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July 21, 2005
"We Have Been Bull-Dozed Aside." Orville Schell Says J-Schools Have to Get More Involved.The Dean of the School of Journalism at Berkeley writes: "What worries me most is that I think one of the oldest assumptions about journalism - namely, if the story can be told, something will happen for the better - is slowly being rendered inoperable."I asked Orville Schell—a journalist whose specialty is China, but who is also the esteemed Dean of the Journalism School at University of California, Berkeley—if he wanted to reply to my June 5th post: Deep Throat, J-School and Newsroom Religion. He graciously accepted. That post was my response to the news—pretty big news in my precinct—that four leading journalism schools, plus Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, were joining with two leading foundations, Knight and Carnegie, in an effort to “elevate the standing of journalism in academia and find ways to prepare journalists better,” in the words of a New York Times account: The unusual collaboration, which has been developing for three years, involves Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University; Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley; Loren Ghiglione, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University; Geoffrey Cowan, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California; and Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. Schell is one of the movers. According to the press release from Carnegie, whose president, Vartan Gregorian, is also a key player in the project, the aim of the partners is to “advance the U.S. news business by helping revitalize schools of journalism.” (See his statement here.) Revitalizing is needed. And in my haste to deliver my opinion about the press think encoded in the Carnegie-Knight project, I neglected to thank the people involved: Nicholas Lemann, Orville Schell, Loren Ghiglione, Geoffrey Cowan and Alex S. Jones, especially, for sticking their necks out and putting their institutions behind a shift in direction, which is also a pause for reflection. This is wholly admirable and sorely needed, and as far as I know a first for journalism school deans and directors. If I criticize the project here and there (“I share their sense of urgency. I’m not sure they have the right ideas…”) it’s because I am an active participant in the same basic cause, and complicit in the same crime of not building better, more vital schools of journalism in the United States. And we need ours to be better. I don’t want to sound picky, but… The press release says the idea is to “advance the U.S. news business.” Is that what a university-based journalism school is all about? I think Schell would say what I would say: as educators we have to know the news business, inside and out, and be engaged with it. What the school is supposed to advance, however, is the craft, conscience and quality of independent journalism. As Schell explains in his response, the concern at Berkeley is not so much with the “news business,” but the vitality and effectivenesss of journalism itself, its diminished place in American life, and the survival of the social practice when fewer employers care about craft excellence and even aspire to a public service standard. I agree: these are the big issues for journalism schools today, along with what to do about the rise of the Web and the new world of citizens media— the great opening that has come about in the last few years. In my prior post, I may have given a false impression about Schell and his partners in this project: They’re not putting themselves forward as anyone’s priests. They’re trying to respond to the challenges they see, and asking other schools to join in later. In talking about a prieshood in journalism, I didn’t make this clear enough. Besides, I know these people. I’m one of them, more or less, having participated in some of the events Schell describes as background to the new initiative. “Journalism as a whole is clearly in something of a crisis,” Schell said in the Times article announcing the consortium. Here he explains in considerable detail what he meant by that. I am very glad he did.
Special to PressThink We Have Been Bull Dozed Aside. by Orville Schell It took us three years of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, discussion and drafting documents to come up with the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. It consists of three main elements: 1. A “research and policy” piece that will be run out of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s JFK School. Here, we have in mind a vehicle through which schools can collectively speak out on critical media issues of the day. That means journalism educators can have more voice. For example, as Judy Miller from the New York Times goes to jail over refusing to release anonymous sources and Matt Cooper from Time Magazine does not, or the case of “60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s coverage of Bush’s National Guard service. These would be examples where journalism schools and universities might want to weigh in on the discussion and debate. 2. An experimental curriculum reform element that encourages journalism programs to match-up reporters with scientists, urban planners, economists, historians, social scientists, legal scholars, foreign policy experts or public policy specialist to co-teach courses. 3. News 21 laboratories, or “incubators” at UC Berkeley, USC, Northwestern and Columbia, which will hire our best recent graduates to experiment with new kinds of multi-media reporting that combine television, radio and the web in new and innovative forms of interactive journalism. (Berkeley will begin by coordinating News 21.) Some wonder if this “initiative” is not just a caucus of self-righteous and self-designated elitist deans forming itself into a priesthood to get some grants to the exclusion of other university programs. I hope that is not the case. This is not an exclusive club First, I should say that UC is a public university and that The Graduate School of Journalism there, where I am Dean, is itself far from being a well-endowed (or a well-heeled) institution. However, we do hope that it is at least a pretender to the aristocracy in terms of excellence in education. Second, I should also note that there are stipulations in the research part of the grants (to be administered by Alex Jones at the Shorenstein Center) that require two thirds of the funds go to universities other than the five initiators. Moreover, Carnegie is also making four $100,000 grants available to other journalism schools each year for the kind of curriculum experimentation that we ourselves are committed to trying. So, in this way, we hope to serve as a prime mover rather than as some exclusive group that brooks no intruders. In short, we seek to become ever more inclusive as the situation evolves. After all, the object is to gain some kind of broad, critical mass, not limit the effort in an exclusive way. “Our involvement was hardly optional” What we can do to help is uncertain. But, I think we all felt that rather than just whine, we should at least make an effort to form some new civil society-based coalition where the sum was greater than the parts. Moreover, we felt that since we were all from big research universities, which comprise the largest pieces of civil society real estate in America, we ought to do what we could to engage these august institutions collectively in the debate over the media. After all, we are all in education, and the most fundamental job of journalism is to educate the public. So, we certainly have a dog in this fight! And finally, we recognized that, since there are fewer and fewer workplaces in the broadcast media of such excellence that our graduates are truly eager to join them, we had to either get involved, or in effect confront the prospect that we were training students for the kinds of jobs that did not really exist. So, in a sense, as we pondered the situation, we felt that our involvement was hardly optional. Like it or not, we were involved. Now, let me address your question about