What I Think I Know About Journalism
- The more people who participate in the press the stronger it will be.
- The profession of journalism went awry when it began to adopt the View from Nowhere.
- The news system will improve when it is made more useful to people.
- Making facts public does not a public make; information alone will not inform us.
NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen lays out what he’s learned over the past 25 years. #2 is a favorite:
It’s Bill Keller insisting that “torture” is the wrong word for the New York Times to use in describing torture because it involves taking sides in a dispute between the United States Government and its critics. It’s Howard Kurtz suggesting that Anderson Cooper was “taking sides” when he called the lies of the Libyan government lies. But it’s also the reporter who has to master the routine of “laundering my own views [by] dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader.” And it’s that lame formula known as he said, she said journalism. It’s the way CNN “leaves it there” when two guests give utterly conflicting accounts.
I will be following Jay Rosen’s writing much closer from now on.
