[Fresh Ink] Can journalism schools be relevant in a world on the brink?

[Richard Menec]

http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3984

Can journalism schools be relevant in a world on the brink?

September, 16 2009

By Robert Jensen

Journalism schools have much in common with the mainstream news media they 
traditionally serve. As the business model for conventional corporate 
journalism collapses and digital technologies reshape the media landscape, 
journalism schools struggle with parallel problems around curricula and 
personnel.

As I begin my third decade of teaching journalism, I hear more and more 
students doubting the relevance of journalism schools -- for good reasons. 
The best of our students are worried not just about whether they can find a 
job after graduation but also whether those jobs will allow them to 
contribute to shaping a decent future for a world on the brink.

Can journalism and journalism education be relevant as it becomes increasing 
clear that the political, economic, and social systems that structure our 
world are failing us on all counts? Do these institutions have the capacity 
to see past the problems of falling ad revenues and outdated curricula, and 
struggle to understand the crises of our age? Can journalists and journalism 
educators find the courage to grapple with these challenges?

The question isn't whether journalism and education are important in a 
democratic society but whether the institutions in which those two endeavors 
traditionally have been carried out can adapt -- not only to the specific 
changes in that industry, but to that world in crisis.

My answer is a tentative "yes, but" -- only if both enterprises jettison the 
illusions of neutrality that have hampered their ability to monitor the 
centers of power for citizens and model real critical thinking for students.

Journalism's business problems provide an opportunity for journalism 
education to remake itself, which should start with a declaration of 
independence from the mainstream media and a renunciation of the corporate 
media's allegiances to the existing power structure. Our only hope is in 
getting radical, going to the root of the problems.

Toward that end, I proposed a new mission statement to my faculty colleagues 
in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. I argued 
that by stating bluntly the nature of the crises we face in today's world 
and breaking with our longstanding subordination to the industry, we could 
offer an exciting alternative to students who don't want to repeat the 
failures of our generation.

It quickly became clear that while some colleagues agreed with some aspects 
of the statement below, only a handful would endorse it as a mission 
statement. Some disagreed with my assessment of the crises we face, while 
others thought it politically ill-advised to criticize the industry and 
corporate power so directly. But nothing in that discussion dissuaded me 
from my conclusion that if journalism education is to be relevant in the 
coming decades, we must change course dramatically.

So, I offer this mission statement to a broader audience as one starting 
point for debate about the future of journalism schools, which must be 
connected to a discussion about the fundamental distribution of wealth and 
power in the larger world. Journalism alone can't turn around a dying 
culture, of course, but it can be part of the process by which a more just 
and sustainable alternative emerges.

Journalism for Justice/Storytelling for Sustainability: News Media Education 
for a New Future

Schools of journalism must recognize that our work goes forward in a society 
facing multiple crises -- political and cultural, economic and ecological. 
These crises are not the product of temporary downturns but evidence of a 
permanent decline if the existing systems and structures of power continue 
on their present trajectory.

These failing systems produce too little equality within the human family 
and too much devastation in the larger ecosystem. We face a world that is 
profoundly unjust in the distribution of wealth and power, and fundamentally 
unsustainable in our use of the ecological resources of the planet. The task 
of journalism is to deepen our understanding of these challenges and 
communicate that understanding to the public to foster the meaningful 
dialogue necessary for real democracy.

The best traditions of journalism are based in resistance to the 
illegitimate structures of authority at the heart of our problems. From 
Thomas Paine to Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell, the most 
revered journalists have had the courage to take a stand for ordinary people 
and against arrogant concentrations of power. But today, commercial 
journalism is constrained by diversionary and deceptive claims to 
neutrality, leaving journalists trapped in a corporate-defined and -directed 
subservience to the status quo. Increasingly we live with a journalism that 
rarely speaks truth to power and routinely echoes the platitudes of the 
powerful. Even when journalists raise critical questions, too often it is 
within the parameters set by the wealthy and their political allies.

In a world in which an increasingly predatory global corporate economy 
leaves half the population living on less than $2.50 a day, can we ignore 
the call for justice? In a world in which all indicators of the health of 
the ecosystem that makes our lives possible are in dramatic decline, can we 
ignore the cry of the living world? Mass media have a moral responsibility 
to produce journalism for justice and storytelling for sustainability.

As the journalism industry faces a broken business model and struggles for 
solutions, there are great opportunities to reshape journalism to serve 
people and the planet, following the traditions of the spirited independent 
journalists of the past and present. The curriculum for this should not only 
offer training for a job but also inspire a collective search for the values 
and ideas that can animate a just and sustainable society. We invite you to 
join us in this exciting time for journalism. By remembering the 
inspirational lessons of our past and facing honestly the problems of the 
present, we help make possible a new future in which justice and 
sustainability define not just our dreams but our lives.

A note to critics: Some might argue that this mission statement threatens to 
"politicize the classroom." This kind of complaint is based on the naïve 
notion that a curriculum in the humanities and social sciences can be 
magically constructed outside of, and unaffected by, the distribution of 
wealth and power in the larger society. The choices that go into all 
teaching -- from the identification of relevant problems, to the selection 
of appropriate materials, to the analyses offered in lectures -- are based 
on claims about the nature of a good life and a good society. The important 
questions are whether instructors are open with students about how those 
choices are made and can justify those choices on intellectual grounds. In 
other words, there is a politics to all teaching, but good teaching is more 
than the assertion of one's politics.

When a department constructs a curriculum that supports the existing 
distribution of wealth and power, challenges rarely arise. Perhaps the most 
politicized departments on any college campus are in the business school, 
where the highly ideological assertions of corporate capitalism are rarely 
challenged and the curriculum is built on that ideology. In a healthy 
educational institution with real academic freedom, we should encourage a 
diversity of approaches to complex questions. This mission statement 
identifies problems and suggests we consider the systemic and structural 
roots of those problems without asserting simplistic solutions. Such an 
approach honors the best traditions in journalism and scholarship, offering 
a path for struggling with difficult questions rather than dictating 
simplistic answers.

----------------------

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism of the University 
of Texas at Austin and a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource 
Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. His latest book is All My Bones 
Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice (Soft Skull Press, 
2009). He also is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of 
Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting 
Race, Racism and White Privilege (City Lights, 2005); Citizens of the 
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing 
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter 
Lang, 2002). Jensen can be reached at rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu and his 
articles can be found online at 
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html.