will vote, and more than 10 million of them will be young voters age 18 to 24. Some will have spent the last few months voraciously reading blogs and consuming cable news and come to the polls with deep knowledge about the issues. For others, voting will be a lone act of civic engagement. But HeadCount aims to create an environment in the live music community that encourages them to do more. We try to make the issues of the day part of the ongoing conversation among music fans, and weave that into the social fabric of our community. This is a long process that will take many years to fully bear fruit. The first step – registering 100,000 voters – is near completion. Post election, you’ll see us take on new initiatives that use music as a platform that inspires people to get more involved and politically active.

John Stossel has carved out a niche for himself as an independent-minded reporter whose shining moment came more than 20 years ago when he got manhandled by a professional wrestler. Since then, he’s been in and out of the news from time to time, facing accusations of shoddy journalism. We are confident that regardless of the angle of the piece and the opinions Stossel espoused, that most Americans will recognize that young voters have a great deal at stake in this election and will be serving the greater good by making their voices heard on Election Day.

Cross-posted from Future Majority.

On Friday at 10pm, 20/20 will run a piece on the youth vote called "Maybe It's Your Civic Duty Not To Vote," in which they suggest that uninformed voters - primarily young people - not turn out to the polls. In talking to the youth group,HeadCount, featured in the piece, it is clear that 20/20 and Stossel were less interested in discovering the truth about young voters while filming their piece than in crafting a hatchet job meant to cast doubt on the growing youth vote.

You can view the 4 minute segment here.

There is a lot that is wrong with this piece. Yes, there are many uninformed voters, but that category is not limited to young people, who are unfortunately the main target of this piece. Anyone who has ever watched Jay Leno could tell you that many Americans are uninformed about current events. Unfortunately, some see that as an excuse to rob people of their constitutional rights, and Stossel and ABC are happy to play along.

But all is not as it appears in this report. In talking with HeadCount, the group featured in the piece, it's clear that Stossel and 20/20 were not interested in giving the young people they interviewed a fair shake. They had a narrative to their story and stuck by it - facts be damned. More than that, they worked -um, creatively - to make sure their point of view dominated the piece. Here's a list of inaccuracies and selective editing that viewers won't see:

• At 1 minute into the piece, Stossel interviews two voters who can accurately answer questions about American civics, after which, far more concert-goers and "regular folks" are shown who are unable to answer similar questions. According to HeadCount, this is not an accurate representation of the percentage of interviewees who successfully answered the questions. Far more concert-goers were knowledgeable than implied by the report.
• At minute 1:20, the report shows a girl saying that there are only 12 Senators in the US. The only problem? She wasn't responding to a question about the number of US Senators, but about the number of Supreme Court Justices. Yes, she was still incorrect, but Stossel and 20/20 manipulated the footage to make her appear even less knowledgeable than she actually was.

  Staffers at HeadCount say that this is often the case with the featured interviewees, who were asked not a single question, as the report implies, but many. Many interviewees were knowledgeable about some issues, but less so when it came to other issues. The young voter responses included in the report were cherry-picked by Stossel and ABC producers to highlight only the incorrect answers.

• At 1:42, Stossel asks Marc Brownstein if voters should be "knowledgeable" (whatever that means) before casting a ballot. Brownstein replies that "there are a lot of of uneducated voters out there." But that wasn't all he said. In the full interview, Brownstein went on to explain that HeadCount distributes nonpartisan issue sheets at the tables alongside the voter registration materials the organization offers each night. That educational effort was completely left out of Stossel's report.
• Also cut out of the full report were interviews with very knowledgeable young HeadCount staffers, teachers, and youth activists - generally the most informed portion of the pool of interviewees.

HeadCount staffers who followed the camera crew throughout the day offered interesting coda to those interviews. During the filming, Andrew Sullivan, a Harvard graduate and producer of the piece, mistakenly tried to correct one young concert goer who was asked about the length of single term for a congressional representative. The young concert-goer, correctly, said two years. Sullivan, incorrectly, tried to tell them it was four. I guess Sullivan won't be voting this year?

