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The closing of the journalistic mind
issues in journalistic education
Howard M. Ziff, a former reporter and editor at the Chicago Daily News, is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.
It may just be this year's anxiety of choice, but fear continues to grow among journalism professors that they are unloved. Take two recent examples.
A professor from the University of Southern California, writing in Editor & Publisher, acknowledges that when newspaper editors get together with educators at a conference they will "engage in a certain amount of j-school bashing," but, the professor goes on to say, the intensity of the "ill-informed, arrogant, and mean-spirited" criticism at a recent meeting nonetheless left her "stunned."
The editors complained that journalism school professors are a "bunch of washed-up incompetents," that their curricula are filled with irrelevant junk toned up as theory, and that their students are unable to write, spell, or read.
Meanwhile, a University of Missouri journalism teacher writes a column for the opinion page of The Chronicle of Higher Education to complain that his academic colleagues don't properly esteem and reward professors whose primary qualifications are those of accomplished professionals. They have more trouble getting hired, promoted, and tenured than persons who chug along getting a doctorate and publishing articles in scholarly journals.
Nor is there comfort in the thirty-three-page report on journalism education issued in 1990 by the Education for Journalism Committee of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The editor are worried. They see schools of communications in which journalism students are outnumbered by advertising and public relations students, courses that focus more on "common elements of communication and less on ... newspaper journalism," and faculties increasingly drawn from the ranks of PhDs in communications. Where is it all leading?
The ASNE report, based on resonses to a nationwide questionnaire, finds that editors "continue to hold firmly to traditional values" in journalism education, but asks: Do journalism educators?
The problem is that many journalism educators, and most editors, have failed to go beyond ritual Fist Amendment fundamentalism in articulating journalist values. They have failed to realize the full implications of the foundation myth of journalism education, enunciated by Joseph Pulitzer in 1902: "Journalism is, or ought to be, one of the great and intellectual professions."
It is easy enough to say that the foundation myth is only so much self-serving rhetoric, but how much more substantially it rings than does the definitional myth of so many of today's academic administrators: Journalism is, or ought to be, a thing that gets taught in a college of communications.
By this definition, journalism is a sibling of things like advertising, public relations, and television production. Indeed, an Ohio State University national survey identifies eighteen communications specializations (plus "other") in which degrees are granted by undergraduate schools of jounralism/communications. More and more, the journalism department attracts big box-office enrollment, and, like Brunhilde in Die Walkure, may sing the loudest among the bumptious sisters; nonetheless, it is considered a subordinate study that falls under the master discipline, communications.
The discipline known as communications was put together, beginning in the 1930s, with borrowings from psychology and sociology, as well as market research and elements from moribund speech departments. After World War II, the names of departments, colleges, schools, and scholarly organizations changed to reflect the new discipline's increasing size and its dominance in graduate research. Some outsiders may have difficulty determining just what communications is, but its claims are imperial.
At the University of Massachusetts, for instance, the communication department (anentity distinct from the journalism department) says in the latest catalogue that it "works from the position that social realities are constituted, maintained, and changed by the process of communication." This definition covers everything from a distinguished graduate research program to undergraduate courses about communication theory, movies, public speaking, rhetoric, advertising, politics, teaching speech in secondary schools, and coaching the debating team.
Journalism departments, rather than creating their own advanced research-degree programs, were content, with notable exceptions, to surrender the field to communications, which trains faculty who have those doctoral degrees widely held as necessary to give intellectual respectability to a journalism faculty. Meanwhile, the communications empire gets bigger and journalism's share of the turf, however tenaciously defended, gets smaller.
Journalism students, moreover, often must pay what might be termed a "communications tax" levied on journalism by the college of communications. The curriculum varies from school to school, of course, but at most universities these undergrads are required to take from one to four courses in common with students from advertising, public relations, and the other liege subjects of the communications empire. Thus, the almost universally required course called Introduction to Mass Communications is usually a package tour in which journalism is accorded a two- or three-week stopover somewher between television, records, radio and public relations, and advertising, all putatively tied together by communications theory.
Other farragoes include media law and, increasingly, mass media ethics and writing for the media. The media law couse covers everything from The New York Times Company v. Sullivan and broadcast licensing regulations to Federal Trade Commission controls over advertising. The course in media writing may with fine impartiality combine training in writing news stories, press releases, film scripts, and advertisements. The media ethics course may contain segments on journalism alongside violence in comic books and the ethical responsibilities of press agents to their clients.
Editors responding to the questionnaire on which the ASNE report was based showed a healthy skepticism of this communications model of journalism education. Only 44 percent thought, for instance, that it was proper that advertising be taught in "journalism/ mass communications" schools, and only 42 percent countenanced the teaching of public relations. In ranking nine kinds of public relations. In ranking nine kinds of theory courses, editors gave the lowest scores for possible utility to courses in mass communications and the highest ratings to courses in journalism ethics.
The ASNE report also reflected the criticism that the communications model awards higher prestige to professors with doctorates in communications than to thos whose principal qualifications are distinguished and continued professional achievement in journalism.
Academic administrators make grave pronouncements about a "proper balance" in the faculty between "academics" and "professionals" and pledge to take journalistic achievement into account in considering hiring, promotion, and tenure. The problem is not that these pledges are insincere, but that journalism often does not have the same kind of academic identity and home base as do the other professions or writing, music, and art. In a college of mass communications, a professional journalist is almost always playing away, while communications "academics," who have set the ground rules, are playing on their home field.
Many journalism teachers are acutely unhappy with this situation, but they fear that by cutting loose from the protective cover of a college of communications they would only find themselves even more isolated and vulnerable. (Even graduate journalism schools emphasizing professional training and with histories as distinguished as those of Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley have critics on their own campuses who challenge their right to exist.) Better to accept carrer heartaches and bureaucratic annoyances within the bowels of the mass communications model than to risk an even more exposed position outside of it, in a school of journalism within a university, where you must defend yourself against charges from high-toned academics of being engaged exclusively in cranking out newsroom foot soldiers who get the punctuation right and do what they're told.
Serious professional journalists as well as serious journalism educators ask more of journalism education than producing employees adept at quickly and cheaply replicating the old routines -- and the old mistakes. They know that it flies in the face of their own experience of journalism education to treat journalism education institutionally as merely one of a congeries of "communications practices." They know what Pulitzer knew, that there is something about journalism that makes it different from taxidermy or selling life insurance or any of the other passions that fill up a lifetime.
To be sure, journalism is not as old as philosophy or lyric poetry, but it didn't begin with Watergate or even the First Amendment. It was around before sociology and molecular biology and its genres are older than the novel or the orchestral symphony. Its traditions can be traced to the spread of literacy and the new social relationships furthered by the printing press. For better and for worse, it is intimately involved in the creation of a vernacular prose style as a democratic vehicle for comprehending daily life, and its role as public explainer, and scold, reaches forward from John Milton, that Puritan pamphleteer, to Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Ida Tarbell, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, and, in our day, Mike Royko and Bill Moyers. Its claims for professional autonomy may not be as clear-cut as medicine or law, for example, but surely it has as rich a tradition and as great a social utility.
Shrewd journalists are wary of pretensions, including their own, yet they know that to ask "What is journalism?" is to ask a good and important question. Just as teaching and scholarsip helped sort out what was astronomy and what astrology, what chemistry and what alchemy, so, too, Pulitzer clearly hoped that teaching and research would be an exercise in self-definition and self-criticism for journalism.
Could journalism education not help capture something more than a description of and training in currently accepted good practice? Are not journalism's principal intellectual affinities with law and history, political science and moral philosophy, and not with its current college of communications yokemates?
