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Where Have the Journalists Gone?
Conservatives and progressives alike lament the "dumbing down" of news. Studies chronicle a marked decrease in foreign news and investigative reporting. Some blame the "corporatization" of the news business for the devolving news landscape. Media educators Mark Crispin Miller and Robert Jensen say today's journalism schools are complicit.

Discussion:  Are journalism schools part of the battleground for building a better media?

Robert Jensen is a Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity" (Amazon; Powells; BookSense).

Indy: You teach journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. Do journalism schools teach students to be critical journalists, or are they part of the problem in perpetuating the flaws of the corporate media?

Robert Jensen: Like any trade school, a journalism school tends to reproduce the ideology of the industry it serves. That's not surprising, given that most of the faculty come out of the industry and share the same worldview and the institution is set up for that purpose. So, most journalism schools have made a kind of corrupt bargain with mainstream corporate commercial news media: The school subsidizes some of the training costs of the industry and indoctrinates students into the narrative of "journalism as the bulwark of democracy," while conveniently ignoring the ways in which journalists are increasingly boxed out of actually performing their role as critical monitors of power in a democracy. This makes it easier for the industry to employ idealistic students at low wages with heavy work loads. In return, the industry employs the graduates of journalism schools and gives some donations, both through the media corporations and the foundations those corporations often establish.

The result is the journalism faculty, on average, may voice some concerns about the corporatization of journalism but cannot, or will not, critique the fundamental issues of structure and ideology. Journalism schools are not just a part of the problem but are at the heart of the problem.

I try to support my students' idealism, but also help them be realistic about the world in which they live and will work.

You have been listed by a Young Conservatives group in Texas on a "Professor Watch” list; what do you think is the impact on your colleagues' willingness to express controversial ideas, when they may be denounced globally on a watch list?

That watch-list, and other attacks on me by various right-wing individuals and groups, have had no effect on my work. I am tenured, and I continue to teach and write in the same fashion I always have. But such watch-lists and coordinated attacks on left/progressive faculty clearly have an effect on graduate students and junior faculty, who see the potential consequences of stepping out of line and challenging the corporate/patriotic ideology, and get scared. That's understandable. What is hard to understand is the timidity of tenured faculty members, who sometimes whisper critical ideas in the hallway but so often remain silent in public. Actually it's not that hard to understand; extremely privileged people tend, on average, not to want to disrupt the source of their privilege.

Do you see the Internet as a solution to the problem of media consolidation? Does the web offer an alternative so that we don't need to address corporate control of the media?

The Internet is a valuable communication tool, but it – like any technology – cannot solve the problems of a society. The key is, as always, political education and organizing. The web can help in that, but in the end I believe it is face-to-face human connections that build movements, bolster people's willingness to take risks, and make progressive social change happen. The struggle to keep as much of the web commercial-free as possible is important, but we shouldn't mistake that for the final goal. That's something that can help us reach the goal of a more just society.

Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media Ecology at New York University and the author of many books, including "The Bush Dyslexicon" (Amazon; Powells; BookSense) and " Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order" (Amazon; Powells; BookSense).

Indy: You've created media maps in the past to show visually the power of growing media consolidation. How does this monopolization of the media affect what news we get?

Mark Crispin Miller: Enormously. In part, it represents the major worsening of a problem that bedeviled the commercial press decades before conglomeration: the hidden (that is, hidden from the public) influence of advertisers in the newsroom. This has been a problem for as long as we have had an advertising-driven press system; Upton Sinclair wrote about it in "The Brass Check," which came out toward the end of World War One. While the press was still dependent more on circulation (and federal printing subsidies) than on advertising, it was reader-oriented, with its news based not on fiscal but on partisan considerations. Once it was mainly advertising-based, the news became a service to the press' corporate sponsors not the public. This process was more or less complete by 1913.

The problem hasn't changed, but grown much, much worse in the new media cartels. Now that the parent companies' various news divisions are routinely squeezed for profit, the goodwill of the advertisers is even more important than it used to be; and so you have, say, Monsanto getting Roger Ailes to yank a couple of local Fox reporters from a big environmental story; or Philip Morris pressuring ABC News to disavow a sound report on nicotine in cigarettes. There are countless examples of such interference.

