Saturday, February 04, 2006

The Media's Ancien Regime: Columbia Journalism School tries to save the old order

Excerpt from a close-up look by Hugh Hewitt. He thinks that journalists are doomed by their bias and lack of specialized knowledge to permanent low status. He finds that Columbia is trying to deepen their knowledge-base but thinks that they are still going to be largely uncomprehending of most of the things they write about

To enter Columbia University's graduate school of journalism is to enter the highest temple of a religion in decline. A statue of Thomas Jefferson guards the plaza outside the doors, and the entry room is suitably grand. Two raised platforms proclaim the missions in bold gold letters: "To Uphold Standards of Excellence in Journalism" and "To Educate the Next Generation of Journalists." The marble floor tells you that the school was endowed by Joseph Pulitzer and erected in 1912 in memory of his daughter Lucille. A bronze quotation from Pulitzer's 1904 cri de coeur in the North American Review is on the wall:

Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve the public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. . . .

There is a new high priest in the dean's office on the seventh floor--Nicholas Lemann, veteran writer for the New Yorker, and before that the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, where he spent 15 years after stints at the Texas Monthly, the Washington Post, and the Washington Monthly. Lemann began his scribbling for a New Orleans alternative weekly, the Vieux Carr, Courier, while still a high school student, covering everything from boxing to city hall to the private school network of the region. Upon entering Harvard in 1972, he immediately "comped" for the Crimson, only to be rejected in his application to join the editorial board of the greatest brand in undergraduate newspapers. "Harvard is filled with this sort of humiliation," Lemann told me in a conversation last fall that capped a two-day visit to the school. He reapplied for a position as a reporter, and the second time was successful, rising through the ranks to become the paper's president in the 1975-76 academic year. Now 51 and two years into a new career, Lemann will need the same persistence if his legacy as dean is to be something other than a footnote in the history of the decline of American media power.

On my first day at Columbia's graduate school of journalism (CSJ), the poster boy for all that has come to plague elite American media--former CBS anchor Dan Rather--took to the podium at Fordham Law School to denounce the "new journalism order." On day two, the New York Times Company announced a cut of 500 employees from its already pared down workforce of 12,300. (The company employed 13,750 as recently as 2001.) On that same day Knight-Ridder slashed its Philadelphia papers' editorial staff by 75 positions at the Inquirer and 25 at the Daily News. "I get 50 calls a day about the crisis in journalism," Lemann deadpanned when I posed the "crisis" question. "Only 50?" I thought.

The story of what is going on at CSJ cannot be separated from the collapse of credibility of the mainstream media, also known as "elite media" and "old media" among its detractors. The fortunes of the big five papers--the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the old TV networks and big weekly newsmagazines--are visibly in decline. The upstart blogosphere is ever at the ready to "deconstruct" the work product of the old media's old guard. The very best investigative reporting is being done not by big names at the big papers, but by people like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies' journalist in residence Claudia Rosett, who almost singlehandedly unraveled the U.N.-Saddam Oil-for-Food scandal, with much of her work published online. Dan Rather's CBS, eager to impugn George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard, got duped by fraudulent documents it took months to obtain and only hours for bloggers and readers to shred.

This story in its small way partakes of the seismic shift underway. Its origin is an email request from Lemann last spring: Would I be willing to be the subject of a New Yorker profile? I agreed, on the condition that I could have reciprocal access to Lemann and the Columbia Journalism School for this piece. Hedged with some qualifiers--he could not commit any of his faculty to talk to me or guarantee access to classrooms, though everyone proved to be very welcoming--Lemann agreed.

Reactions to his profile of me varied among family and friends, but I thought it complete and fair. Before I sat down with Lemann I had read everything he'd written for the New Yorker and was impressed with his profiles of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. (The Cheney profile earned Lemann some animosity among colleagues, who thought him too gentle with the only man the left fears as much as Rove.) The scorn on the center-right for the "objectivity" and "professionalism" of the mainstream media is deep and sincere. I went to Columbia to see if Lemann was the exception that proves the rule, and to test the rule itself. What's the rule? That the elite media are hopelessly biased to the left and so blind to their own deficiencies, or so in denial, that they cannot save themselves from irrelevance. They're like the cheater in the clubhouse, whose every mention of a great round of golf is met with rolling eyes and knowing nods....

