Your average scoop-minded journalist would rather see his expenses cut by 90 percent, or face a plagiarism charge spotlighted by Romenesko, than read a book by a communication scholar.

It’s a blunt calculation of lesser pain. The first two assaults can be fought and repulsed. The third lasers into that part of a journalist’s brain that craves constant feeding of germane fact, persuasive evidence, sensible argument, even-handed analysis, and lively style. Fairly or not, the mainstream reporter presumes that while some books by communication scholars provide all five, that’s only by the logician’s criterion that some means at least one.

Another psychological bent accounts for the aversion of journalists to communication scholarship. The scholars themselves would describe it as “theory aversion,” but it’s more aptly described as “theory immersion”—the feeling, similar to relaxing in a warm bath, in which one’s view of the media world appears both true and practicable in professional life.

Call it the “naturalistic” take on American media. It posits that the shape of the American media landscape reflects two-hundred-plus years of free agents—individual journalists, daring entrepreneurs, aggressive corporations—pursuing their interests in more or less legal fashion, with those interests variously including profit, truth, influence, fame, and, usually, more profit. As Walter Cronkite put it in what’s now deemed a Neolithic, pre-postmodernist era, that’s the way it is, and likely the way it’s supposed to be.

A third aspect of communication scholarship also estranges working journalists. If they’ve sampled the wares, journalists notice that communication scholars view them not so much as fellow media types, or even “informants,” in the manner of anthropologists and linguists, but as worker ants—insects in an organism to be studied aloofly and from afar.

If there’s any communication scholar likely to bridle at being victimized by these clichés or truisms...

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