James Carey and Deprofessionalizing Journalism Education
From Studyplace
Linda Steiner, University of Maryland, October 5, 2007
Most discussions of journalism and journalism education emphasize professionalism; commitment to advanced education and ethics are what we generally take to distinguish professions from vocations. Jim Carey danced with the idea of jettisoning the equation of professionalism and ethics, and thus deprofessionalizing journalism. In my view dispensing with professional ethics is at this point risky, if not dangerous. But James Carey’s radical approach to understanding and teaching journalism as a set of cultural practices has to be taken seriously. It applies even in the context of Columbia’s journalism program—or rather, especially there, since Columbia’s Journalism School has the unique status of being able to do whatever it chooses to do, to teach journalism in the ways that best prepare journalists to do the work they need to do, to help journalism become what it ought to be. It need not report to the New York Times.
Several years ago, at a meeting at Middle Tennessee State University Jim Carey discussed “Where journalism education went wrong” and I’d like to recall that presentation in conjunction (and in tension) with his 1977 AEJ presidential address. The MTSU paper famously took as its central tenet that journalism is another name for democracy. But Carey also took as axiomatic that journalism education must take journalism essentially as its sole object of attention: journalism must not be confused with advertising and public relations in either classrooms or news rooms. Not that this is particularly remarkable at Columbia, where Joseph Pulitzer required the same separation between news and advertising as at the World. He took pains to say that journalism is a distinct social and historical practice. As such, it should not be confused with media or communications. Media are organizations or technologies with which journalism takes place; communications is a social process for transferring meaning. As a designated respondent to Jim’s paper, this attack on media studies caught me off guard. I wanted to take journalism and journalism education very seriously but to do so in the context of media studies. Of course, what I was neglecting to consider was that the paper came soon after Carey had arrived at a professional journalism school in New York, where his fame as an eminent “communication” scholar might be disadvantageous. It certainly was controversial. This new context meant that Carey had to establish and maintain a new sort of credential. It’s also possible, although he did not mention this either, that he was properly rejecting the conservative technique, now widely naturalized, of undermining the press by calling it “the media” (that is, since “the media” don’t have the Constitutional and mythological protection that “the press” enjoyed, renaming the latter as the former meant that the press could be attacked with impunity).
Jim’s point was that the science of communication he saw—or at least the one he was foregrounding at the time-- was one that privileged a science of control. Not a science of enlightenment or citizenship designed to clarify our vision, but a science designed to rule over citizens, albeit benignly. He argued, with not a little vehemence, that the natural academic home of journalism is the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, such as political theory.
Having founded cultural studies, Jim seems to be attacking a straw man here. This science of communication had little impact at Columbia. But that doesn’t get Columbia or the rest of us off the hook.
Because Carey objected—I think equally-- to the study of communication that read journalism functionally; and to the “professional” treatment of journalism, as trained technique. It’s as wrong to reduce journalism to messages as to technology. Neither understands journalism (as he did) as a social act, as an imaginative construction of the social.
I’m the last to read any phenomena or person psychologically. But I believe that while Jim Carey cared about journalism because he cared about democracy and citizenship, he liked journalists because he saw them—in part, romantically remembered them—as contentious, undisciplined Bohemians. They harbored sympathies for radical politics, and smoked and drank. Certainly when Columbia founded its journalism school, Pulitzer’s noble language notwithstanding, journalists came from the working class. As Carey himself said, reporters “were the upwardly mobile children of immigrants with an inherited rather than an educated gift of language.”
So, I concede three points about professional education. I am willing to stipulate that Pulitzer had some base motives—not only to acquire the veneer of respectability for himself and his newspaper empire, but also perhaps hoping—since Carey did not mention Foucault here, I dare not bring this up, either—that a professional education would domesticate and discipline journalists. The emergence of ethics resulted not from commitment to morality but from an attack on the sensationalism and cultural style of the working class. Yes, education was and is a means of social control, a means of co-opting an undisciplined group. Professional education has been partly driven by a desire for a moral, orderly, and conservative work force.
I stipulate, too, that university faculty, even journalism educators, wanted to legitimize themselves and their enterprise. Grafting journalism onto the university via history, ethics, and law abets this symbolic crusade. Journalism faculties attempted to manufacture codes of ethics that justified the professional standing of their students and graduates. I stipulate even that journalism’s fit at universities remains awkward.
I do not concede, however, that a concern for ethics is fatally compromised by the fact that our motives were never wholly pure. The implication of status politics does not invalidate our concern for ethics. Certainly the solution to journalism’s crisis, or even to the crisis of journalism education, is not to focus narrowly and exclusively on the techniques of journalism, much less the changing array of technologies for its dissemination. And at this point, the real problem is the loss of news readers who care about journalism, who regard journalists as credible. We face no less a crisis of legitimacy than Pulitzer. Perhaps the plight is more intense. But the meaning of journalism is the same.
Journalists are no longer that ragtag bunch. They have changed, and they have altered newsrooms. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. As a result, the problem is not ethics per se, at least not in the way that Carey’s AEJ speech pleading for the university tradition put it. Rather, the issue is the way that journalists hold themselves as above the people, apart from the people. They assert that they live in a morally certain world unique to them, an exclusive gated compound. It was, after all, Carey who criticized the science of society when it should be a science in society. Thus, the problem with the professionalization of journalists—and even of ethics—is that it frames journalists as different, albeit well-intentioned. The distressing repudiation of journalists now heard in the US and in the world is a complaint about their arrogance, their claim to have transcended the embodied realities that plague the rest of us.
I agree with those who argue that citizen journalism—for all its oxygenating and invigorating competition-- cannot seriously and usefully cover the gamut of social and political stories that professionals do, as much as they share the romance of the chase, of the scoop. But it is not this, but ethics, commitment to democratic processes and to ongoing inquiry about the nature and implications of the work that sustain and guide full-time journalists. Citizen journalists may engage in much the same reporting practices, more and less well; but what they do not undertake is serious thinking about what journalists do and why journalism matters. (Arguably, in contrast, this is why public journalism is more consistent with the public aims and philosophy of democratic journalism.)
What would it take to remake journalism education, to deemphasize technique and thus deprofessionalize it in Carey’s spirit, yet retain the necessary commitment to ethics? First, it would require free-spirited debate over the nature of journalism and over the curriculum. The curriculum, of course, can change. But as necessary as change is, it shouldn’t result from top-down mandates. If journalism and citizens require democracy, debate, and inquiry, so do journalism educators and education. Of course, this means that journalism is not marketing. Readers are citizens, not consumers. Indeed, I would not have thought any of these ideas controversial--but Medill’s example unfortunately suggests otherwise.
It would mean educating journalists to understand and appreciate their connection to social processes. Faculties would encourage them to become more willing to listen to critique and criticism, not training them to be well-bred dispassionate business people. Again, the value of journalism ethics is not that it endows elites with special privileges but that it requires those who profess commitment to the ethics to have thought about it, a lot, and in a sustained way.
Finally, and relatedly, journalism education would benefit from abandoning the anti-intellectual disdain for scholarship. It would treat intellectuals/scholars, journalists, and citizens as partners, all, as Jim Carey said, trying to make the world more intelligible. Journalism schools—like other professional schools—should not only be connected to the larger publics, but also to their universities. Jim Carey was the connection of the J-school to Columbia, but it was not modesty that led him to think that such connection should not rest on his shoulders alone. He was the model of and for this partnership. That too is part of the University tradition. Back to Digital Carey