Soon Mike Hoyt, executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, arrives. With Michael Shapiro, Hoyt team-teaches the class "Advanced Reporting," into which Wallace and 15 other students are headed, and introduces me to Shapiro, who quickly welcomes me to observe the hour. Shapiro is a gifted teacher who, three weeks into the term, already knows all of his students' names and engages them with ease and good humor. The first half of this hour is given over to outlining a large assignment--a profile of some recently deceased person or the reconstruction of a crime. Shapiro is clearly hoping the students will go for the profile, and spends considerable time instructing his charges on how they might go about selecting their subject.

He fences his instructions with cautions about engaging the bereaved ("You need to know, but you can't be a vampire") and tips on tracing the details of the life to be profiled. Hoyt contributes key bits of experience, and the students are curious and attentive to these practical lessons. "You need to make your first phone call today," Shapiro insists. "Tomorrow becomes the next day, which becomes next week. Good reporters make the first call on the first day."

The 16 students are not evenly split--there are 14 women and just two men. Two-thirds of the M.S. class this year are women, a reflection of what Lemann calls the "feminization" of journalism programs across the country. Robert Mac Donald, the assistant dean for admissions and financial aid, ran down the demographics for me: The average age of an M.S. student is just shy of 28, the mean is 26, the youngest is 20, and the oldest is 63. Whites make up 69 percent of the new class; 11 percent are African American, 7 percent Hispanic, 6 percent Asian, 3 percent Middle Eastern, and 4 percent South Asian. The school doesn't yet keep stats on religious background, though Mac Donald believes there has been a significant increase in Muslim students post 9/11. A fifth of the students are from the New York area, and between 37 to 40 percent are from "the corridor"--from Boston to Washington. Another fifth are from the west coast, and 10 percent are foreign. It is a pretty "blue" student body, and willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of their credentials. A year at CSJ--tuition, living expenses, incidentals--comes to $59,404 according to Mac Donald, though 85 percent of the students receive some financial aid, with packages ranging from $1,000 to $50,000. The average scholarship is $5,200, which means that these students are putting a lot of money into the program.

The "blue" nature of the student body is further confirmed by my polling of the class I attended, done with the permission of Shapiro. Six of the 16 were English majors, two studied history, and the balance spread across the humanities. No one had a background in the physical sciences. No one owned a gun. All supported same-sex marriage. Three had been in a house of worship the previous week. Six read blogs. None of them recognized the phrase "Christmas Eve in Cambodia"--though Shapiro not only got the allusion but knew the date of the John Kerry Senate speech in which he made the false claim about his Vietnam war experience. Three quarters of them hope to make more than $100,000 as a journalist, 11 had voted for John Kerry, and one for George Bush (three are from abroad and not eligible, and one didn't vote for either candidate). I concluded by asking them if they "think George Bush is something of a dolt." There was unanimous agreement with this proposition, one of the widely shared views within elite media and elsewhere on the left. The president's Harvard MBA and four consecutive victories over Democrats judged "smarter" than him haven't made even a dent in that prejudice....

"Authority is a construct," Lemann tells me on my second day at the school. And the "authority" of journalism with the American public is clearly at a modern low point. Lemann intends to reconstruct journalism's shaky reputation via an infusion of specific and measurable skills--either you can or you can't do regression analysis; either you can or you can't follow a case citation sequence or decode an annual audit report--and thus ignite a demand among editors not for the bright young reporters from campus newspapers, but for really smart alums of graduate schools of all sorts who can be tempted into the field despite its pay and present status somewhere near the carnival barker's...

Every conversation with one of the old guard citing the old proof texts comes down to this point: There is too much expertise, all of it almost instantly available now, for the traditional idea of journalism to last much longer. In the past, almost every bit of information was difficult and expensive to acquire and was therefore mediated by journalists whom readers and viewers were usually in no position to second-guess. Authority has drained from journalism for a reason. Too many of its practitioners have been easily exposed as poseurs.

More here





Other People's Money Poisons Higher Education

Supporters of the statist quo usually recoil in anguish from the idea of deregulation. They can be counted on to try to discredit it at almost every turn. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education does just that. In "The Lessons of Deregulation" (January 20), Gordon Davies, director of the National Collaborative for Postsecondary Education Policy, argues that the United States should not copy the "deregulation" of higher education that has occurred in New Zealand, calling it "market experiment gone bad." That phrase caught my attention; in my view, true market experiments that go bad are rarer than alligators in the Yukon. So what was going on?

