Why journalists are arrogant
Andrew Cline writes about journalism education:
The plain fact of the matter is that most journalism is practiced at the local level for modest news organizations. That’s where most of our students will go to work. And I think we do our students, and the citizens of the communities in which they practice, a disservice by encouraging (even) our (best) students to believe that good journalism must be practiced at big-time news organizations.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that national is better than local.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that the audience is “general.”
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to elevate investigative reporting over solid day-to-day reporting.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to value winning prizes for their work.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them what language really is, how it really works, and how people really use it.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists have more First Amendment rights than citizens.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them that journalists are responsible for making democracy work.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them to ignore the fact that they are players in civic affairs.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we teach them the nonsense of the philosophical ideal of objectivity rather than the objective process of good reporting.
* We teach students to be arrogant when we fail to teach them that the public always knows more than they do.
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