Reinventing journalism education
May be the only way to rescue American journalism from its sorry state
Looking back from abroad, I did not recognize the America that I grew up in, until it occurred to me that maybe the America I grew up in never existed. Media portrayals of life in America were carefully sanitized to hide the whole truth. Beyond the urban chaos there was a rural ideal to which we could all aspire, later mimicked by the rise of suburbs which revealed how imperfect our vision was.
Journalism and Hollywood provided endless narratives of the good life in America, also confirmed in our classrooms. Exceptions were horror stories on the edges of the narratives, slight deviations from the apple pie norms. Okay, there were still some bad actors left in the south, and we weren’t about to invite them to dinner at our houses.
When I left the picture post card environment for life on campus, a different picture began to emerge. Teachers like Howard Zinn and John Hope Franklin told us the complete story. And though I was fired up for a career in journalism, I was painfully aware of the shortcomings of my chosen profession. With youthful hubris, I thought I could change all that. My further education at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism convinced me it was possible.
My opportunity came in 1984, when at age 49 I was hired by Loyola Maryland to create a journalism program there. My survey of available programs revealed theory imbued courses in ossified curricula managed by social science Ph.D.s. Over the years I had considered a doctorate myself but always recoiled from the mass com model as having “nothing to do with journalism.” I had become a willing acolyte for the pragmatic Columbia approach that focused on reporting and professional writing.
My design for Loyola had the students in practical courses for two years before encountering their first mass com theory and journalism history courses as juniors. And even here I was tentative because I didn’t believe that journalistic writing should focus so much on reader expectations as on discovering and telling truths through facts. Social science trained practitioners were more relativists than needs be.
In a major departure from standard practice I designated Latin as the preferred language requirement. It was clear that few students retained after graduation any spoken understanding of language requirements, which caused us to rethink the purpose. We settled on Latin knowing that students would emerge with enhanced vocabularies and intimate understandings of language structure and grammar. Our young journalists would command logic and clarity in their writing. They would escape the flourishes that catered to audience awareness and distracted from the core purpose of journalistic endeavor.
I was never able to take the next step which involved reformation of the graduate approach to a true Ph.D. in journalism - shifting from the social sciences to the humanities. Courses would draw on a pedigree in the classics and philosophy. What better interviewer than Socrates? Imagine tracing the development of human organization through Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli and the great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Given such a background it would be difficult for our journalists to be rooted in American exceptionalism. The arc of history would place all movements and revolutions in their proper evolutionary places. Within this context journalists could achieve a proper command of the facts and see emerging truths more clearly.
I had been sitting on this idea of this column for a while, until energized by a call this weekend from a former professor, Maryalice Yakutchik, and former student, Val Conners, both of whom participated in my first journalism study abroad program in Cagli, Italy in 2001. The idea for this program was not based on any grand design or vision, but rather on the inspiration in a cup of cappuccino being consumed outside the Cafe Commercio on the central piazza. I was concluding a sabbatical and felt a strong need to return to this place. Thus was born the idea of bringing students there every summer.
Our concept of study abroad was not to prep students with advanced courses in which the jargon of area studies would color their perceptions. Instead we opted for our students to have deep immersion and come away with concepts of Italy and international reporting based on their own experiences. The most common student comment on the effectiveness of our approach was “life changing.”
Cagli may have been the ultimate test of experiential learning. However the principles could be applied in the traditional classroom, as was done regularly in our program. While lecture/discussion works well in certain disciplines, experiential learning (as in business and law school case studies) sticks best.
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. Even today the public discourse and the media paint pictures of Russia and China that keep Americans cowering behind their useless missile defenses.
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 were truth, logic and reason can thrive. We need to distill their skills, their insights into the deceit of politics, their awareness of cultural history and bake it into the education of a new generation of journalists.
Maryalice’s and Val’s FaceTime call brought me back to the unfinished business of my career. Their inspiring feedback about experiential education and unconventional methods made me yearn for the opportunity to champion a new approach to the larger academic community. But I am past the time for academic conferences and peer reviewed publications. Yet they assured me that in the 20 years of study abroad enough seeds have been sewn to uphold a more noble mission than the “selfie” aggrandizement of social media.
Though retired, I still maintain an active organization, ieiMedia.com, that pulls journalism students out of their classrooms and forces then to engage others whose lives are as sacred as their own.
Beautifully written Andrew! I very much like this paragraph:
"Courses would draw on a pedigree in the classics and philosophy. What better interviewer than Socrates? Imagine tracing the development of human organization through Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli and the great thinkers and artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Given such a background it would be difficult for our journalists to be rooted in American exceptionalism. The arc of history would place all movements and revolutions in their proper evolutionary places. Within this context journalists could achieve a proper command of the facts and see emerging truths more clearly."
I couldn't agree with you more on how important this is. Your students are lucky to have you as a teacher.