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Michael Bromley, page 2
Journalism educators have too readily allowed the media to make the running. The systemic issues include the interposition of the prefix "market" in all circumstances; the substitution of "demographics" for people; the assertion of one definition of "choice" and "freedom." Media businesses strategically seek monopolies of strong extended brands: they are buccaneer Marxist-Leninists. Their chief tactics have been to screw down the costs of origination, to lay proprietary claim to everything they can, and to rigidly control distribution. The potential of the Internet threatens to derail their project, so they are successfully colonizing it and subverting its (democratic) possibilities.
Historical and contemporary evidence points to access as the key issue in the popularity of journalism. Some aspects of this imperative are pretty obvious: interactivity, graphics, design, visuality, strong narrative all facilitate access. Some dimensions yield different puzzles — should journalistic inquiry be forensic, scientific, technocratic, humanistic? All fields deal with such matters: except in rare and extreme circumstances, they do not result in the sort of turmoil which regularly besets journalism.
Why? Because journalism, with notable exceptions, still prefers to dodge the big questions, and to reduce issues of the formation of a field to simplistic polar oppositions, like craft vs. theory. Journalism education is not about practicing journalism (no more than English is about practicing English); it is about understanding journalism, of which its practice is a greater or lesser part. In this sense, practice is not just doing journalism, but being a journalist - performing in and reflecting on a vital social role.
Journalists graduating from our schools should be at least as comfortable with methodologies and theories, reflective practice and action research, as they are with inverted pyramids, split infinitives and live two-ways. Otherwise, what they are doing is useful and fun and maybe lucrative, but journalism it ain't.
Michael Bromley is Professor and Head of Journalism
at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. A former daily newspaper
journalist in the UK, he was the Howard Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism
at the University of Michigan in 2000-2001.
