TEACHING JOURNALISTS TO SAVE THE PROFESSION

Abstract

Concerns about the media industries prioritizing profits over public service has historically given rise to proposals for a more professional model of journalism education (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947; Pulitzer, 1904; Royal Commission on Newspapers, 1981). In the context of neoliberal restructuring and a “professional crisis” in journalism, there have again been proposals for journalism education to help uplift professional journalistic values (Adam, 2001; Bollinger, 2003; Carnegie Corporation, 2005a; Sauvageau, 2004). This paper offers a critique of these recent journalism education reform proposals. While the proponents of professionalizing journalism schools acknowledge the structural and economic changes that are the culprits of the professional crisis in journalism, they place the onus of the solution on journalists, and they propose a model of journalism education that encourages students to refrain from critically analysing the media industries. The advocates of professional journalism schools also hark back to traditional journalistic ideals and notions of objectivity which some critics argue contributes to public apathy and damages prospects for participatory democracy. This paper will conclude by exploring recent proposals for a critical journalism pedagogy, which overcomes some of the problems of the professional reform model (Atton, 2003; Skinner et al., 2001).

Keywords:

• journalism education
• media commercialization
• neo-liberalism
• objectivity
• political economy
• professionalism

Notes

1. Pulitzer's own newspaper, The New York World, had suffered from a blow to its reputation during the “yellow journalism” era of the Spanish–American war (Boylan, 2003, p. 3). Pulitzer had defended sensationalism as necessary to attract readers, however he considered his reputation tarnished after The World “had thrown itself into frenzied competition with William Randolph Hearst's Journal” (Boylan, 2003, pp. 3–4).

2. The commission explicitly ruled out government intervention as incongruent with the ideal of the free press, which it defined as necessarily free from government intervention (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947, p. 5).

3. Extensive lobbying by the newspaper industry helped to kill the Davey report's proposed solution of a press ownership review board to address compromised journalistic practices stemming from concentration of ownership in the Canadian media (Lorimer and Gasher, 2004, p. 239), however the Davey committee's more modest proposal for the expansion of journalism education beyond central Canada was adopted (Gaunt, 1992, p. 35).

4. In 1996, Freedom Forum, a private foundation with close ties to Gannet, the largest US newspaper chain (Reese and Cohen, 2000, p. 222), launched a report titled Winds of Change: challenges confronting journalism education (Medsger, 1996b). The Freedom Forum report claimed that “the future of journalism education is jeopardized by hiring practices at university journalism programs, which increasingly privilege academics over professional journalists” (Medsger, 1996b, p. 7). The report raised warning bells over pressures that “promote removing journalism education as a separate academic discipline and merging it into communication courses designed not to prepare journalists” by referencing the key public service mission that journalism plays in democratic society (1996b, p. 5).

5. These ideals are underpinned by four interrelated assumptions: the journalist's role to inform; the assumption that citizens are informed if they regularly attend to the news journalists supply; the belief that the more informed citizens are the more likely they are to participate; and the conviction that democracy is enhanced by the participation of these informed citizens (Gans, 2003, p. 56).

6. Compton argues this in his critique of the public journalism movement, however, the charges are arguably equally applicable to the proposals for the professionalization of journalism education.

7. The introduction of public journalism practices into classrooms was seen as being potentially risky on the grounds that “if the commercial context of the news media offers journalists little room to maneuver, then public journalism education would at best make no difference at all. At worst, such education would offer students a false sense of autonomy” (Haas, 2000, pp. 29–30). Such an allegation could equally be launched against critical journalism pedagogy.

8. My own experience as a successful applicant to the Carleton University School of Journalism's Master of Arts program was instructive in this regard. The School of Journalism's Graduate Studies Co-ordinator informed me that the School considered the articles I had published with Canadian alternative media to be “advocacy journalism.” When I explained that my journalistic praxis was informed by an analysis of the role of the media in structures of power, I was warned that I “w[ould] be marginalized” in the Carleton School of Journalism, unless I “left my politics at the door”.

9. The major US foundations providing funding for journalism education are the Freedom Forum (formerly the Gannett Foundation), the Knight Foundation (Knight-Ridder), the Park Foundation, the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Hearst Foundation (Johansen et al., 2001, p. 475).

10. Significant Canadian media industry investments in journalism education have been more the exception than the rule (Johansen et al., 2001, p. 477).

11. In 1998, MacLean Hunter endowed academic chairs at journalism programs at Ryerson University, King's College and the University of Regina. In 2000, Bell Globemedia Enterprises’ (BCE's) acquisition of CTV, and CTV's acquisition of NetStar Communications Inc. resulted in the endowment of two chairs: the Université Laval's Bell Globemedia Chaire de journalisme scientifique, and the Carleton University School of Journalism's CTV Chair in Science Broadcast Journalism (Carleton University, 2000).