Editor’s Note

Journalism is still not for the faint of heart

In the last issue, following up on the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s report, “Journalism’s Crisis of Confidence: A Challenge for the Next Generation,” I emphasized that the intellectual and educational demands of being a competent journalist just keep growing. For more detail on this, I would urge you to carefully read the articles published in various issues of Nieman Reports over the past eight years or so about education reporting, health and medical reporting, science and environment reporting, and so on. Veterans on every beat emphasize the need for specialized training and long experience to cover those beats, even to the point of many claiming that their own beat requires more experience and education than most or all others.

As I wrote in summer, many journalism programs are responding to this need with specialized reporting courses and other initiatives, but that relatively few print and broadcast journalism students are showing much interest in them. Since then, I have been on an educators’ panel at a journalists’ convention at which a professor at a major research university in one of the country’s largest cities confessed that a total of only four undergraduate and graduate students had enrolled in a recently offered science journalism course. (In fact, as I noted, one often wonders how interested many of them are in journalism at all, above and beyond majoring in, and planning to work in, it.)

But “Journalism’s Crisis of Confidence” report had another, more subtle, warning in it: that being a print or broadcast journalist covering anything other than a war, perhaps now more than any time since a lawyer shot Denver Post proprietors Frederick G. Bonfils and Harry Tammen in 1900, requires varying degrees of courage, patience, tolerance, and ego, or at least a lot of self-confidence.

Deborah Howell, Washington Post ombudsman and former Washington bureau chief for Newhouse News Service, is paraphrased in the Carnegie Corporation report as saying, “being unafraid is very important,” and then quoted, “The volume of sheer rudeness is enormous....It affects reporters and editors who switch on the computer in the morning and there are 500 e-mails waiting. That’s literally what happens to me. Trying to keep your head when people are screaming at you is not anything anybody teaches you in journalism school or anywhere else.”

Howell is right that characteristics such as courage, patience, tolerance, and self-confidence cannot be taught in journalism schools, although some students may increasingly demonstrate one or more of those characteristics when they graduate than when they were admitted through some combination of maturation, socialization, and experiences.

Logically, that many, probably most, journalists need both some guts and some ability to “roll with the punches” suggests that students who are not well-suited to be journalists could be, perhaps should be, counseled out of the major and out of the profession. (I’m reminded of an article in the March 1998 American Journalism Review, which said about journalism students at the conservative Christian Regent University, “after they’ve gone through the curriculum, many emerge more convinced than ever that journalism is no place for Christians”—but on their own, since Regent professors do not preach that.)

In fact, I have pointed out to my students that if we know, or at least if we knew, which personal characteristics tended to make a good journalist and which ones tended to make a poor journalist, shouldn’t students with the latter ones be counseled out of the major and away from the profession? (Even on the issue of what I would call literacy, there was a time—not so long ago—when high school students who were excellent writers were counseled to look into journalism, while high school students who were poor writers were counseled to avoid journalism or other professions that required especially good writing skills. However, that no longer seems to be the case; young people seem to be encouraged to do whatever they might want to do, whether they have any talent, or even any potential talent, at it or not. And of course it was only a matter of time before evidence of this showed up in print; the number of grammatical errors, even in the New York Times, seems to have increased over the past ten years.)

But my students are egalitarians all. They have been raised in a generation in which their “self-esteem” was promoted above all else, regardless of the fact that real self-confidence comes from possessing actual knowledge and skills—not simply being told that you do whether it is true or not. And they have insisted, almost to a person, essentially that no one who wants to go into print or broadcast journalism should be discouraged from doing so, and that the journalism profession can handle, in fact needs, all kinds. What I have been generally unable to convince them of is that a journalist who has too many personality characteristics of one kind and too few of another isn’t just adding to the diversity of the newsroom environment but may very well be incompetent as a journalist.

Certainly the idea of journalism as an important public service and democratic function is missing. Do they also believe that anyone and everyone should be a U.S. Senator or a judge or a school teacher or a police officer or in the clergy and so on? Perhaps they do, but I don’t.

Getting back to Howell’s comment: for what happens when a journalist—print, broadcast, wire service, online—reporter fails to be “unafraid,” as she put it? Well, these days we have a Presidential administration that claims to be willing to pursue treason charges against reporters and a growing number of judges and federal prosecutors who don’t have any qualms about sending journalists to jail for not revealing sources. Fortunately or not, most reporters are not following those kind of stories. But it doesn’t take much effort to find both hard and circumstantial evidence of what happens when reporters are not unafraid. A case can be made that the U.S. news media gave an easy ride to the Bush administration for years after September 11, 2001, to avoid being regarded as “unpatriotic” and/or because the noise machine calling them “liberal” was beginning to make them bend over backwards to avoid being so.

In any case, those various senior, prize-winning reporters who have written about beats such as the environment for Nieman Reports also frequently recount having to argue with editors to get time to work on a story or to get a finished story published, sometimes going so far as to go over one or two editors’ heads up the chain of command or working on a story on personal time when an editor has otherwise said no. Every journalist I know has memories of stories that weren’t covered because they would have caused too much backlash from advertisers, the public, and/or news media executives.

Being “unafraid” also is an issue in public relations and advertising work, in which it is sometimes too easy to go along to get along, whether with one’s colleagues or one’s clients. When I teach media ethics to graduate students, most of whom are already in public relations or planning to go into it, I ask them what moments might prompt them to resign an account, or quit a job, at least threaten to. I can’t recall any drawing a line in the sand. Do your students have guts as well as brains?

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January 7, 2007, is the deadline for papers and presentations for the first World Journalism Education Congress, to be held in June in Singapore. Please see the call elsewhere in this issue of JMCE. I hope you will make a submission.


Dane S. Claussen
dsclaussen@hotmail.com