WHY JOURNALISM ISN'T A PROFESSION

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[50 years ago last summer, your editor covered his first story in
Washington. Throughout the year, the Review will exhume some of his
writings]

[From the DC Gazette in the 1970s]

SAM SMITH - It was nice to learn the other day that the National Labor
Relations Board agrees with me that journalists are not "professionals."
The ruling came in a labor dispute over which union reporters and other
newspaper workers should join. The NLRB probably didn't mean to, but it
nonetheless struck a small blow for freedom of the press -- and the rest
of the country as well. One of the most serious of the infinite
misapprehensions suffered by reporters is that they are somehow akin to
lawyers, doctors and engineers. They long for initial letters after
their name.

As late as the 1950s more than half of all reporters lacked a college
degree. Since that time there has been increasing emphasis on
professionalism in journalism; witness the growth of journalism schools,
the proliferation of turgid articles on the subject, and the
preoccupation with "objectivity" and other "ethical issues." There has
also been an interesting parallel growth in monopolization of the press.

Among the common characteristics of professions is that they are closed
shops and have strong monopolistic tendencies. The more training
required to enter a field, the more you can weed out socially,
politically, and philosophically unsuitable candidates; and armed with a
set of rules politely known as canons or codes of ethics but also
operating as an agreement for the restraint of trade, one can eliminate
much of the competition.

The professional aspirations of such formerly unpretentious occupations
as journalism, teaching and politics is one of the most dangerous of the
numerous anti-democratic currents of the day. Professionals hoard
knowledge and use it as a form of monopolistic capital. For example, one
of the most constructive ways to improve health in the country is
through preventive action and personal habits, which depend upon
widespread information and education. Yet it has been largely through
governmental intervention (the FDA, EPA, etc.), renegade doctors so few
they are household words, investigating legislators, health nuts and
consumer groups that the country began to understand that health is not
something that you buy from a doctor. The medical profession regarded
this as a trade secret.

Lawyers have been more successful in withstanding the democratic spirit.
The fact that there are ways of dealing with civil disputes and
community justice other than in the traditional legal adversary system
is still not widely known. Through semantic obfuscation, a stranglehold
over our courts and legislatures, and an arcane collection of
self-serving contradictions known as law, attorneys have managed to turn
human disputation from a mere cottage industry into a significant factor
in the gross national product.

The First Amendment says nothing about objectivity, professional
standards, national news councils, blind quotes, deep backgrounders or
how much publicity to give a trial. Its authors understood far better
than many contemporary editors and journalistic commentators that the
pursuit of truth can not be codified and that circumscribing the nature
of the search will limit the potential of its success. Nor can there be
an institutionalization of the search for the truth; it always comes
back to the will and ability of individuals.

Check a reporter's bookshelf and you'll find a dictionary, Bartlett's, a
thesaurus and, perhaps, Strunk & White and lots of junk reading. No
stacks of maroon or blue texts with thin gold titles like "Compton on
Trial Coverage." Doctors need such tomes and lawyers have made it
necessary to themselves to have them. But journalism does not depend
upon the retrieval of institutionalized stores of knowledge, and won't
-- until we presume to know as much, as definitively, about the working
of human society as a doctor must know about the workings of the
stomach.

Journalism has always been a craft - in rare moments, an art - but never
a profession. It depends too much on the perception, skill, empathy and
honesty of the practitioner rather than on the acquisition of technical
knowledge and skills.

The techniques of reporting can be much more easily taught than these
human qualities and they can be best learned in an apprentice-like
situation rather than in a classroom. Too many reporters have nothing
but technique. Trained not to take sides, to be "balanced," they lose
the human passion that makes up the better part of the world about which
they write. They are taught to surrender values such as commitment,
anger and delight that make the world go round and thus become
peculiarly unqualified to describe the rotation. Disengaged, their
writing is not fair but just vacuously neutral on the surface while
culturally biased underneath.

All memory of the newspaper trade short of printing could be wiped out
and in a matter of days someone would start publishing a newspaper
again, and probably a good one. Someone would want to tell a story.

The institution of journalism functions like all large institutions; it
is greedy, self-promoting, and driven towards the acquisition of power.
The thing that has saved it has been the integrity and craft of
individual journalists. Preserving that integrity and that craft is not
only important to reporters but to everyone, for when reporters become
merely agents of an overly powerful profession, democracy loses one of
its most important allies, free journalists practicing their craft.

PERMALINK
http://prorev.com/jcraft.htm

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