a “New Church” and a “priesthood” marching under the standard of a bogus mythology propagated by Watergate and the kind of hero worship and celebrity kultur that developed around the likes of Woodward and Bernstein. Frankly, getting this effort together has been a lot of hard work, and usually it hardly felt like an establishmentarian priesthood in quest of a lot of grant money. Yes, these are good universities and excellent journalism programs. But, there are others equally as good. To get this effort organized took thousands of hours of grunt work both on the part of the five universities and the two foundations. An understandable yearning for press heroes I think it fair to say that that only way we felt part of a priesthood was in so far as we have truly came to enjoy each other’s company and derived a certain measure of energy and possibility from the thought of working in concert. And, we actually have learned a good deal from each other. But, that was part of whole purpose from the outset. (And parenthetically, Jay, let it be known that we would wish for nothing more than your presence in whatever watchdog priesthood of media we may come to comprise!) But, in reading your blog entry, the larger question you address is not so much whether we as the founding schools of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative have anointed ourselves as “priests,” but whether the whole last few decades of journalism have not been ginned up on an almost chiliastic vision of a second journalistic coming in the trans-substantiated form of Carl and Bob. I take your point about the need for a healthy skepticism about heroes of all sorts who invariably get delaminated from the contexts in which they arise as well as from those others who sustain them. They are often turned into larger than life figures, albeit, with a few toes of clay. But, let’s be honest. There is something about every fraternity, profession, and even society, that does seem to need to lionize and mythologize certain people so that they become iconic hood ornaments. I have just finished reading the Odyssey and the Iliad again, and despite all the mortal flaws of these Homeric heroes – and Greece was the birthplace of western heroes and hero-worship -people seemed to need heroes and to be inspired by them. In this sense, it may be fair to say that Woodward and Bernstein have become unreal personifications of latter-day people’s yearnings (with a little help from Hollywood and “the media”) to believe that somewhere in the Fourth estate there are/were dragon slayers who are/were diligent, trustworthy, efficacious and often bigger-than-life. This hardly surprises me. People do want to believe. Being able to identify, or create, heroes, helps them believe. It also sustains and exhilarates them. It is true that much of the rest of the press were less than aggressive about the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Nixon administration. But, then it is also true that they have not been able to get much traction against the shameless spin-mongering and outright distortions of the Bush Administration. And, let’s not even raise the question of the war in Iraq and WMD. The P.R. apparatus and the propaganda of the state Indeed, speaking as someone who has studied China and other Marxists-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties. They include ultra-loyalty and obedience to the supreme leader; extreme party discipline; an absolute imperative to stay on-message (fidelity to “the correct line”); maximizing the use of state organs for propaganda purposes; and a poorly evolved appreciation of the essential role that the Founding Fathers of this country imagined for the press as an independent watchdog over all kinds of power (whether state, ecclesiastical, corporate, etc.) I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China, but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before. I am also suggesting that because of their commercial/corporate backgrounds, when it comes to the question of “communications,” many in the higher reaches of government have a keener appreciation of public relations than of independent, hard-hitting and often abrasive investigative journalism. Their tendency is to want to use communications as “the mouthpiece” of the state and party, rather than to see the most important role for communications as one of opposition and challenge to established power centers. This almost religious veneration of Woodward, Bernstein, Bradley, Graham means that people did, and still do, feel a deep need to believe that someone can, and will, stand up to these prevailing centers of power and propaganda. The Watergate hearings were cathartic, because sclerotic Washington did finally rise for one grand moment to dig in the Washington manure pile and get past the spin and PR to search out truth and fact from falsehood. And, yes, by now we have forgotten many of those other figures like Sen. Sam Ervin or Sam Dash who played such important parts in the saga. What we remember instead is their personifications. “Bereft of good models… despondent about their profession” Al Pacino played Lowell Bergman (who is on our faculty at UC Berkeley) in “The Insider,” the story of Lowell’s joust for “60 Minutes” against the tobacco industry. And, yes, Lowell, who is an excellent investigative journalist, but still a mortal, comes out looking something like a journo-Godhead. Sure, you can say that Pacino’s version of Bergman—just like Redford and Hoffman’s version of Woodward and Bernstein—is a somewhat glossy, incomplete, idealization of what really happened. But, what else is new? Are we as citizens not entitled to take some heart in a few inspiring stories of valorous deeds just like all those who have gone before us who believed in good kings, kind monks, patriotic warriors or dedicated political figures? Look at children’s books? Heroes abound! I just read my kids a book on Hannibal as seen through the eyes of his nephew, and it was a terrific story. Is it an historical distortion? Sure! The nephew probably never existed and certainly didn’t write a book! I know it isn’t journalism, but is that impermissibly warped story telling? From the Bible on down men have sought exemplars. Sure, they may only tell part of the story, and sure young journalism students and acolytes should not be lulled in visionary stupor by such mythologized, heroic examples. But it all seems quite understandable to me, especially in this age of extreme skepticism, doubt and cynicism that people yearn for some hopeful models for human action even polish up, or invent, a few larger than life inspirations. Indeed, what I worry about is not so much that the next generation of journalists will be swayed by or sell out to press mythology, but that they will end up so bereft of good models and so despondent about the state of their profession that they may lose all hope and idealism. Then what? After all, if you are going to be a journalist, repayment must come in some other currency than dollars. One of those alternative currencies journalism trades in is “able to make a difference.” “I don’t experience myself as ‘a priest’” I realize that such a phrase may sound a trifle corny to grizzled veterans, but this is one of the animating spirits of our trade for many good journalists. God knows, most of us are not being paid so well—at least compared to other professions—that we do not look for some compensatory sense that what we do is worthwhile. In short, I do not share Greg Lindsay’ critique that “journalism school professors” (our professors are almost all journalists!) sell students “a mindset, a worldview, and ideology” that is somehow erroneous and corrupting. (See Lindsay’s essay for Media Bistro.) That is a gross over-simplification. At least here at Berkeley, I do not think our students are all lathered up like religious zealots for “good old fashion shoe leather reporting.” We want them to have good ethics and ideals, but we also want them to be sophisticated, world traveled, realistic and skeptical. Whatever one believes about the animating mythologies of journalism and its role in society, who among would deny its importance? Who