And of course the parent companies are themselves huge advertisers, with interests of all kinds – interests that must not be threatened by the journalists who also work within the corporation. So GE stays away from stories of all kinds, from nuclear reactors to the Iraq war (GE being the world's largest defense contractor) to the pollution of the Hudson River to numerous other corporate crimes. Ditto re: ABC News' treatment of Disney, CBS on Viacom, CNN on Time Warner, and so on.

Worst of all, the parent companies each have a vested interest in maintaining warm relations with the government, so that they can get the kind of regulation that they like the best: i.e., the kind that lets them grow still larger. Although it's not the only factor, this desire to be well-liked by the regime in power has meant a drastic bias in favor of the Bush administration, and, more generally, right-wing Republicans. (The culture trust has done quite well with Democrats, of course; Al Gore, according to the British press, was Rupert Murdoch's personal choice for president in 2000. But since the Busheviks are more explicitly and radically "free-market," the corporate press has favored them to an astonishing degree.) The "news" in the United States today is all too often very hard to tell from rightist propaganda – a fact as pertinent to the New York Times and Washington Post (both of which are would-be media colossi) as to Fox or CNN or NBC.

Why do you think the media have been so reluctant to criticize George W. Bush, despite all of his goofs?

For the reasons given above; and, as well, for other, related reasons: the winning propaganda drive against "the liberal media"; the corruption of the Washington press corps (who are too rich and famous for our own good); the inordinate source-dependency of U.S. journalism; the cultural primacy of TV, which trades in "mood" and catchy visuals and shouting heads; the lack of any genuinely public system, which would stand as an alternative. Also, to be frank, outright intimidation of the press by Bushevik enforcers. It has happened in Iraq, where non-embedded journalists attempt to do their jobs at their own risk. It happens here, albeit not through violence (as far as we know).

All these factors have created an environment in which it simply seems to make more sense to toe the line than cross it. It's a matter less of outright interference from on high (although that certainly does happen) than of employees developing that crucial instinct for not saying or doing anything that might do harm to their careers.

Jon Stewart and late night shows have made comedy the most popular (and sometimes the most critical) news source for many people. Does comedy affect the mainstream media coverage? And is this comedy from late night shows really an important form of political critique?

It's hard to say whether it affects the mainstream. I reckon that everyone would like not to be derided on "The Daily Show," but when the crunch comes that desire is likely, always, to be trumped by more material concerns, such as the possibility of getting fired, the need not to alienate a source, the urge for an impressive raise, etc.

There's no doubt, though, that such comedy comprises an important opportunity for dissident opinion. It is absolutely vital that there be observers out there contradicting the official propaganda, even if it's just for laughs. Often what Jon Stewart does is to confirm, with brilliant wit, what should be obvious to everyone, but which the press will not allow itself, or us, to see. That sort of confirmation keeps sane people sane, and serves to jostle the official picture, so that millions can perceive that there's a problem with it.

As a communications professor, how do you think the education of future journalists needs to be changed in order to make them more critical reporters?

From what I've seen, the journalism programs in this country are still too professionalist, in that they train their students to get jobs, but don't prepare them for the world of journalism as it's been corrupted by big money. The students therefore are technically well-trained, but clueless as to what it now takes to succeed in journalism. In other words, the j-schools haven't bothered to instruct their students in the sad reality of journalism in America today. Outside of a few courses in "media ethics," there's very little that explains why more and more newspeople have been leaving the profession, often taking jobs that pay much less, because they simply can't stand doing the sort of garbage that the system now demands, but that the j-schools never even mentioned to them. (This problem certainly is not peculiar to the world of journalism, but applies to all the culture industries, which generally turn out to disappoint the talented and idealistic youngsters who first go to work in them.)

The j-schools basically ignore what's happened to investigative journalism since the Sixties. The best reporters in America are either working for such magazines as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, or for the BBC or else they're self-employed, or unemployed: Sy Hersh, Greg Palast, Robert Parry, Lowell Bergman, Frances Cerra, Sydney Schanberg, Carl Bernstein. Their disappearance from the mainstream is a most significant development – one that the j-schools tend not even to perceive, much less analyze.

– John K. Wilson, coordinator of the Independent Press Association's Campus Journalism Project  and founder of the Indy, where the interviews were published.