Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

When James W. Carey died on May 23, the field of journalism lost more than its most accomplished professor. It lost a great democrat who tried to cure professional journalism of some of its provincialism as a discipline. Carey at the time of his death was the CBS Professor of International Journalism at Columbia. In a long career he had been dean of the College of Communications at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign; a member of the PBS board; and president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I knew him as an author, scholar, and critic. His Ph.D. was in economics. His accidental field was communication and the study of modern culture. What Carey loved, however, was journalism and public conversation.

He was a man of unusual personal warmth, but people loved Carey partly because he improved them just by talking to them. One day I was sitting in his office and he said, “What do you think would have been the reaction in the country if the commercial television stations and TV networks had been bought up by the petroleum industry, or the aerospace firms, and they programmed the news?” I said people would see an agenda behind the purchase. “Exactly. And yet we let the entertainment industry do just that. Why?” I wasn’t sure. He said let’s go to lunch and chew on it.

I think Carey came to Columbia at the end of his career because he decided that Columbia had gotten many things right and one or two big things wrong. The school was right to remain dedicated to the craft of journalism and to preparing future professionals who would excel at it. It was right not to let advertising, public relations, and marketing anywhere near the curriculum. Columbia was right not to add “communications” to the portfolio. “Not the media. Not the news business. Not the newspaper or the magazine or the television station, but the practice of journalism,” as Carey put it.

But Columbia was wrong to preach the virtues of professionalism without also teaching new recruits that it has a cost. Carey pointed out that professional education is not only about acquiring knowledge, ethics, and standards. It also wants “a work force that is moral, orderly, habitual, and conservative.” Meaning: cautious, productive, and predictable. Professionalism in journalism had an ideology — it domesticated a potentially unruly class of scribblers. Carey came to Columbia and pointed this out. Nothing imploded. The place just got smarter.

“If journalism was a profession, then it must have a code of ethics or at least an enlightened sense of the First Amendment,” Carey wrote. “Journalism faculties attempted to manufacture such codes and gave to the First Amendment a meaning that justified the professional standing of the journalist.” So journalism students get told, as Reese Cleghorn, a former dean of the J-school at the University of Maryland, once put it, that “we are the only profession mentioned in the Constitution, that we have a unique responsibility and our democratic government depends on it.”

That’s a reading of the First Amendment that justifies the “professional standing” of journalists. It assigns to them a “unique responsibility” on which constitutional government itself depends. Carey did not share this thinking. He refused to teach the First Amendment as a property right. He did not think the Constitution gave an exalted place to the institutional press. It was wrong to tell young people that it did. The Constitution doesn’t mention any particular profession.

“The practices of journalism are not self-justifying.” Carey said this very often to audiences of journalists (I must have heard it fifty times). The things the press does are only justified if they contribute to “a democratic social order.” If journalists liked to remind us that without them, democracy is impossible, Carey was determined to remind them that without democracy, they are impossible.

To read the articles in the July/August 2006 issue, click here.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.