Exhibit JC42 - The Leveson Inquiry

For Distribution to CPsThe importance and meaning of the London University Diploma for Journalism courseThe IoJ was able to call upon American professors of journalism in 1908and 1919 when they sought advice about setting up British universityschools of journalism. The American journalist Walter Lippmannconveniently wrote about the subject in his book Liberty and the Newswhich appeared originally in the Atlantic Monthly, in 1919. 7o He posed therhetorical question about schools of journalism asking ’how far can we go inturning newspaper enterprise from a haphazard trade into a disciplinedprofession?’ That he posed such a question in the very year that theLondon University introduced the Diploma for Journalism makes his answerappear even more remarkable today, when the American JournalismSchools are firmly established: ’Quite far, I imagine, for it is altogetherunthinkable that a society like ours should remain forever dependent uponuntrained accidental witnesses. ’71He saw such a university connection contributing to the demise of ’thecynicism of the trade’ replaced by ’patient and fearless men of science whohave laboured to see what the world really is.’ While reminding ourselves ofthe time in which he spoke, and of the undercurrent of objectivity related toscientific endeavour, it goes a long way to helping us understand thebewilderment some Americans, especially professors of journalism,express, when they read what passes as fair comment in Britishnewspapers. While lip-service is paid to ’objective news facts’ by Britishjournalists they rarely experienced real teaching of the ’Objective NewsFact Concept’ as ~ropounded by such American journalist educators asFrank Luther Mott.In the author’s opinion American journalists must feel what an Englishjournalist described after he experienced ’the carefully trained...standardized technique.., taught in the Schools of Journalism, ’73 that’competitive sensationalism’ still rules in England when, in America, the’tendency is towards a more serious kind of journalismf 4 It is instructive toremind ourselves that the author, a respected British journalism, J.A.Spender, was writing in 1928 when the journalist education movement waswell established in the American universities.The News Study Group of the Political Sciences Department of theMassachusetts Institute of Technology provided a useful explanation ofwhat this difference, between English and American forms of journalism,means: ’... the notion of objective reporting took over American journalismin the early twentieth century and helped improve much of the newscoverage. Reporters were to become professionals and stay sober; theywere not to pay for stories; they were not to impersonate law officials oranyone else in the pursuit of news; they were to forsake sensationalismand cheap thrills. Above all they were not to take sides or slant theirstories.’75The author Edwin Diamond was himself a former journalist, anddescribed how the ’objective journalism’ took for its model the medicaldoctors and that ’this model corrected many unsavoury practices in thepress itself.., not unlike (those) in the majority of countries in the worldtodayf 6 For Diamond the reason for this different form of journalism wasso obvious he did not state it, but Donald H. Johnston, of the ColumbiaUniversity Graduate School of Journalism, did set this in the context of196MOD100051367