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Journalist’s Trade
answer for the Chinese students.
The purpose of journalism, I said to
them, is not all that different from the
larger purpose of surgery, which is
more than simply cutting people open
and sewing them back together again.
The real purpose of surgery is to heal.
Similarly, the purpose of journalism
goes beyond reporting and writing stories.
It has to do with something more
fundamental, which I have come to
think of as serving
the public
trust.
Some Chinese
journalists
and educators
are grappling
with what the
concept of a
public trust
means for their
country’s press,
but in the United
States, the notion is clearer. Or at least,
it used to be. As the authors of the First
Amendment understood, to be free,
men and women must be able to make
their own decisions, particularly their
political decisions. They understood
that people cannot have liberty without
access to information and that government,
by its inevitable nature, strives
to limit what people can know.
The relentless acquisition and independent
presentation of that information
is the public trust the press serves.
This concept even transcends democracy.
Like journalism, it is only a means.
Democracy is a system that is the political
means to liberty, just as journalism
is the professional means by which we
serve the public trust.
By declaring that teaching “the craft
of journalism is a worthy goal but clearly
insufficient,” President Bollinger makes
a useful point. Young journalists who
know how to report and write but are
ignorant of the social, historical and
theoretical context of their profession
are doomed to live in the shallows.
Similarly, journalists who have been
taught all about theory, history, ethics
and the law of the press but who cannot
go out, get the story, and write it
are equally useless and ought to be in
another line of work. Neither the one
nor the other is equipped to serve the
public trust.
As I talked with the Chinese journalism
students, increasingly it occurred
to me that whether we should be teaching
craft or academic breadth involved
the wrong choices—or if not wrong,
then irrelevant ones. The case for doing
both well is so obvious as to seem
not worth much further discussion.
The great task for us, as journalism educators, is
to equip our students with a firm sense of the
public trust—how it developed, what it means to
America, how it manifests itself or is betrayed by
the work that individual journalists and news
organizations do.
In fact, the question of whether craft
or academic breadth is a worthy and
sufficient goal “within the setting of a
great university,” strikes me like asking
whether it is best for young people to
join the Army or the Navy when the
military already has been hijacked by a
half dozen warlords. I use “a half dozen”
advisedly. That’s the number of corporations
that Ben Bagdikian, in the sixth
edition of his book “The Media Monopoly,”
says “dominate all American
mass media” and provide “the country’s
most widespread news, commentary
and entertainment.”
The fact that fewer and fewer corporations
own more and more of the
media is scarcely a secret. Nor is it a
secret that privately owned news organizations
are becoming an endangered
species and that three-quarters of the
country’s daily newspaper circulation
is the product of chains. By now, it’s
also well known that the large institutional
investors, who represent thousands
of individual investors, are concerned
with the financial performance
of news organizations and not the quality
of their journalism.
What are the implications of this for
journalism education? Some institutions
might be turning out whiz practitioners
of craft. Others might be producing
journalists rich in historical,
social and theoretical understanding.
But what does it matter if the owners of
America’s media don’t recognize the
value in the journalist’s role in serving
the public trust?
The great task for us, as journalism
educators, is to equip our students
with a firm sense of the public trust—
how it developed, what it means to
America, how it
manifests itself or
is betrayed by the
work that individual
journalists
and news organizations
do. Our
journalism programs,
departments
and schools
need to become
the places where
such concepts are
nurtured, protected and ceaselessly
advocated.
These are things I tried to get across
to the Chinese students this summer.
Despite the differences between our
systems, they sensed some fundamental
similarities. Their press, too, is in a
time of great change, as reliance on
public subsidies is being replaced by
reliance on the market.
So I said to them what I said last fall
to our students at Berkeley: A press
that is hostage to its investors is no
more a free press than one that is
hostage to government. Surely, great
universities, and even lesser ones, can
understand this. ■
William F. Woo, a 1967 Nieman
Fellow, has taught journalism at
Stanford University since 1996. He
formerly was editor of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
wioux1@stanford.edu
106 Nieman Reports / Winter 2002