among us would deny that things are rapidly changing and that there are dysfunctional links in the whole food chain of reporting? What I mean by this is that the chain on which information is vectored to the public and then digested by society and the powers-that-be is broken. As a journalist, or a dean, I don’t experience myself as “a priest,’ much less as a member of some new church. I experience myself as someone who has been around the journalistic block a few times, seen some real problems with our profession; and wants to do what I can to keep this institution in good running order. I also see great uncertainty for our students in terms of where they can expect to matriculate and find dignified places of work that will sustain them, even rudimentarily, in their future lives. If you are about to go into television these days, things don’t look so great. The assumption that the press matters is under threat Final thought: As I survey the landscape, what worries me most is that I think one of the oldest assumptions about journalism—namely, if the story can be told, something will happen for the better—is slowly being rendered inoperable. (But, maybe it never was operable, and I am in some mythology myself!) I prefer to think that the chain once existed, more or less, and now has acquired some major breaks it in. In other words, we can no longer blithely assume that if a reporter does his/her shoe-leather investigations and writes or produces a good revelatory story that an editor will welcome it; the publisher will publish it; producers will air it; readers and viewers will become better informed; the collectivity of citizens will demand action; hearings will be held, commissions formed laws passed, court cases will be adjudicated; and reforms will be made. Isn’t that the way things are or were supposed to work? And, if not, how the hell are they supposed to work? Alas, we can no longer assume that journalists have this catalytic ability. We have in too many ways been bull-dozed aside. (I think this is the real message of Judy Miller going to jail.) We still can, to some degree, do our thing, but we are increasingly maligned, marginalized and presumed by many power centers (government, state, church, etc) to be troublesome, negative, unpatriotic and unreliable. Now, we are even threatened with jail. The assumption that the press matters, can have an effect when it does its job and should be protected is what is under threat. Our problem is not so much that we are lost in a mythology of the press. It is that we are threatened with being dislodged from the presumption of Americans that we have a necessary role to play in the life and governance of this country. After Matter: Notes, reactions and links… Jack Zibluk, Associate professor of journalism, Arkansas State University, Vice head, AEJMC small programs group, in comments: While I appreciate Dr. Schell’s efforts and those of his peers, i believe the collective efforts of his group are doomed to failure. Andrew Cline at Rhetorica, who teaches journalism at Missouri State University, replies: The big j-schools can reasonably suppose that their best students will start at “good” jobs and progress to the “highest” levels of the profession. I want to challenge those adjectives because 1) most of our students will not practice at the “highest” levels, and 2) people who read newspapers or watch local news in fly-over land deserve good journalism, too—practiced by journalists who are not simply using the local news organization as a stepping stone. That’s a recipe for disengagement. Terry Heaton, who spent 28 years in television news including news director at six stations, (his blog) says in comments: It is both my experience and my sincere belief that young people do not get into the news business these days to make a difference. I’ve written about this many times, but the nut of it is that 95% of the budding journalists I interviewed for jobs in the latter days of my TV news career wanted into the business for celebrity. It was rare to encounter someone who genuinely wanted to make a difference, and when I did, I hired them immediately. The people who are armed with this passion today are found in the local blogospheres around the country (and the world). Orville Schell in a 2002 essay for a special section I edited on J-Schools and their challenges: Journalism schools can, I believe, fully justify their existences by striving to become workshop-like places where older and more seasoned journalists team up with younger journalists to do actual projects that get published, aired or exhibited. In this sense, schools might aspire to be almost medieval in their conception, in other words, to buddy small numbers of students up with faculty who are still active in the profession to take on projects of a local, national and foreign scope, which can then be injected into the “real” media. In this effort, the division between students and professors should be blurred as much as possible. A revamped Blog Pulse has been launched by Intelliseek. There’s new data for the top blogs, blog posts, news stories, and news sources being cited, and a new element: “BlogPulse Profiles, which adds metrics to the top-ranked 10,000 blogs, based on citations, posting and linking behavior.” Recent J-school grad and Exegesis blogger Daniel Kreiss (Stanford) e-mails this reaction: Of course we learn and are inspired by those who went before us. But I think what becomes dangerous is when J-schools posit these heroes to show how journalism is to be done. By this I mean both the craft (the writing, tone, shoe-leather reporting) and how the journalist herself should act in the world.
Posted by Jay Rosen at July 21, 2005 12:38 AM
Comments
It's late and I'm tired and I'm going to cut and paste an email I sent Jay while the comments were off. The column deserves a more thorough response and I'll get back to it, but meanwhile ... I just finished reading the Schell piece, and while I need to read it again before I say anything substantive about it, it did bring something to mind. About a month ago I stumbled into a too-brief conversation (which I plan to renew soon) with Alan Davis of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. You're probably familiar with them but if not, in brief, they go into conflict zones and teach free-press journalism to reporters. So as I was reading Schell's column, it occurred to me that much of what he's talking about is what IWPR does, only they do it in places where reporters can get shot for reporting, and they do it with somewhat more immediacy. The reason Alan contacted me was that I had made a remark somewhere, Online Journalism Review I think, about wishing IWPR could do some work with journalists here. And my immediate reaction to the column was something along the same lines. There's a certain ponderousness at work there, and I suppose it's an inevitable byproduct of trying to coordinate so many things across so many bureaucracies, but it was frustrating. More better later ... Posted by: weldon berger at July 21, 2005 4:56 AM | Permalink There are many things I could say about this, Jay, but I'll limit my thoughts to two. It is both my experience and my sincere belief that young people do not get into the news business these days to make a difference. I've written about this many times, but the nut of it is that 95% of the budding journalists I interviewed for jobs in the latter days of my TV news career wanted into the business for celebrity. It was rare to encounter someone who genuinely wanted to make a difference, and when I did, I hired them immediately. The people who are armed with this passion today are found in the local blogospheres around the country (and the world). Secondly, the real mission of this collaboration is institutional self-preservation, and that's understandable. I do wish these priests would be a little more forthcoming about it, however, because it would inject a little honesty into the proceedings. Research projects nothwithstanding, I just don't see how a gathering of the highest of the high priests accomplishes anything more than a masturbatory release. Posted by: Terry Heaton at July 21, 2005 9:32 AM | Permalink Indeed, as someone who has studied China and other Marxists-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties... I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China... Huh? If there is no comparison between the current administration and Leninism, then why write in the previous paragraph that there are "similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties." Dude, that's a comparison. This initiative is a great idea. This is exactly the type of journalism that will pull red states out of their stupor. If journalists want to avoid being "increasingly maligned and marginalized", this is the style of writing that will do it. Keep up the good work! Posted by: Jeff Hartley at July 21, 2005 11:19 AM | Permalink Jeff, you have to read the entire sentence. In your concern for ideological purity, you omitted this clause: "but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before." I'm sure it was an oversight. