Peter Parisi: "Liberal Arts and Journalism"

Parisi, Peter. "Critical Studies, the Liberal Arts, and Journalism Education." Journalism Educator, Winter 1992, Vol. 46 Issue 4, pp. 4-13. pp. 5-7:

Liberal arts and journalism

The liberal arts are fundamentally and persistently critical. Liberal arts study may indeed have responded historically to vocational opportunities,(2) but the liberal arts college insofar as it deserves the name does not "train" but "educates." It remains centrally "an institution created for the critical examination by professional minds of tenets, principles, laws, dogmas, and ideas that make up the ever varying body of truth" (Jones, 1967).

Liberal arts education "preserves truth by perpetually subjecting conventional assumptions to critical analysis, discarding fallacies, and retaining as valid only the information or the general statements that pass severe, impersonal, and professional testing, and it extends truth by pushing forward, into the unknown, task forces of professionally trained persons who are skilled in distinguishing fact from assumption" (p. 15).

Some journalism educators would contend that journalism and journalism education fulfill this spirit just as they are. Mencher (1990) defended the liberal arts values embodied in journalism by pointing to key critical qualities: "the premise that a rational, independent approach to problems will turn up useful, sometimes essential information," " a scientific approach—objectivity of observation, verifiability, exactness of description," "demand[ing] proof of assertion," and freedom "from the bonds of bias and unreasoned conviction" [p. 66]. Journalism, Mencher says, is "the university's center of Enlightenment values, the focus of a truly liberal education" (p. 66; see also Merrill, 1962; Wilcox, 1959; Higginbotham, 1961).

But at the same time, journalism educators are not entirely comfortable with the critical spirit. Would it create Hamlet-reporters, so sensitive that they cannot write? Lance (1961) worried that "the heady perfume of aesthetics" might "cripple the student's news sense" (p. 87). And Meyer (1986) described a student answering an ethics question, so freighted with virtue he couldn't see any way to write a story.

In an important sense, journalism does not "critically examine tenets, principles, laws and dogmas." Tuchman (1978) notes that "dependence upon accepted understandings of the social world [is] intrinsic to news" (p. 88). Journalism posits events as "understandable in themselves" (Benjamin, 1969, p. 89), and for the same reason has been called "empiricism without science" (Nord, 1990, p. 26).

Journalists may pride themselves on criticizing public officials, but the standards of criticism must be based narrowly on existing law and regulation. And journalism is notoriously uncritical of the larger framework of this very law or the context of social problems. Journalistic writing achieves the appearance of objectivity precisely by pruning away context, by fragmenting events and framing them within terms that can achieve immediate public assent. Tenets, principles, and laws are hard to fit in a news story.

Journalists make it their social role to suppress personal opinion in order to mediate between sources and the public. They are to be objective, or, if that seems too pretentious, impartial and balanced. They "get sources from both sides." They define events by asking questions about measurable facts (the five W's and H); they gather information most often, not through their critical assessment of published literature, but through personal interviews with sources (and "a reporter is only as good as his or her sources").

Finally as Tuchman and others have shown, journalists do not really claim to find the truth but only to state the fact that Source A made Statement X (though this caution does not prevent codes of ethics and rhetorical fervor in which journalists proclaim their dedication to the pursuit to an apparently uncomplicated truth.)

Journalistic method entails a partial neutralization of the intellect in the name of public discussion. As Sandman said, "The reporter makes a principled decision not to think" (1988; see also Sandman, 1986). This formulation isolates the social value, the principle, that motivates journalists, but at the same times reveals the nub of the contradiction between traditional journalism education and the liberal arts. Journalism education that uncritically inculcates the objective method is, in a significant sense, an education in how "not to think."

True, most journalism educators urge students to put facts in context, but it is relatively rare that the journalism curriculum examines the dimensions and limits of journalism as a rhetorical method of examining social experience.

The problem is compounded when we reflect that the theory of knowledge that underlies journalistic objectivity ignores the most important currents in contemporary thought. In journalism, the gathering and description of "truth" is straightforward and, philosophically if not practically, unproblematic. Journalism treats facts as simple things. But as Tuchman (1978) points out:

"taken by itself, a fact has no meaning. Indeed, even 'two and two equal four' is factual only within certain mathematical systems or theories. It is the imposition of a frame of other ordered facts that enables recognition of and attribution of meaning (p. 88)."

This view reflects the most significant contemporary developments in anthropology, philosophy (including philosophy of science), literary theory, sociology, and other disciplines. Truth is not "found" but is defined by the very methodologies, languages, technologies, cultural assumptions, economic imperatives, and literary systems through which it is sought and represented. For liberal study, facts, knowledge and the truth are not "out there" but are socially constructed.(3)

Forms of writing and interpretation, such as journalism, are seen to take shape within a specific social (as opposed to institutional) history. Thus Schudson (1978) can show how objectivity itself "became an ideal in journalism ... precisely when the impossibility of overcoming subjectivity had come to be regarded as inevitable" (p. 157). It is because journalism and journalism education so systematically ignore this truly critically understanding that Birkhead (1985) observes:

"handling news is not a way of exploring and reporting the world that stands on its own merits as an epistemological method. In the university setting, it often demands less creativity and aptitude than other forms of observation, research, judgment and expression that may be demanded of students during their academic careers. Many journalism departments operate in intellectual isolation, closer in spirit to the media they serve from a distance than to the university community within which they reside (p. 35; see also Birkhead, 1986)."

Since journalism education ignores its own larger historical and cultural dimensions, it cannot coherently reinforce the liberal arts curriculum.

(2) As Nash (1944) points out, even the most classical liberal arts subjects arose in a vocational context: "a liberal arts course based on the synoptic study of classical culture provided the vocational training of future leaders in Church and State" (p. 399). Higginbotham (1961) and Merrill (1962) make the same point to deflect criticism of journalism vocationalism (see also, McCall, 1987; Jones, 1986).

(3) Providing references for this observation requires almost a course in the intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries. The following selected works may serve, however, to suggest ways in which conditions of the act of knowing are recognized to govern what is known: Kant (1929 [1781]); Freud (1953 [1924]); Cassirer (1970; Mannheim (1936); Heisenberg (1958); Berger and Luckmann (1966); Foucault (1972).