Getting journalism right
We need highly educated practitioners dedicated to truth and morality.
I am starting this column from the end because it might not survive your journey down my discursive pathway. It’s that important to me as to why and how I was drawn to journalism as a profession. And why it is important to all of us at a time when anarchy rules and journalism seems without standards. Later on, maybe we can answer the question: Is Julian Assange a journalist?
HuffPost editor Thomas Maier, an alumnus of the Columbia U. Graduate School of Journalism, has this memorable response to the question - What advice would you give to the next generation of J-Schoolers?
Two words: character and fluency. First, be able to translate your work into as many diverse platforms as possible – a multimedia “fluency” if you will – which is essential to the future. Today, I think being able to edit video and know the grammar of visual storytelling is as important as being able to type on a computer (or a manual typewriter!) was back in the 20th century. However, the importance of character transcends skills. It is crucial to intellectual honesty and a fearless presentation of facts. As an investigative reporter, you learn quickly how important character is to truth-telling – exploring the world as you find it without preconceived bias or ideology – and how things can go terribly wrong without it. Character teaches you to stand up to personal threats or legal challenges, to champion the rights of those less fortunate without power or money, and to force your news organization to publish when the cowardice of editors and publishers prefers that your story go away. Character isn’t something you’ll see in your paycheck but rather in the mirror. Character is essential to good journalism and a world in desperate need of it. Being a journalist – a witness to the world – is arguably the most noble calling of all.
When I was teaching, the first page of my news writing syllabus always began with this quote from Joseph Pulitzer:
“…Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
This grand vision of social responsibility is not what propelled me into the profession. I arrived there organically. I was always a good writer scholastically, but journalism was never on my horizon. My first experiences started before going to school, when I would thumb through the New York Daily News starting with the comics. And i liked listening to newscasts on the radio, starting with baseball, and play-by-play broadcasts of the Giants, Yankees and Dodgers.
A seminal experience happened for me when I was 8 years old at a Dodger-Giant game. When Jackie Robinson went sliding into second base I yelled for Eddie Stanky to “spike the n—-er. Make him bleed.” The man in the row before mine turned on me with such a steely glare of disgust, that I first became aware that racial and ethnic attitudes had no place in the world. That was the moment that my consciousness and conscience emerged. I was on a righteous path, and that is the first requisite for any journalist and maybe a few other professions.
One other small incident showed an inkling of the emerging personality that would be fit for journalism. I regularly put pennies on the Nostand Ave. trolley tracks to be flattened into useless thin copper discs. One day I thought I’d try a steel bar. My mad dash to sweep the bar off the tracks as the clanging trolley bore down revealed to me a side of myself heretofore unknown. I became aware of the consequences of my smallest actions. Lesson: Every journalist needs to know the value of “the other.”
As a child I was consumed with a huge curiosity about my immediate world, disappearing along the streets and alleys of Brooklyn, drawn always by what was around the next corner. My favorite place to hang out was in the Brooklyn Museum, especially the Egyptian section, where the imagined movement of a sarcophagus would send me fleeing in terror.
It took a misfortune in high school to turn me toward journalism. In my junior year I made my varsity baseball team as a pitcher. Just before spring training in my senior year, my eyes were damaged when sodium thrown into a bathroom sink exploded in my face. My eyesight was touch and go, and when I recovered, coach told me that having missed training I wouldnt see much action this year. But he said they needed someone to write up game reports for the local newspaper.
When my first byline appeared in the New Rochelle Standard Star, I was hooked. I became the on campus stringer for all sports. My freshman year at Brooklyn College was a disaster in that my motivation fell to zero and I dropped out mid second semester. Luckily my cousin, Len Scandur, an editor at the NY Daily News alerted me to a copy boy position at the paper. Responding to the shouts of “BOY” soon became tiring and the presence of 30-year-olds discouraging.
Serendipity intervened again when Jerry Rose, the editor of the Brooklyn section asked for me to be assigned to his desk. There I got my first bylines and reporting assignment. I especially enjoyed being the editorial point person in the production department when the paper was being put to bed. Fame came when I violated all union rules and repositioned an upside down engraving of a helicopter at the last second; bells sounded and the presses were stopped and all the big wig editors came down to plead with the pressmen to get the presses rolling again. My reprimand was big and public, but Jerry Rose pulled me aside later to thank me. Lesson: Always do the right thing regardless of personal consequences.
While working at the paper, I attended evening classes at Brooklyn College and there took my first journalism class with Prof. Lou Breglio. Lou recruited me to be sports editor of the evening student paper, KEN. Proving myself there rather quickly, I became editor-in-chief. My decisive moment came when we covered the story of two tenured BC professors being fired for refusing to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. I wrote an editorial supporting Academic Freedom. The Dean of Students summoned me to ask if I was Communist. I responded that I was a journalist. Finally, I knew who I was and who I would become.
When I returned to college full time, I became an editor on Kingsman, the day session newspaper. There I jousted with the administration regularly, for instance refusing to hand over our photos of students protesting the take-cover drills in the event of a nuclear attack. Lesson: Journalists have a higher commitment than being patriotic agents of the state.