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 21, 2005 11:31 AM | Permalink Indeed, as someone who has studied China and other Marxists-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties... I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China..."but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before." How about Indeed, as someone who has studied China and other Marxists-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current media and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties... I am not saying that there is a comparison between our media and that of a Leninist state like China..."but I am saying that the role and acceptance of our media by the public as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before." No oversite. The prior reference to Marxism/Leninism/China adds absolutely nothing to this statement: but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before. In fact, when he writes (in the same paragraph) that he is not making a comparison between Leninism and the current administration, he tacitly admits he could have made his point without any reference to Leninism at all. The fact that he made the reference anyway says something to me and millions of other Americans. It says "stop reading right here. this doofus has nothing to say." If a journalist/intellectual cannot get his/her point about the current administration across without mentioning "similarities" between the current administration and Marxism, then there is no way the particular journalist/intellectual will ever "make a difference." You can't "make a difference" by preaching to the choir. To make a difference, you have to write in a way that makes people want to read what you're writing. Isn't "making a difference" what it's all about? If it is, then you can't write in a way that causes people to think you're a doofus. That the person who is organizing this new approach to teaching journalism is the doofus in this case, doesn't bode well for the program. Posted by: Jeff Hartley at July 21, 2005 12:20 PM | Permalink Yes yes- Beside being described as Hitler incarnate by the Left, Bush and his admin. is now "Leninist" in its daily operations. Worse than Nixon himself..zzzzz. Posted by: calboy at July 21, 2005 1:54 PM | Permalink Michael Kelly says it all:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/blog_7_21_05_0955.html Posted by: calboy at July 21, 2005 1:57 PM | Permalink Mr. Schell sounds like a very thoughtful man; clearly very accomplished in his profession. I would like to believe that other journalists and their professors are, at heart, driven by good intentions. A word of caution, however, about what Mr. Schell states: Our problem is not so much that we are lost in a mythology of the press. It is that we are threatened with being dislodged from the presumption of Americans that we have a necessary role to play in the life and governance of this country. The press have a necessary role to play in the governance of this country? I assume Mr. Schell means this only in the most indirect manner, perhaps in the same way an individual citzen's voice in the form of a letter to his congressman might ultimately yield reform. Yet, because the press' voice is louder, the chain Schell describes from "...a reporter does his/her shoe-leather investigations and writes or produces a good revelatory story..." to "...laws passed, court cases will be adjudicated; and reforms will be made" could be alarmingly interpreted otherwise - - even frighteningly undemocratic. Which makes it all the more important that the journalists who play a role "in the life and governance of this country" be truly representative (especially ideologically) of the all the Americans they purport to serve. Posted by: Trained Auditor at July 21, 2005 2:09 PM | Permalink I should say: Which makes it all the more important that the journalists who play a role "in the life and governance of this country", and the journalism they produce, be truly representative (especially ideologically) of the all the Americans they purport to serve. Posted by: Trained Auditor at July 21, 2005 2:15 PM | Permalink Nice inside baseball stuff about a tune-up of journalistic training, but there is an angry elephant lose in the room that Jay and Schell do not acknowledge, no less talk about, which relates directly to the bull-dozed posture of journalism today -- corporate ownership/consolidation of media outlets. Even those entities still privately owned are in direct competition with those corporately owned, which means a lot more than the mere operation of economies of scale. Journalism is today perceived as an owned and trained pet of corporate interests, which, in turn, exist in an unhealthy client/state relationship to the government the journalists are ostensibly covering. The Bush Administration hasn't bull-dozed aside the heroic, independent press of the past. It is instead cuffing down a trained poodle. The recent noisy outbreak of standing-on-hind-legs-and-barking-about-Rove will last only until the choke-collar is jerked back to subservience. Posted by: Mark J. McPherson at July 21, 2005 2:21 PM | Permalink This is at least the second major false alarm out of the Berkeley jschool in about as many decades. The first was Ben Bagdikian's 1983 book "The Media Monopoly", about how corporate consolidation of newspapers and television was going to drive energy and rebelliousness out of the news media. Now Schell, too, hyperventilates from his supremely haughty perch at North Gate that we're in crisis. What a load of alarmist bullshit. Just as Bagdikian failed to account for the diversifying effects of cable television, alternative newsweeklies, giveaway newspapers and electronic publishing, Schell ignores the explosion of vigorous, diverse and enlightening information on the Web, in niche newspapers and magazines, on satellite television, even on ipods. With a record high of three general cable news networks plus CourtTV, the C-SPANs, BBC America, PBS/NPR, sharp commentary on Comedy Central and HBO, one doesn't even need to leave the boob tube to get an exciting new wave of news. Look at the explosion in the documentary form! Who would have thought there was such a huge appetite for Michael Moore's insights or for films like Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room or Modovino or Journeys with George which have surfed the wave of Moore's success? Who would have thought Al Gore would be setting up a TV network, Al Franken a radio network, and two competing satellite radio companies competing for talent from both NPR and morning drivetime? There is an explosion of news media at the moment. On the Web, in print, over the airwaves. And I'm not talking about people blogging about their cars; I'm talking about paid professional journalism, right alongside the upaid watchdogging. A lot of the technology behind this explosion was invented just a few dozen yards from Schell's office at Cal. Even more of it was exploited and applied to media a few miles across the bay in San Francisco (or down the road in Berkeley). So I can't understand why Schell ignores it. Does he not see it, or does he just not care? Is it really all about the NYT, WP, evening network news