Coupla interesting pieces on Journalism

And no, it’s not just me sitting here snarking at journalists! There are several pieces out there on the current state and future of Journalism, and I think they’re all interesting and important in one way or another.

Doug at Bogus Gold links to this Jay Rosen piece on a recent J-School professor’s convention:

Next was Dianne Lynch, dean of the School of Communications at Ithaca College…She told us a startling story about an exceptional student who gave up a four-year scholarship worth over $200,000, including tuition, room and board, even travel money. The student came to the dean’s office to let Lynch know that she was quitting journalism and switching to sociology. “I decided that I just can’t be in such a terrible profession,” the student said, adding that it did not seem to her a field where a young person could “make a difference.”

There was a slight gasp in the room at that. This was because the phrase used, “make a difference,” though tedious and vague, was once the very thing that identified to journalists their own idealism. You didn’t do it for the money, and it wasn’t the wonderful working conditions, or a chance for advancement. For a certain generation (whose mortality was lurking about the panel, way under the laughs) journalism, at its best, was all about “making a difference.” Speaking truth to power, and all that implies.

But for one of Ithaca College’s best students this was a joke. Lynch to crowd: “she gave up a $200,000 scholarship just to get out of journalism.” We let that sink in. To learn, when you are ready to pass the torch, that some of the best and the brightest don’t want your torch, because they think it went out a while ago, counts as a sad day for J-schoolers of a certain generation.

The Rosen piece is well-worth reading. I like Doug’s observation, as well: Journalism schools are struggling with the ability to replace that kind of animating mission with something else. “Just report the news,” seems more like a craft than a profession. Yet so many of the presumed pillars of the profession aren’t standing the test of time.

Maybe it’s time to bring back cub reporters – people who are in the profession because they love to write and they love to tell a story. It seems to me so many of the press’ problems would go away if they would simply get back to reporting news, rather than trying to “frame” it. You know – let good news BE “good news,” stop “framing” it with the everpresent, negative BUT… and tell the anchors to stop reporting such stories with a grimace that suggests they need a dose of magnesia.

Mary Katharine Ham has a look at the press memo heard ’round the world

Yost’s column set off a wicked firestorm on Poynter. He garnered what could only charitably be called undiplomatic criticism from an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, the Washington editor for Knight-Ridder newspapers, which owns the Pioneer Press, and the director of the Knight-Ridder Baghdad bureau, among many others.

This week, the Minnesota-based bloggers at PowerLine, got their hands on a leaked internal memo instructing the staff of the Press to cover more aspects of the war. The paper, the memo states, is strong on covering the deaths of soldiers and weaker on covering the more mundane details of the war, the reconstruction, and how they affect families on the homefront.

Austin Bay is looking at how the AP’s rather negatively slanted Iraq coverage is being re-evaluated, which is news I am grateful to hear. Jack Kelly seems to have something of a companion piece to it wherein he opines:

I’m not impressed with the argument that journalists can’t report positive news because it is so hard to get around the country. More reporters can embed with U.S. forces. (There are only about three dozen embeds now, down from around 700 during Operation Iraqi Freedom).

Congress and the Pentagon could make it easier for regional newspapers to send embeds by permitting journalists who are embedded with U.S. units to buy Servicemen’s Group Life Insurance. My paper has balked at sending me back to Iraq because of the high price of hazard insurance. If we could buy insurance at the same rate as the GIs do, more of us would go.

An interesting idea. A thing is always doable if you want to do it badly enough. Didn’t Giuliani solve a problem of underinsured citizens by putting allowing them to sign onto a gov’t employee health plan? I believe he did.

Cathy Seipp covers a new documentary on 9/11 which sounds very promising, and which she says mostly manages to stay objective, although she details a press conference about the thing that reveals a great deal.

I don’t much like the tone of this piece in the Canada Free Press, but it does make a point that is worth looking at

It seems that some members of the former mainstream media are suffering from a serious bout of amnesia. Last week CNN ran a promo for its “Situation Room” program, hosted by Wolf Blitzer, their Washington correspondent. The promo posed the question: “What would Clinton do… about AIDS, Africa, terrorism…?”

Stop and think about that for a moment. Does anyone really believe – for one second – that, were President Clinton in office, CNN would be doing a piece called “What Would George Herbert Walker Bush Do?” Does anyone think, for one moment, that if Hillary Clinton were president, CNN would be asking “What Would W Do?”

The truth is, a lot of journalism’s current problems can be summed up thusly: they are completely owned by their infatuations with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and their hatred of most members of the Bush family. And you know what? That’s not Bill or Hillary’s fault, or the Bush family’s fault. It is the fault of the journalists who have lost control of their own objectivity, and thus their credibility – and that is largely the fault of the editors and publishers who became disinterested in reining their people in, or in clearly outlining a committment to objectivity.

Journalists complain about bloggers – that they are amateurish (yes, we are, most of us – unless we’re trained in the craft), that they are biased (well, yes we are, but we’re also up front about it) and that we’re too quick to find fault and harp on them. That might be true. But the thing is…when I read a Mo Dowd or Frank Rich column lately, I find myself wanting to bathe and disinfect afterwards, because their writing – no matter what the subject – always, always, always comes down to “and I hate that bastard George W. Bush so much!” It is a festering, ugly sort of hatred – you feel the pus dripping down from the page and onto your hands- and I always end up thinking…yes, some bloggers on both sides are ridiculous and hateful. But they are amateurs. We are, most of us, amateurs. These people – the Dowds, the Riches, the Ivenses, the Thomases, the Krugmans and the Cohens, are professional journalists spewing this sort of one-sided, myopic, completely closed-minded hate.

If journalism wants to redeem itself, regain some credibility and attract bright, energetic writers, perhaps it needs to rein it its passions a bit, stop continually writing from a place of hate or love and begin to re-embrace objectivity. Or, if not “clean” objectivity, which is perhaps not even possible in an era of blogs and 24 hour news, at least a move to moderation. Can the press still, consciously, force itself to be moderately – rather than stridently – biased? I think that should be do-able. And yes…a thing is always doable if you want it badly enough.

I doubt anyone with a bit of intellectual honesty would try to claim that John Kerry was looked at objectively in 2004. The press carried 3/4’s of his campaign on their shoulders, and never questioned itself about it. They are even now preparing to carry fully 7/8’s of Hillary Clinton’s campaign on their shoulders (with some quick lifting for Bill into the UN.) I would urge the press to re-think that plan. If journalists reduce themselves to being nothing more than the incurious, puff-ball-questioning, obsequious deliverers of a uniquely ambitious person to the White House, they will have assisted in their own demise, utterly shredding their credibility and reducing their once-noble profession to the role of second-water-carrier. And in doing so, they will be precipitating something unhealthy.

No president should ever “own” the press. As much as I sometimes despair over the incessant pounding Bush is handed by the fourth estate, it is at least better than seeing the press throw hearts and flowers at candidates – working toward delivering a starry-eyed victory over delivering the truth…all of which reminds me of nothing so much as Pravda on Prozac.

Co-incidently, neo-neocon is also writing about the fourth estate, as is Michelle. Serendipitous?