From Richard Rostron:
Mainstream media completely blew it this election – how do we fix journalism?
The Response
When I was working on my associates degree, I signed a contract to write as a freelance reporter for The Chicago Tribune. I did so for five years. A guy I knew applied for the same position with The Northwest Herald and was told to come back when he had his bachelor’s degree.
I’ve served as a sports editor with a weekly here in Woodstock for five years (two combined stints). I was the advisor to the student paper at McHenry County College and taught independent study in journalism. I do have a bachelor’s degree in journalism and in history. I graduated with honors. I believe I learned a lot from my studies in the field. But I had an advantage over many of my classmates.
I was a return student. I had spent about 15 years working in construction before I went back to school. I had real-world experiences that made me less susceptible to indoctrination. And, yes, I did witness indoctrination.
One such example was when professors at the two 4-year schools I attended (I spent one semester at SIU before finishing my degree at NIU) said that it was impossible to be unbiased because our individual experiences effect our perspectives. This prompted me to ask, “If we can’t avoid bias, what are we supposed to do?”
One professor told me, “You find a good cause and get behind it.”
Who gets to decide what is a good cause? Isn’t this the problem with what we’re seeing in journalism today; so-called journalists deciding that LGBTQ, WOKE, Socialism, Equity, Radical Feminism, Open Borders, etc., are ‘good causes’ they should get behind?
Aren’t there nuances that make their choices less clear? Are they truly qualified to make these decisions? Isn’t bias still driving their positions?
The reality is that, years ago, established journalists looked down their noses at young “journalists” with degrees who joined their papers. I do think a journalism degree helped to make me a better writer. It gave me a broader view of the world. But I don’t understand why, when acknowledging the difficulties in avoiding bias, the academic elites didn’t look for ways to avoid our inherent bias rather than using this as an excuse to abandon the effort and become ‘journalistic activists.’
It was because of their own bias that they didn’t realize there’s no such thing as a ‘journalistic activists.’
An activists practicing journalism is not a journalist.
And a journalist using their position to promote a position that fits their activism is not a journalist.
Seems to me we can fix journalism, not by eliminating journalism degrees, but requiring aspiring journalists to spend some time working in the real world first.