and a dozen top magazines for him? Or can he embrace diversity and change? After years as a Berkeley student and years more listening to Schell's pronouncements from a distance, I remain flummoxed. Terrific exchange -- with Schell making his own lack of situational awareness plain for all to see! His snarky (Nixonian?) comparison of Bush Admin PR to Leninist State propaganda makes the problem he correctly indentifies perfectly. Bush PR isn't the problem, Orville! It is your world view. The people know what they know: the performance of the national press and their owners after Sept 11 has demonstrated perfectly free people can do without the kind of stories you're telling. Stay tuned Posted by: R. Thomas Collins at July 21, 2005 2:48 PM | Permalink The article I linked to above(6 posts up) by Micael Kelly addresses some of the points made by Schell either indirectly or directly but it was written in 1993, "before everything that has ever happened bad in this world from the beginning of time is the fault of Bush." Posted by: calboy at July 21, 2005 4:06 PM | Permalink I started out reading Schell's piece with hope, and ended up underwhelmed. What exactly did he say? That he doesn't feel like a priest. He also said that Woodward and Bernstein have been mythologized a bit, but maybe that's okay. He made some reference to Marxist/Leninist governments, that I think was a swipe at the current administration. But after all of this, I can't say what he would propose for improving journalism training. I don't see here the kind of self-scrutiny that is necessary to truly improve the work of an institution or the practice of journalism. Bravo, Daniel Kreiss! Posted by: kilgore trout at July 21, 2005 5:38 PM | Permalink Does anyone definitively know how many people get their "news" from how many different sources? Without knowing I can't decide if I agree more with the (corporate) consolidation theory, or the many more voices in the room theory. I certainly get the general impression that most of the country gets its news from the fewer large corporate-owned properties than the myriad independent, new, old and in-between media sources. It seems many attitudes about "the media" are anecdotally similar to that of politics - "[they're] all bought and sold, and just paid shills." And while the lowering of the bar for nearly everyone to publish in some form is great in many ways, I think many people hit the point (see _Paradox of Choice_) of being completely overwhelmed, and just turning on the first news channel they come to -- or their "favorite". Likely determined by how much and often they agree with it. I just don't believe the average citizen has the desire or patience to sift though the vast (and growing vaster) selection of media out there. This is certainly no call to curtail that expansion, but an observation that its effects may not be 100% positive. And I thought based on the premise of this weblog Schell and the others involved in this undertaking would be the completely wrong people to assess what's wrong with j-schools? My kneejerk reaction is that the problem largely lies outside the schools, and more in the economics of the media world and such. Whatever it is, I think it's beyond changing the attitudes of beginning journalists. Schell writes that at Berkeley they expect their students to be “sophisticated, world traveled, realistic and skeptical.” What I don’t understand is how these four qualities relate to a person’s ability to practice journalism. Well, let's reverse Schell's prescription, shall we ? Posted by: Steve Lovelady at July 21, 2005 9:04 PM | Permalink Steve- your "opposite" comparison is not analogous. Posted by: calboy at July 21, 2005 9:22 PM | Permalink Is that your definition of liberal, calboy: “sophisticated, world traveled, realistic and skeptical?" If so, then you must have an odd view of William F. Buckley. I'm not sure what you find so appealing about the late 19th/early 20th Century. But to define journalism by the attributes of the 1890s or 1920s is preposterous. We don't live in those times. We have a wider, more acute understanding of the world and our relation to it than those long ago times. I'm not sure I buy into Schell's total message. I'd say journalism has done itself in more than had it done to them. But until shown differently, let's assume the professor from Berkley means exactly what he said: that 21st Century journalists need to know their world, know themselves and be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 21, 2005 9:37 PM | Permalink Steve -- Making some sort of reverse equivalence out of my comments certainly makes for a weak argument, or really no argument at all. The larger point I was making was that there are better ways to describe what to look for in a young journalist; for starters, try "honest, credible, idealistic, dedicated, intelligent, creative, strong ties to the community, etc." Perhaps all the "sophisticated, world traveled, realistic and skeptical" journalists are the reason why only 20 percent of the country finds them credible anymore. And perhaps those are the only students who can afford the top tier of J-schools Keep in mind that only 15 percent of Americans have passports and very few outside of New York City would be what you might call "sophisticated." As for the skeptical stance of the journalist, I think Jay has already handled that. Posted by: Daniel Kreiss at July 21, 2005 10:05 PM | Permalink Dave- those 4 qualities can be ascribed to a number of things, both liberal and conservative-that's my point. More than that, however, I would say that that is how most liberals I know describe themselves(thus saying that conservatives are the opposite), therefore the Boulder reference ie If I tell myself I have those 4 qualities does it make it so? Posted by: calboy at July 21, 2005 10:32 PM | Permalink Daniel -- Posted by: Steve Lovelady at July 21, 2005 11:09 PM | Permalink What a bunch of drivel! As Mark Steyn writes: "The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook's drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world is the precise sequence of events by which some White House guy came to mention the kook's wife to some reporter, then you've departed the real world and you're frolicking on the wilder shores of Planet Zongo." Journalists today, or at least those pretending to be journalists, are presently frolicking on Planet Zongo. If someone really wants to improve journalism, he might start by trying to understand how all these fools ended up lost in space. Or perhaps a better way to describe journalism as presently practiced would be, in the words of an old Hollywood lefty, Roger Simon: The Mainstream Media Needs Psychotherapy The first (maybe the only) thing I learned in twenty or so years of psychotherapy (hey, I wrote for Woody Allen) was one of the major psychological problems many of us have is we always want to be "right." Indeed, this need to be right can cloud our thinking to such extraordinary degrees we will cling to a view even when the results are wildly detrimental to ourselves. The Mainstream Media are particularly good case in point for this. They continue to ask asinine self-destructive questions, as they did today to John Howard and Tony Blair, even as media popularity plummets to the lowest (or near lowest) levels ever. These MSMers desperately want their view to be correct about Iraq and the war on terror at the very moment their fellow citizens are being attacked on all sides, sort of like the people who wanted to reason with the guards as they were gassed at Auschwitz just to prove... to themselves at least... they had the right opinion five years before... or maybe ten. Of course the "need to be right" often leads to blatant lying as we have seen recently from Reuters and the Associated Press. Of course this kind of prevarication is a huge threat to democracy, greater I am convinced than even Bin Laden and his religious fascist cohorts. Less than half a year ago when some of us first started talking about Pajamas Media we saw it merely as a gadfly/competitor to the Mainstream Media. Since then, the situation has gotten more serious. Who knows where all this will lead?
