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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