In The Big Picture, Jeffrey Scheuer grapples with a highly abstract subject: the intermingled roles of journalism, education, and democracy. The author has read widely and thought deeply about these matters (he is also the editor of a new series on Democracy and the News for Praeger Publishers). And in a rarity for just about any contemporary book touching on the subject, Scheuer takes the enterprise of journalism education seriously. But once he establishes the centrality of such education, he tries to demolish its value. As someone who has spent twenty-five years teaching journalism, I would argue that his smackdown is unwarranted.
Scheuer, the author of a highly regarded 1999 book, The Sound Bite Society: How Television Helps the Right and Hurts the Left, begins his extended rumination with a simple, non-controversial proposition: “What people know, the accuracy and extent of their understanding, bears directly on their ability to function as citizens.”
How are citizens to accumulate this necessary knowledge? At first, Scheuer gives journalism and education equal billing as “democracy’s two great propulsive forces.” Then, without ample explanation, he demotes journalism to a junior role in assuring a well-informed citizenry: “It is the function of formal education, not journalism, to provide us with most of our fundamental understanding. The simpler job of journalism is to help us understand our immediate times and situate them on those intellectual foundations.” Indeed, like A. J. Liebling before him, Scheuer views American journalism as the “weak slat under the bed of democracy,” whose best practitioners exist in a sort of cultural ghetto.
As Scheuer sees it, journalism has fallen down on multiple fronts. He bemoans the shortage of investigative journalism, which he calls “democracy’s alarm system, variously revealing what urgently needs to be known, what is harder to know, what someone in power...
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An excellent article that actually serves to convince me that the author of "The Big Picture", Jeffrey Scheuer, has the very best advice for both schools of journalism at all levels, as well as aspiring journalists who wish to attend and are attending those schools. What Scheuer describes as a proper educational background for entry into journalistic practice is a sound liberal arts education before entry to a school of journalism.
Given the current, nearly total, corporate control of the mainstream media today, the question of actually CLOSING the schools journalism may have merit, but the REFORMATION of the entire journalistic community and the schools that train journalists in the USA is a much better idea and, indeed, a critcal one.
Journalism in the USA today is descending to a very low ebb, The reapidly failing fortunes in the marketplace of our corporate media attest to the fact that newspapers readers and TV viewers are fed up with the repetition, the triviality, the sensationalism, and the bias (including subtle editorial
comments during a simple news report), so that both readers, and TV viewers, and as a result, advertizers as well have swtiched to the gathering of supporting of news at websites on the internet.
Finally, a suggestion: if schools of journalism are to continue operating and training honest and competent journalists, they should all reqiuire a liberal arts baccalaureate degree for entry into their programs. And while in journalism school. all students should be absolutely required to complete
several well designed courses in journalistic ETHICS and practice, particularly if our media of the future are to continue to be controlled by corporations for which profit and power take precedence over sound and honest journalisn.
Posted by Vince Francis
on Fri 2 May 2008 at 01:26 PM