Yep, that's a bit of a problem. I have a J-school degree from a decent school, but that's not something I brag about. J-school education ain't rocket surgery to begin with, and even then it falls into a murky area in academia. Is is a trade? A fine art? A craft? Is it a profession? And in all of this, what about the theory? How much weight should we give to the abstract versus the concrete (law and ethics courses, newswriting, copy editing, etc.). It's a muddle. How about this: You guys figure out what journalism education should be and start producing better entry-level reporters, and THEN you can form your journalism Jedi council and advise us on the media issues of the day. I mean, you can do it however you want, but I think you earn your credibility as industry advisors only after you've improved at teaching and developing the next generation. I don't see that j-school grads have gotten any more impressive over the past 15 years, and we weren't the most stellar group on campus in my day, either. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 21, 2005 11:44 PM | Permalink Is it liberal vs their biases VS conservatives vs their bias? Posted by: calboy at July 22, 2005 1:29 AM | Permalink I had to chuckle heartily when I read Dave McLemore's comment I'm not sure what you find so appealing about the late 19th/early 20th Century. But to define journalism by the attributes of the 1890s or 1920s is preposterous. We don't live in those times. We have a wider, more acute understanding of the world and our relation to it than those long ago times.One often hears this canard, as if somehow our ancestors were ignorant boobs who couldn't possibly understand the world we live in. How this for defining journalism? (Thomas Jefferson, 1807) To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.I'd say not much has changed - and Jefferson wrote this almost 100 years before the times that Dave mocks. Antimedia- dont be too hard on Dave because when he comes to Colorado he'll be packing a six pack or two of Tecate. Dont ruin a source! Posted by: calboy at July 22, 2005 2:02 AM | Permalink In this day and age, the Leninist qualities of the Bush administration PR Mr. Schell accurately refers to are as much the principles of corporate marketing as anything else--though the message discipline would make Vladimir proud. How long will it take for people to notice there IS something totalitarian about the marketing as politics model of behavior modification? Am I a doofus to wish we could find a model of democracy that didn't feature the Stepford wives of market research in the guise of public debate? Mr. Schell's comments don't seem to be getting much traction with the true believers who see the media as interfering with the daily dose of marketing they so ardently long to believe in. A generous swath of the reading and viewing public clearly wants their political advertising straight from Karen Hughes' and Karl Rove's mouth (or the mouth of the journalist they choose to leak their good stuff to on any given day). He and his project will certainly need to work on that angle. Given that Marc Steyn is a virtual exhibition of the psychotic break from reality, it's hard to imagine what he could possibly add to the discussion. It sounds like he's making his own secret cry for treatment to me. If you wish to write to him and express your sympathy and concern for his evidently precarious mental state, he can be reached at: mailbox@steynonline.com (Is he trying to subconsciously tell us he's a liberal by recommending therapy? Or is he just being Canadian?) Posted by: Mark Anderson at July 22, 2005 5:53 AM | Permalink In the interests of completeness, I see I have to add Roger Simon to the secret cry for treatment list. Expressions of sympathy, etc. may be relayed to comments at: http://www.rogerlsimon.com/ Posted by: Mark Anderson at July 22, 2005 6:02 AM | Permalink Regarding Dr. Cline's comments in Aftermatter("The big j-schools can reasonably suppose that their best students will start at “good” jobs and progress to the “highest” levels of the profession. I want to challenge those adjectives because 1) most of our students will not practice at the “highest” levels, and 2) people who read newspapers or watch local news in fly-over land deserve good journalism, too...") Does anybody have stats that show what percentage of "print" journalism majors get jobs at newspapers or current events publications (could include web media) out of college? Or how many are still in the business after five years? 10 years? My anecdotal experience is that most of my "network" of college friends and entry-level peers aren't in the business anymore. When I look at the alumni pub, I see people doing all sorts of things that have little to do with journalism. Secondly, while people in flyoverland deserve good journalism (and let's make the point -- some of the best journalism is done in off-the-beaten-track places), good journalism is not solely a function of a J-school education. Your average small-town print journalist doesn't make what your average starting schoolteacher does. It's a system based on the notion that you just replace your reporting staff every couple years as people move up and out. And it can be even worse for radio and TV. Also, and this may address the question about co-teaching, some of the best journalists never set foot inside a college journalism class. A college friend of mine (antropology and Spanish education major) quit teaching in disgust and came to stay with me for a few months when I was editing a small-town paper. I put him to work (without pay) in the newsroom for a couple months, and we'd talk journalism over dinner. He got his clips, sent out resumes, and got hired doing community journalism. After a few years he moved up to a metro and today he's an award winner and a consummate pro who could talk theory and practice with anybody on this board. Maybe he's the exception, but we have to accept that such a story couldn't replace law school, or engineering school, or med school, etc. Which is why I'd like to see us talking about the most basic questions: What does it take to do our job(s) well? What makes a good journalist? Are there different types of journalism that are valid but distinct? Then build a program out of those answers. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 22, 2005 8:01 AM | Permalink Yes, please God, save us from journalists who see it as their mission to change the world (or the nation). In some cases, our dominant media have the power to do so. But suppose the nation doesn't want the same changes that our dominant journalists want? Posted by: Trained Auditor at July 22, 2005 12:01 PM | Permalink Well, yes, Jefferson definitely had his problems with press critics. With the venemous attacks he suffered, you can't blame the man for his view of the press. But that isn't the point, antimedia. Had you bothered to read the post in question, you'd have noticed that calboy was holding the early 20th Century as a model. Journaling, he later called it. But the media of the 1890s/1920s were remarkable for the fervish partisanship and the powerful dictatorships of publishers, I'm not sure why it would be held as a model Hearst, for example, had his New York newspaper maintain a list of 2,000 names on its S-List (persons to be mentioned only with scorn. A reporter was assigned to read copy just to make sure mistakes of honesty were not made. That's not journaling. Newspapers were split along political and ideological lines both editorially and in the news columns. Facts were subject to intense interpretation. Perhaps you'd be right at home here, antimedia. But it ain't journalism. The community accomplishments of blacks, Hispanics, Italians, Catholics, Jews, etc. and the poor were largely ignored. As was context and nuance. Crime stories routinely identified suspects as "Negro" or "Jewess." The powerful and friends of the powerful were extolled. If that's the model, we see that emerging from the increasingly partisan chatter of some of blogworld. That said - and back on topic - I agree with Daniel Conover. If journalism schools want a bigger role in defining journalism, let them do a better job of providing working journalists. An analytical mind is fine. The ability to write a simple declarative sentence on deadline is not to be sneezed at. Posted by: Dave McLemore at July 22, 2005 12:53 PM | Permalink My first and somewhat glib instinct is to say the best way to reform journalism would be to get rid of the J-schools. That is not entirely true of course but speaking as a consumer of journalism I think that journalists need a lot more real knowledge, broader experience and heaping helping of humility than more self-absorbed navel gazing. Most journalists go directly from college where they study journalism or communications to some aspect of the business. Should we then be surprised that they know absolutely nothing about business, science, economics, farming, leadership, war, history, law enforcement or the military? And I am sorry to report, but if your experience of the "real world" is limited to some summer jobs while in college, you are clueless. As for humility...geez. Let's start with the basic premise that the people who represent "the people" are those who ARE