All of this is par for the course for John Stossel, who has often had a rocky relationship with the truth. Here are just a few examples pulled from his Wikipedia page:

Controversies

[edit] Galbraith and Stossel

Liberal economist James K. Galbraith said that Stossel, in a story on laissez-faire economics in September 1999, used an out of context clip of Galbraith to make it seem that Galbraith had said nearly the opposite of what he meant. Stossel denied that Galbraith's views had been misrepresented but changed the words with which he introduced the Galbraith clip in rebroadcasts of the program.[27][28][29]

[edit] Organic Vegetables

A February 2000 story about organic vegetables on 20/20 included statements by Stossel that tests had shown that neither organic nor conventional produce samples contained any pesticide residue, and that organic food was more likely to be contaminated by E. coli bacteria. The Environmental Working Group objected to his report, mainly questioning his statements about bacteria, but also managed to determine that the produce had never been tested for pesticides. They communicated this to Stossel, but after the story's producer backed Stossel's recollection that the test results had been as described, the story was rebroadcast months later, uncorrected, and with a postscript in which Stossel reiterated his claim. Later, after a report in The New York Times confirmed the Environmental Working Group's claims, ABC News suspended the producer of the segment for a month and reprimanded Stossel. Stossel apologized, saying that he had thought the tests had been conducted as reported. However, he asserted that the gist of his report had been accurate.[30][31][32][33][34]

[edit] Televangelist Lifestyle

In a March 2007 segment about finances and lifestyles of televangelists, 20/20 aired a clip of a TV minister originally broadcast by the Lifetime Network in 1997. The clip made it seem that the minister was describing his wealth in extravagant terms, when actually, he was telling a parable about a rich man. ABC News twice aired a retraction and apologized for the error. The minister filed a lawsuit against Stossel, his source for the clip, 20/20, and ABC for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.[35][36]

Stossel, who is a self-proclaimed libertarian (a position that obviously does not extend to the freedom to vote for one's leaders), and frequent contributor to the conservative website Townhall.com, closes out the piece by highlighting the work of fellow libertarian Byan Caplan, an econ professor who made his bones espousing an elitist view of democracy in which only a select few should cast their ballots:

"Maybe 75 percent of people can name the vice president. ... The public's knowledge of politics is shockingly low," economist Bryan Caplan said.

In his book "The Myth of the Rational Voter," Caplan argues that people who know little about our government ought to stay home on Election Day.

But aren't Americans always told it's their civic duty to vote?

"This is very much like saying, 'It's our civic duty to give surgery advice,'" Caplan said. "Now, we like to think that political issues are much less complicated than brain surgery, but many of them are pretty hard. If someone doesn't know what he's talking about, it really is better if they say, 'Look, I'm just gonna leave this in wiser hands.'"

But isn't it elitist to say only some people should vote?

"Is it elitist to say only some people should do brain surgery?" Caplan said. "The bottom line is, if you don't know what you're doing, you are not doing the country a favor by voting."

Voting is serious business. Democracy works best when people educate themselves. So maybe instead of telling people things like "Rock the Vote," these groups should say "Rock or Vote."

All Americans - young and old - may not be experts on the every issue, but they are experts on their own lives. They know that they're not getting enough help. That tuition is too high and grants are too low. That they need to drive to work, and heat their house or apartment, but energy prices are too high. That they are one broken leg away from bankruptcy and that getting a loan to buy a house just became that much more unattainable. And let's face it, it's not as if the experts have that great a track record when it comes to the issues of the day, whether we're talking about the subprime housing market, the war in Iraq, or ending our addiction to fossil fuels.

Democracy is for all of us, not just a select few. As a nation, we eliminated the idea of literacy tests decades ago, and rightly so. Kudos to HeadCount for pushing back on this argument to the extent that was possible within the piece, and shame on Stossel and ABC for enabling it. Young voters have faced a hostile media for decades, always pining about youth apathy. Now, on the cusp of a record breaking turnout, for a major media outlet to question the validity of those votes on such flimsy grounds, in opposition our constitutional rights, is the height of irresponsibility. Dare I say it, it's unamerican.

If you would like to express your displeasure about this piece to ABC, send a polite but firm email to the producer, Andrew Sullivan, outlining your concerns: Andrew.G.Sullivan [at] abc [dot] com