Some Thoughts on Journalism

There have been a lot of scandals lately about journalists getting caught plagiarizing and fabricating stuff, especially at USA Today and the New York Times. Why? I offer a modest explanation here:

It used to be that journalists were either self made, driven types who pushed themselves hard to get to the top of their profession. Alternatively, they had college degrees in a substantive field like political science, economics, history or something like that. But now journalists tend have college degrees in journalism or communications. This is the root of the problem. Journalism does not have any substantive content. It is a field entirely based on the art of presentation. The less said about communications, the better.

Combine this with an alarming lack of emphasis on objective truth in education (i.e. "Everyone's opinion is equally valid" or "There's no right answer here") and you get people - especially in TV journalism - who have little or no substantive knowledge of the fields on which they report (the economy, the government etc) and seem to have a command of the English language that rivals Archie Bunker's. In the past several months I've seen CNN refer to "eighty five million" while showing a graphic with 85,000,000,000 in big bold numbers. Then there was the time CNN reported on the number of killed from each country in Iraq and referred to "1 dead Danish." Aside from the fact that someone with a degree allegedly designed to produce good writers/communicators should KNOW that "Danish" is an adjective and "Dane" is a noun, it would only take 10 seconds to look it up in a dictionary.

But this is the problem. They didn't know, and didn't care that they didn't know, these were mistakes. As an instructor at a major - and prestigious - university, I have seen numerous students supposedly from the top of their high schools' classes complain when I correct mistakes like those in their papers. They come to me and declare that there is no right or wrong answer and I shouldn't grade them down "just because [I] don't like their writing style." I mention this because the students wouldn't complain if the complaint didn't work often enough to make them keep trying it. In other words, a lot of instructors teach them, through low standards, to expect a positive response to such complaints.

See, first, journalism/communications majors insist that style is more important than substance, then they say that since style is totally subjective, it should not be graded. The result is a gradual decline in the quality of communication skills as style becomes more and more determined by the particular areas of ignorance of the journalist in question. Statements become more and more ambiguous as meaning becomes more and more imprecise, sloppy and driven by the idiosyncratic mistakes of the writer/editor/journalist.

As for plagiarism and fabrication: I actually see dozens of cases that are probably unintentional but are technically plagiarism (improper citation of other people's work etc) every year. Of those most just get a stern warning from me and a somewhat lower grade but nothing dramatic. Once or twice a year I come across blatant and intentional plagiarism which I either flunk outright or submit to the authorities on campus. I've seen surveys that say that something like half of all college students have cheated like this at least once and think its OK. Is it any wonder that when these students get jobs as journalists, they don't think it's a big deal to make stuff up or plagiarize?

OK, I'm done now.