ELECTED TO DO SO. If you want to "make a difference"; walk a beat as a cop for a few years, join the Army, be a paramedic or a fireman, run a small business that provides a useful good or service to your community and provides a living for your employees, grow food to feed us, help build a bridge, a house or a road. These folks make a difference, journalists mostly just talk about it and journalists would be a lot better off if they reminded themselves of this basic fact at the start of every working day. "Talking about it", is of course, useful and sometimes even important. The Federalist Papers started out as pamphlets, a close cousin to the newspapers of the time. But, I think that supports my point, since the authors were not journalists, they were actors themselves. The rise of journalism as a quasi-profession and an institution in its own right, had a lot to do with the ecomomics and technology of communication in the last 500 years or so. At a time when over 80% of the population had to work 16 hours a day to put food on their table and a printing press cost more than an average man's yearly salary, it was natural that only a few people had the time or resources to spend a signicant amount of time writing or talking about what was going on. This natural monopoly or perhaps oligopoly created its own values and conventions...and corruptions, just as any other monopoly or oligopoly would. Happily, those conditions are no longer true. Now anyone has the capacity for mass communication and the role of the institutional providers of news and opinion is less important, and competition is more open....the market for ideas and news is more open. What is the role of journalism and journalism schools in this new environment? Journalists are experiencing the same diffusion of power that politicians did with the rise of democracy and free markets. Just as ordinary people became their own soveriegns, they are becoming their own journalists. Instead of trying to be the grand "4th Estate" perhaps journalists should think of themselves as individual entrepreneurs in the marketplace for news and ideas. And maybe many of them will find that the best way to make a difference is to build a bridge and write about that. Posted by: Patrick Walsh at July 22, 2005 1:13 PM | Permalink Trained Auditor, suppose the nation doesn't want the same changes that our dominant journalists want. Doesn't matter. Socialism keeps failing because it's never been done right. Posted by: Jeff Hartley at July 22, 2005 1:30 PM | Permalink The world of journalism education is full of experienced reporters and smart people. Journalism schools are full of good students who turn into good reporters. And the schools do need to change with the times. But it would help newsrooms across the land more if managers just made an effort to recruit more students from programs outside of journalism. A school of journalism education -- even a dynamic school -- is not the fountain from which new life will flow for the news business. The fresh perspectives and critical thinking of students who have primarily studied law, biology, history and computer science would help keep the profession sharp. Posted by: Wright Bryan at July 22, 2005 2:07 PM | Permalink re: "journaling," this idea that journalists should tell us what happened without injecting themselves into the story via critical examination of claims or biased framing of rhetoric. There are entire essays that can be written on the problems associated with the concept (it seems a simple solution on its surface, only it isn't). But let me just say this in its defense: one of the strengths of "live-blogging" events is that such reports can approximate this ideal in a way that a newspaper never could. Journaling and live blogging belongs in the mix, but it's no panacea. The competing wish for the media goes in the opposite direction: "Spare me the official dog-and-pony show. What's really important?" In the first model, the journalist is just a collector and packager. In the second, the journalist is the analyst you trust to give it to you straight... straighter than the spokespeople and PR people ever would. In theory, an analyst is a great thing to have. But the person who briefs you has to be someone you trust, or else you have to fact-check everything behind them, and then what's the point of having an analyst? And people don't trust us as an industry. Some of us have the trust of a limited audience, but its built over years. You don't get issued a "trust me" card with your newsroom security badge and parking pass. Personally, I read a bunch of information sources every day, and I view each as an "editor." I think that's part of what we'll see in the future: the journalist as a value-added aggregator of information. Must such editors go to J-School? Absolutely not. But I do think there are a lot of people on these threads who slam the trade of journalism even though they've never practiced it, and they routinely over-step their otherwise valid critiques. It's like anything else: the conventions are there for a reason, and to break the rules effectively, it helps to understand them. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 22, 2005 2:09 PM | Permalink I'm interested in the idea that the cop, the soldier, the paramedic, the fireman, the small businessman, the farmer, the homebuilder, somehow have more real-world experience than the journalist. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at July 22, 2005 2:40 PM | Permalink Steve, I think the point that Patrick made was more subtle than just "real-world experience." In his comment above, Patrick suggested that if a journalist wants to "make a difference" then become a cop, or run a business that employs people, or build roads. And I think that makes sense because at the moment journalists are removed from solving problems. They report on problems, but they aren't part of the solution. They are outsiders, watching others live and work, then chronicling both. I think the "make a difference" theme motivates lots of journalists to join the profession, and I also think that when big media lost its monopoly on distribution of news, then the opportunity to make a difference began to be more dispersed among many people. Now anyone with a modem can make a difference by reporting on life in his community, or by posting ideas and observations, or someone involved in an event (subway blast?) can photograph it with a cell phone and have those images become the record of the event.
Here's one to chew over. Terry Heaton was a news director and he had to hire a lot of people. So he was a "customer" for the Journalism School pipeline. Here is what he says ahout the product: "... It is both my experience and my sincere belief that young people do not get into the news business these days to make a difference. I’ve written about this many times, but the nut of it is that 95% of the budding journalists I interviewed for jobs in the latter days of my TV news career wanted into the business for celebrity." Now most of these people went to journalism school, I am guessing. Terry could tell us. His, it's only one view, but he's saying J-school were graduating into the broadcast job market a pretty poor product. Malleable careerists using "journalism" as calling card to a media career, they care not which. Schell is saying: if we trained people for broadcast news as it mostly is today, we would have to mistrain them. We don't want to "make" that kind of product. If you know your Marx you know about the reserved army of the unemployed, which the employers use as leverage. Big factor in the evacuation of quality in broadcast news: all these people willing to step in. Who's going to tell you that you can't do twice as much news with half as many able journalists? J-Schools, via their grads, were part of that. I think Schell is saying: we shouldn't be a part of that, but then.... what do we do, and offer our grads? One answer Berkeley has is: they house the West Coast office of Frontline at the school. To me that's a direction to explore more. On making a difference in flyover country. Yes, one of the reasons I became a newspaper reporter is that shopworn cliche "I wanted to make a difference." (I also became a reporter because it was an excuse to indulge my inherent nosiness, and it sounded better than getting back on the test and grade treadmill of going to law school.) What making a difference mean? It doesn't mean that I want to dictate terms to my community. It means that I'd like to help improve it. It means that I'd like public and private institutions to make well-considered decisions based on facts, and that I'd like at least the public institutions to make their decisions after something resembling democratic debate. I believe there are such things as facts. I believe I usually fail in getting the transcendent truth in the paper, but I am pretty good at ramming the facts in. And if you know that tuition is going up at state U, that your legislator is spending K-12 education money on a tennis court, that XYZ Corp. told its shareholders that the factory's for sale, that there are nasty chemicals in the river, or that the city's behind on trash pickup, maybe you learned something. Maybe it will help you in your daily life. Maybe the next