Time stood still for me recently when I watched the graduation ceremony on line for the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. The class is bigger, more international, more diverse…but the methodology and message is the same. It remains experiential to the core and students are “knighted” into a quest for truth unlike any profession in the world. I left with a sense of mission in 1960, and that mission is as strong for students today, as is the imprinted responsibility to all who came before and will follow after.
Walk into the newsroom at any newspaper or news media company and you’ll find a J-School alum in a leading editorial position. Students were reminded that they were joining a powerful force for good in the world. Not only did they have a constitutional duty to use fact and truth to maintain good governance - but they had to be careful not to let their vision of “good” dictate the selection of those facts.
The common thread running through every speech was the power of the story and the reporting that validates the story and the writing that compels it. We were reminded that facts, not from rumors or managed access, were the nuggets for which journalists were mining. Such reporting is hard work and requires the patience to pore over endless records, reports and transcripts to document the facts and triangulate the truth. The Excel spread sheet is as good a friend as Microsoft Word.
No one stressed the words “storytelling” or “narrative”. I can say that now, as back when, fictive techniques and ways of thinking did not support the 5 Ws or the objective standard. It was great to hear objectivity defended simply as a way of being “open” to evaluating all information and keeping one’s personal values and opinions from interfering with those judgments. Like trained social scientists, we gather all the data points and see if a pattern emerges. We never start collecting data with a pattern already in mind.
No one mentioned “fake news.” Such oxymorons are the double speak of the culture wars and not relevant to professional practice. Columbia never was and is not now about the flavor of the day. It has always reflected it’s time honored Pulitzer mission to let the facts tell the story. And if that story reveals corruption or denial of rights to an underclass, then journalism’s constitutional duty is to expose the perpetrators.
The absence of any mention of Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and others was appropriate in that the dispositions of their situations have no bearing on the immutable tenets of journalism. They punctuate the degradation of American political culture and the justice system and it remains with the liberal cohorts to make this a public battle that the news can cover in utter depth. Regardless, reporters will do what they always do, objectively.
Trump got only one mention. It was a lesson for the graduates. Marty Baron, retired WAPO chief editor, referred to the criticism The Post received for its unyielding coverage of the former president. He reported that the same approach was being taken in the coverage of President Biden. So there.
One of my pet peeves with journalism today is headlines. They are written for emotional impact, and when formulated as a question, there’s generally no story there. The same for the teasers on TV. I also don’t like burying the lead; the message I get there is that the writer is more important than the story. What may work for features is not always good for news.
The spirit of liberalism thrives in this Class of 2021. It showed in the way they cared for each other during the pandemic and the way they threw themselves selflessly into the stories of a sick and desperate city. Humans caring for humans - that’s the liberal way, and it is the way of Journalism. The illiberal way is to put ideologies and the interest of special groups first.
Watching the 2021 graduation, I got the same goose bumpy feelings I had when I was graduated. Then came the inevitable question. Did I meet the expectations of my faculty, my classmates, my profession? I can’t quite say. That’s why I am writing this newsletter at the age of 86. I am putting down all the data points that maybe someone later will connect. I was going to write a memoir but too many anecdotes surfaced, all demanding to lead the book. This is why we have long obit writers - for the last news story.
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With thanks to main speaker Marty Baron, retired editor of the Washington Post, for reminding us what journalism was, is and always will be. His address may be available on the J-School website. The spirit connecting 1960 to 2021 can be found on YouTube - President Kennedy’s Press Club speech in 1961 on press freedom at the Waldorf Astoria.