1. BACKGROUND
An annoying but necessary habit of critical thinkers (one of many, no doubt) is making connections between seemingly disparate things. Another is making distinctions within seemingly unified ones. The idea, of course, is to strike some sort of balance: to understand both how things connect and how they do not.
This is because (if I have it right) the order of the universe is such that everything is connected to something, but nothing is connected to everything (except to the universe itself). If I were now sending my kids off to college (and sadly it’s too late, I’m already a grandfather), those would be my parting words to them. (Come to think of it, that’s not a bad bumper sticker for critical thinking: Everything’s connected to something, but…I could see that one on the back of my pickup truck, next to “Lock Him Up”.
Put another way: distinctions and connections are all we’ve got; they are the ultimate constituents of human thought, and in fact of human consciousness. Everything comes down, in the end, to those two complementary logical moves. And I might add, they are all we need, or all we could ever have. I’m tempted to say that this is true in any possible universe, but let’s not get ahead of our skis. Maybe there are better universes out there in the multiverse.
Getting back to Earth: analytic thinking (something we all do every day) is essentially just that: making, and then refining or qualifying, distinctions and connections. The balance is never fully achieved, but by pursuing it asymptotically, as it were – getting ever closer to a receding goal – we arrive at something we can call truth, or at least fuller understanding.
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2. FOREGROUND
So much for the philosophical underpinnings; now let’s get real. What has journalism got to do with liberal education? I use the term “journalism” because “media” has become a rather too elastic term, embracing all sorts of tools, methods, and messages with all sorts of content and motives, including commercial and political propaganda and self-aggrandizement. I’m interested in something more high-minded: civics, and how the liberal arts and the news –subjects I’ve addressed across three books – interconnect, and how they don’t.
Superficially, the proverbial tweedy (male or female) professor and the proverbial ink-stained wretch in the newsroom seem to occupy different universes. The American daily newspaper, arising in tandem with and as an advertising vehicle for large department stores, produced generations of reporters who were essentially blue-collar storytellers looking for audiences more than for truth or consequences. Over the second half of the 20th century, those Jimmy Breslin-type news hounds gradually gave way to the liberal arts grads whom they despised.
How and why that transition occurred is a complicated bit of sociology. As everyone knows, a liberal education helps you to become a good actor, teacher, museum curator, lawyer, architect, or to get hired as a Disney “imagineer.” And it doesn’t hurt if you are a doctor or engineer or truck driver or nurse either. But what do you need to be a serious journalist?
I would suggest a general answer right away. First, and most important: to write, report, or think about anything in public, you need to be a clear and critical thinker. That is what college is for. Second, but also important: it helps to know a thing or two. That’s another thing college can help with. For both of these requisite talents, a liberal education is (almost) essential. There are always exceptions; Abraham Lincoln never went to college, let alone law school. But he sent his son Robert to Harvard.
I’ve been both a student and a journalist (and briefly in between, a student-journalist); and to me, the connections between education and journalism are at once obvious and slightly counterintuitive. I was better at studying than reporting, but I have equal respect for both as essential democratic functions. Both promote citizenship. That’s the link.
We tend to think of education (not entirely accurately) as an ivory tower, apart from society. (See my April 6th 2024 post). Journalism, on the other hand – real journalism – is the shoe-leather stuff of collecting, organizing and transmitting news on a deadline, rigorously and conscientiously. Or at least, that’s an important part of it, along with opinion, analysis, and box scores. There’s enough of it out there if you know where to look for it; but you have to want to look, and there are a lot of counterfeit versions. If we give up on the ideal of journalistic excellence, just as if we give up on liberal education, we give up on democracy altogether. So, when I talk about media or journalism here, I’m referring to the serious stuff.
What makes journalism serious is what makes education serious, and it is also what makes them part of a joint enterprise. Each is based on a kind of rigor, a model of what counts (in each context) as truth, clarity, and relevance. Both are communal and communicative processes. Both are about the world and our place in it. And, like basic human rights, both are essential drivers of democracy.
In fact, journalism is nothing more than adult education, more topical and immediate but serving the same function of helping us to be better informed, wiser, and potentially more active, citizens.
One question that remains is: how to prepare people to be good journalists. I’m not a huge fan of journalism education, especially not on the undergraduate level. (I studied journalism on the graduate level, with mixed results.) I’m not for closing down journalism schools (although some ignoramuses who read my book on journalistic excellence accused me of that). But journalism education has always had a difficult relationship with the academy.
In its present form, it is not primarily an academic or a liberal arts discipline. It’s more about teaching a craft. That’s one reason why Columbia’s j-school, considered a national flagship, is the only one in the Ivy League.
I hesitate to question any sort of teaching or learning, craft-based or otherwise. I got some good practice of being a journalist at Columbia, and though I didn’t remain a “hard-news” journalist, or any kind of journalist, for long, it didn’t do me harm. But it’s also a fact that (as opposed to, say, law, medicine, or architecture) you don’t need training in journalism to be a good journalist. What you need is to think well and know stuff.
So if you are young and want to be a journalist, my advice is to get a liberal education. Work on your college or university newspaper or radio station or whatever, but save your course work for the liberal arts. Study the world first, and journalism later.
J-schools should also be more knowledge-oriented and less craft-oriented (how to conduct an interview, meet a deadline, harvest data, etc.). But that’s a separate debate, and one that mirrors very old debates within the practical-minded and often anti-intellectual American psyche. (See, e.g., Ch. 1 of Inside the Liberal Arts, and Ch. 7 of The Big Picture).
Learn how to learn, how to think, and how to write. Finally, learn how to report. It isn’t rocket science. (Learning, thinking and writing are more difficult). Learn that the magic word of great journalism is: context. (Accuracy counts too). And that the only reason to bother with it is: democracy. And that commercial values in the journalistic realm are largely incompatible with those ideals.
To be a journalist is to be a teacher. (The same goes for writers; just don’t call me “Professor.”) Most professors don’t study education as undergraduates, but they figure out how to teach. Journalists, likewise, should prepare themselves to be teachers. That is the best way for them to try to be – like all teachers and educators -- true centurions of democracy.