time you go to vote you'll do something about it. And if not, well at least the comics, sports scores, TV listings and grocery coupons are handy. Out here in the provinces, civil society is often weak. There is very little good information in circulation for citizens to act on. There are very few interest groups doing serious research. The riotous flowering of blogs that characterizes discourse on national politics, or even journalism, has yet to happen here in my metro area of 550,000 people. There are two blogs I know of interested in the affairs of my community. One hasn't been posted to since May. The other one (horrors) is run by a freelance journalist. So there's the daily, three television stations, and a few weekly papers. Someone's trying (for the umpteenth time) to make a go of an alternative paper. Our public radio station has no news operation, our talk radio station is kinda lame. As for the glamour factor in recruting people to the profession, I did encounter that among some of my television counterparts in my J-school graduate program. But while print reporters have big egos, I don't think many of us expect to be a star. If we're talented and work hard, we might win a nice big prize someday and have an upper-middle class life in a big city. But no one will recognize us in line at the store. And I'd say I'm pretty well in touch with the "real world," although I'm in the John Maher school in believing there's no such thing. I made $9.50 an hour in 1997 in my first job. I have a wife, a daughter, a mortgage, and a car with 186,000 miles on it. My parents paid my way through an Ivy League undergrad degree for this. I've interviewed people laid off from the factory, or people still working there who were fatalistic about their station in life ever getting better. I've watched the paramedics scoop up drunk fools who were lucky they weren't dead, had coffee at McDonald's with mommas who knew their teenagers were doing drugs. I've visited the classrooms where public school teachers are fighting the good fight and where college professors were trying to widen the horizons of callow youth. I've walked the field with the dairyman who was struggling to keep the farm. I'm here at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, trying to live through the editing of a story looking at my county's emergency preparedness. Just the sort of (insert your preconceived notion of what's wrong with newspapers here) that you hate. And all of you folks who spend so much time slagging me and my brethren, you're welcome to pull up a chair at my cubicle and see how it's done. Shoot me a line. Posted by: Jeff Amy at July 22, 2005 9:14 PM | Permalink Dave wrote But the media of the 1890s/1920s were remarkable for the fervish partisanship and the powerful dictatorships of publishers, I'm not sure why it would be held as a model Hearst, for example, had his New York newspaper maintain a list of 2,000 names on its S-List (persons to be mentioned only with scorn. A reporter was assigned to read copy just to make sure mistakes of honesty were not made. That's not journaling. Newspapers were split along political and ideological lines both editorially and in the news columns. Facts were subject to intense interpretation. Perhaps you'd be right at home here, antimedia. But it ain't journalism.Now don't freak out. This is a serious question. How is the journalism of today different? There may not be S-Lists, but if someone wrote one down, I can assure you that Karl Rove would be at the top, right next to George Bush. So, while the partisanship is perhaps better concealed (I was going to say subtle, but that's inaccurate), it's still obvious to an impartial observer. Now, I know most of the people on this blog reading my comments will immediately label me as a partisan and dismiss me, but I challenge anyone in "the business" to dispute the facts I've collected about John Kerry, George Bush's Guard story or the Joseph Wilson story. You might not like my conclusions, but you can't dispute that I've gathered more information about those stories than any one person in the professional media has. I say this not to boast but to get those of you who are in the business to, for once in your life, ask yourself a serious question - why was the reporting of those stories so devoid of detail? Why is it that certain facts were used and others ignored completely? If you can't do that, and come up with a reasonable, non-snarky (Steve Lovelady, are you listening?) answer, then you aren't honestly reviewing the work of your profession in an attempt to improve your product. And to tie this back in to the purpose of this post, if you're not honestly and regularly asking yourself the hard questions and figuring out what makes a good journalist, then there is no hope of you ever getting a better product out of the j-schools. You are what you eat. Building a bridge to the 19th century! Yea! Go Govt. Go! It is sad, nay, pathetic to see people in the US actually complaining that the media is not sufficiently "Pro-Govt." Especially the typically spineless, lazy, complicit and ineffective media we have. It is hard to imagine what might satisify these critics except perhaps government produced propaganda, or government worshiping corporate propaganda (which we already have in many venues). Whatever it might be, it's not supposed to report actual news, or news that may cast a light on criminal conduct or spectacular failures within the govt. cult. The press should only print cheery good news. There is derision and disdain for any notion of govt. accountability, or a press that serves in the role of govt. watchdog. Jeff Gannon is what these folks want. He's their ideal of what a journalist should be. I ear he even went to journalism school for 3 hours. Posted by: steve schwenk at July 23, 2005 2:25 AM | Permalink I'm here at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, trying to live through the editing of a story looking at my county's emergency preparedness... Jeff: thank you for that testimony. Really. Most people have little or no idea how journalists actually do their work. I think we might want to distinguish between Local and National news because I sense most of our disagreements stem from there. Posted by: calboy at July 23, 2005 3:46 AM | Permalink re: Lovelady and Amy Does life experience before a journalims career help make you a better journalist? You bet. I'd say that a broad understanding of life would help a doctor, or an architect, or a politician too. Understanding other people is just a good thing. But Steve and Jeff make great points. If you care about the what you do, and if you stay with journalism long enough, and you remain curious and vulnerable to new experiences, your career becomes a never-ending post-graduate education. We don't enter the business knowing stuff, and I think most of us can point to plenty of examples of veteran reporters and editors who have lost their curiosity, who have learned to pick sides (not always partisan sides, by the way) and to become invulnerable to unpleasant surprises. They're called hacks. But the ones who retain their integrity, compassion and fascination with the world? Such people can be good to have around. Everybody talks about how arrogant we journalists are, how we don't know the stuff that we think we know. But I find the job endlessly humbling and instructive. Every day I get to talk to people who know more about their subject than I do, and every day I read more and more material on an ever-widening circle of topics. Some of that sticks. We're not always popular, but popularity shouldn't be our goal. And that's one of the places where I think we've gone astray. We want personal respect from and the social perks of the people we cover. This is a natural thing, and I've felt its pull, too, but its our Dark Side. In the end, what are you about? Getting at the truth and living up to your responsibilities? Or weilding clout and power? You gotta chose. Jay says that journalism is a religion, and I think he has a great point (although he overstates it). If that's the case, then one of that religion's greatest saints would be I.F. "Izzy" Stone, and this passage would be carved in a mountain somewhere: "To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they’ve got you!" Is that the whole picture? No. I get that now. But if you don't have Stone's warning stashed away in your head somewhere, you're doomed. Posted by: Daniel Conover at July 23, 2005 10:57 AM | Permalink I am not a journalist and do not even play one on my blog, but as a lay person, I have an impression that J-schools teach a lot of mechanics and a little bit of ethics, but nothing else. In my mind, a journalist has to be primarily an expert on something. If a student wants to be a reporter on science s/he should take LOTS of science classes, including history and philosophy of science classes. The classes on journalistic techniques should be an addendum. It is similarly in business - companies hate freshly-minted MBAs because they do not know anything except the techniques of running business. Just as every business is about something (selling particular goods or services) and requires expertise about that 'something', so journalism i |
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