The "market experiment," Davies notes, was New Zealand's policy, beginning in 1989, of allowing a proliferation of postsecondary educational institutions, only some of which grant degrees, to tap into . . . state funding. The idea was to encourage greater consumer choice. The result, of course, was an explosion of sub-degree programs. In just a few years government grants to such programs went from half of what was provided to degree-granting institutions to parity.

As Davies points out, many if not all of the sub-degree (or certificate) programs are flimsy academically. Davies provides a number of excellent examples, including funding for "Maori singalong courses" and programs in "golf studies." One polytechnic institute scammed more than $9 million for a course that consisted of nothing more than sending students a CD for them to study at home. Davies concludes that this policy of "deregulation" has been enormously wasteful, writing, "[T]he money in New Zealand is now spread out over so many institutions and so many programs of questionable value that support for important but high-cost programs -- like those in medicine, computer science, and engineering -- is unrealistically low."

Undoubtedly, a lot of higher-education money is being wasted in New Zealand, but it's an abuse of English to call this policy a "market experiment." Yes, free markets maximize choice for consumers, but another condition is necessary: that consumers spend their own money. You don't really have a free market where the government puts money in people's pockets and then says, "You're free to spend it here, here, and here."

Davies worries that similar "market experiments" might spread to the United States. He notes that in several states, policymakers are asking for greater autonomy for public universities. "Colorado, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and others have been lured by the call of the open market," he says. Better not allow it, he cautions, at least not without making sure that the state keeps enough control to fulfill "a public agenda that meets the needs of [its] residents." Davies proceeds to praise Virginia because it ties "deregulation" of its institutions to commitments to "provide greater access regardless of student income, to improve retention and completion rates, to increase research support, to create partnerships with schools, and to be actively involved in economic development."

When politicians write legislation that aims at pleasant-sounding but vague objectives, they hardly ever accomplish anything. "Greater access" means trying to get a few more marginal students into college rather than into the job market on the assumption that more formal education is always better -- but it isn't. "Improving retention and completion" means efforts to keep weak students from dropping out -- on the same assumption. The result is primarily to increase the number of college graduates with poor skills who will end up taking "high school" jobs. (That trend is documented in Who's Not Working and Why by economists Frederick Pryor and David Schaffer, who lament the low standards of American higher education.) Putting more money into "research" sounds good, but a lot of the research that goes on in our universities is of negligible value. "Partnership" with schools (government schools, that is) won't do anything to overcome the inherent flaws in government-run education. And it is mission creep to call on universities to become involved in economic development, which, if needed, will happen spontaneously.

More to the point, though, even if some or all of those policy notions worked, they would not solve the problem of higher-education dollars being drained away into academically feeble programs and courses. That started happening long before anyone was talking about "deregulation." American colleges and universities have majors like golf-course and casino management -- perfectly useful fields in which on-the-job training has always been adequate. They also have had lots of "identity" programs -- Women's Studies, African-American Studies, "Latina/o Studies," and so on -- that don’t transmit a body of knowledge to students, but attempt to engender certain attitudes of resentment. And they have numerous vapid courses on pop culture. Just as in New Zealand great amounts of money are spent on the equivalent of educational junk food. Why?

As Milton Friedman says, 'No one spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own." When it comes to education, students (and parents) are largely spending taxpayer money. Davies correctly observes that students are not wise decision-makers: "Too many naive young people will opt for the offer of a free cellphone or for a 'fun' program like surfing rather than select the education that they truly need." That's undoubtedly true, and all the more reason not to put young people in a position to squander other people's money.

The recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy shows that despite the prodigious sums lavished on education, we have a startling low level of literacy in this country, even among people with college degrees. If parents, students, and other interested parties were putting up their own money, they would take far more care than they do now to assure that it wasn’t being wasted on educational cotton candy. Because education is mostly paid for by government, however, many students drag out their years of formal schooling, often accomplishing less in 16 years than people a century ago did in eight.

If we are serious about the waste of education dollars, we ought to focus our attention on the real problem -- government funding. There is nothing wrong with greater consumer choice in higher education, as long as the people who make the choices are spending their own money.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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