All these lessons finally coalesced in the professional cauldron that was The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. But there was one BIG lesson yet to learn. All of us would never forget the Pulitzer professor, John Hohenberg, throwing our editorials to the floor when we dutifully completed an assignment supporting racial segregation in the schools. Lesson: Never accept an assignment the requires you to violate professional ethics, your personal principles and the public interest.
When I left Columbia I was recruited by and offered jobs in major print media, all of which I turned down for a job in community journalism as Managing Editor of Manhattan East. I liked doing journalism where one regularly rubbed elbows with the people you write for and about. That closeness is required in order to avoid being captivated by an ideology or faction.
One day, before my first marriage, I decided that I would leave my job and tumultuous romance to go to Europe and establish my self as a free lance journalist. Inspiration came from Sy Pearlman, a J-school classmate, who had gone that route before winding up on the travel desk at The NY Times. My plans were suddenly cut short by a phone call from my Brooklyn College mentor, Lou Breglio, “Would you like to come and teach news writing in the evening session?” Figuring that was a once-in-a-lifetime offer, I said yes. And thus began an almost 60-year intermittent career in higher education.
While at BC I took a side journey into university PR and development that lasted about 10 years. Once again, I was recruited to shore up press relations at the time campuses were in upheaval over the Vietnam war. I found that promoting the values important to society’s well being did not conflict with my sense of mission as a journalist. PR, advertising, teaching, and journalism are didactic professions. And one can always do them honorably with Hohenberg’s dictum in mind and three months of saved salary (a la Mel Mencher) to backup a sudden need to quit.
Having been the architect of the journalism minor at BC and with my Ivy League grad school background, I was a shoo in for the job to teach journalism at Loyola University Baltimore. It was there that I developed my experiential approach to teaching (a la Columbia J-School) for undergrads. When I first started teaching there, Loyola was never any student’s first choice for journalism, until I introduced a unique study abroad program. Then we became the largest enrolled department on campus.
In those days we emphasized working in teams, but journalism was later driven by the internet into backpack entrepreneurship. Now there is chaos, and any self-serving jerk with a web presence, populist instincts and commercial values can claim to be a journalist. I want to quote myself here from a previous column:
Journalism’s omission of unpleasant facts meant supporting a national narrative to the extent that we were totally shocked during the Viet Nam war when US troops massacred civilians at My Lai. Our boys just didn’t do such things, and that attitude persists to this day in our drone aggressions. Journalists telling it like it was contributed more to the end of the Viet Nam debacle than the student uprisings. Public support of the war began to wane when Walter Cronkite wielded the journalistic hammer.
Now that I am spending more time in Russia for family reasons, I am well aware that our journalists crafted a deceitful narrative. I came of age during the Cold War when life in Russia was portrayed in the most derogatory ways. Had our media and film industry shared the truth with us about life beyond the gulag, the American public would not have been honed to support American military/economic adventures in the guise of anti-Communism.
It pains me that big media is nourished by the dictated narratives coming out of Washington. Journalists like Glen Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Cynthia Chung and Chris Hedges provide a safe place where truth, logic and reason can thrive. We need to distill their skills, their insights into political deceit, their awareness of cultural history and bake it into the education of a new generation of journalists.
The world is so much more complex under the new mono-polar global paradigm and communications technology so advanced - that it takes more than a symbol on a t-shirt to be a journalist. Not even Julian Assange, a distributor of raw data, can be considered a journalist, not to denigrate his importance to the idea of a free press and freedom of speech. Journalists of my generation would make guest appearances in our journalism classrooms and tell students that they didn’t need journalism courses or degrees to enter the profession. True then. But none said that a college education wasn’t necessary.
What needs to change is the nature of that education. Journalism requires a mastery of technology and how to deploy it to enhance communications. It also needs a deep commitment to truth and the common good, and strategies for freeing oneself from prevailing narratives. Writing and how to think like a writer must be at the core of one’s practice, but with an unyielding link to logic and rhetoric. Journalism must be taught within the context of the liberal arts, well founded in classical philosophy up through Schiller and Leibniz, world history, cultural diversity, political and economic theories, world religions and their values, - anything that will contribute to becoming a discerning human being with a private and social conscience. The fact is that the more deeply educated a person is the greater their scope of moral awareness.
Being credentialed gets a young journalist on the first rung of the career ladder. His education continues through those who have preceded him, and her natural abilities are coaxed out through experience. At the apex, you have been vetted by those who are equally dedicated to going behind the facts to communicate the truth, temporal and eternal, and leave the world a better place for ALL than they found it.
Most graduates of these journalism programs can spot each other without a sign. And we can also spot those gifted practitioners who’ve come a different route but share the same values. Respect for our pedigree and confidence in our roles sets us apart from all the fakers out there. Through our example, the educated or endlessly inquisitive consumer of news and information, will discover those who help them make sense out of a chaotic world. And reject those whose main currency is partisanship and chaos.
Very enjoyable read