09
May
Where Have the Journalists Gone?
Guest-blogged by Doug George, MediaChannel editor.
What role do journalism schools play in the increasing corporatization and “dumbing down” of news? That’s today’s kickoff question in MediaChannel’s “Media Reform Runup,” a week-long feature of interviews and debates leading up to the May 13-15 Second National Conference for Media Reform.
David Shaw cuts to the chase in his latest ‘Media Matters’ column for the Los Angeles Times: “Are there more lazy, careless, duplicitous, dishonest journalists working today than in earlier generations?”
Media educators Mark Crispin Miller and Robert Jensen say j-schools are indeed complicit. In an interview by the Indy featured today on MediaChannel, Jensen says “Journalism schools are not just a part of the problem but are at the heart of the problem.”
“Like any trade school, a journalism school tends to reproduce the ideology of the industry it serves. That’s not surprising, given that most of the faculty come out of the industry and share the same worldview and the institution is set up for that purpose. So, most journalism schools have made a kind of corrupt bargain with mainstream corporate commercial news media: The school subsidizes some of the training costs of the industry and indoctrinates students into the narrative of ‘journalism as the bulwark of democracy,’ while conveniently ignoring the ways in which journalists are increasingly boxed out of actually performing their role as critical monitors of power in a democracy. This makes it easier for the industry to employ idealistic students at low wages with heavy work loads. In return, the industry employs the graduates of journalism schools and gives some donations, both through the media corporations and the foundations those corporations often establish.
“The result is the journalism faculty, on average, may voice some concerns about the corporatization of journalism but cannot, or will not, critique the fundamental issues of structure and ideology.”
Are journalism schools part of the battleground for building a better media? In today’s highly partisan political environment, where allegations of both liberal and conservative bias are increasingly lodged at colleges and universities, how should a broad-based media reform movement respond?
