Those who’d like to read the premier text on why journalism ought to be a university-trained profession much like medicine and law should turn to the classic work on the topic, Joseph Pulitzer’s The School of Journalism.
And yes, I am the guilty party. I did bring it back into print in the hope of stimulating lively debate on the topic.
Personally, I suspect that journalism’s problem isn’t its attempt to spin it as a profession, but the absolutely shoddy work that journalism does pass off as professional. You see that best in their demand to be treated, they say, like lawyers and priests, able to keep mum about their sources. The argument is so absurd, it’s difficult to imagine how any profession with a scrap of intelligence or integrity would advance it. When a lawyer or a priest invoke their right to silence, it’s about something they are NOT telling us. No lie is being spoken. Only one particular category of truth, that from certain conversations, is being denied the public.
But when a journalist attempts to invoke what their profession asserts is their right, it’s often about claims that are being broadcast to millions, claims whose source we cannot find out and whose veracity we cannot check. Its intent can only be to deny us the evidence we need to determine whether the journalist was lying to us. And in that journalism isn’t asserting professionalism, it’s claiming that we must regard it as infallible. That’s not something a genuine profession does. Genuine professions always hold themselves accountable for their deeds.
The closest parallel would be for medicine to assert the right of any physician to prohibit absolutely any post-mortem examination of any patient he’s treated who has died. The chief reason for giving physicians that power would be to permit them to cover up their mistakes and blunders. The chief rationale for journalists being able to hide their sources is much the same.
Because it really is a profession, medicine has a much sterner and less subjective perspective on the truth. I worked for a time in a hospital with children being treated for cancer. I was impressed that the physicians involved were continually tested their treatments, seeing if they could develop something better.
In contrast, journalism rarely tests itself and rarely questions its assumptions. Once story has developed a certain spin, that spin will continue in defiance of the facts. Over time, it isn’t getting better are arriving at the truth; if anything it’s getting worse. To give but one example, why hasn’t the Internet led to a central clearing house for facts, where someone wrongly treated can go, present their evidence, and clear their name, a source that a journalist must consult before running a story. (Medicine has numerous, carefully checked, authoritative sources like that.) That is not the case. Journalism is mired in the state medicine was in when for centuries it practiced odd theories of disease and treatment derived from the ideas of Greeks and Romans, ideas it never tested for truth.
Or to make a different comparison, during WWI the British discovered that only 10% of the bombs they dropped at night came within two miles of their attended targets. They were essentially flying over German cities and bombing them at random, blowing up homes and killing civilians. Today, the British and the American military can drop a bomb down the chimney of a specific building with near 100% accuracy. The US military has gone to great effort to reduce the number of innocent people they hurt. Journalism has made no such effort. Their failure rate is as bad or worse than it was half a century ago. Someone slandered by the press has little effective recourse. Unless they sue and, after spending huge sums of money, win, they can be nearly certain that other journalists will continue to repeat those lies without end. As one reporter told me, all the new technology has done is make it easier for lies to stay alive.
The real issue isn’t whether journalism should be a profession or not. It’s that regarded as a profession, journalism’s standards are pitifully low and indefensible.
–Michael W. Perry, Seattle
