Remedial Academy

Why didn’t we think of this before? All this time we could have fired those trained, experienced reporters who expect salaries and benefits, and then turned the news gathering over to these citizen journalists. We could have closed – indeed, never opened – 300-plus journalism schools. Let the students learn gender-based world politics critiques instead. You know, something more universally useless.  Simply put, every week we could have saved millions of dollars of precious advertiser money, and we know how critical that money is.

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Almost universally in journalism schools, professors teach you never to buy news or buy access to news makers. Never. Don’t do that. Yet, radio and television students dash out and go to work in their field and quickly follow their employers’ policies of buying the news. Obviously one of the reasons they do this is that these broadcasters are limited by the number of reporters in the “news center.” Broadcasters simply skimp on hiring reporters, and even then they seem to seek good looks more than intelligence.

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You can chalk this up to the grumblings of an old fart who refuses to see bliss and wisdom in progress, but I grew up believing that standing behind what you say, write, and even murmur was the better choice. If you write something, you should put your name at the top and be ready to defend it. That’s integrity. It shows you have fiber and strength. To refuse to stand behind your own words reveals you as dishonest and gutless. It shows you are at least a weenie.

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It is going to be tough for this new generation to carry the torch. Perfectly good kids say they have very little to believe in, that they were taught this truth by not being taught something else, and that they learned it well. As our education system bolstered the curricula with meaningless glop, the same system also retreated from giving students the tools and ideas for them to find something to believe in. So students now go to college and consider journalism and advertising and public relations as pretty much equal. They are not equal. How can you “believe in” anything to do with, for example, public relations?

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For decades journalism has been tip-toeing around any topic smelling like spiritual or religious matters. It has been an attempt on the part of media not to offend anyone, so it limited stories to bare facts — announcements of change of leadership, times of services, names of churches, priests and ministers under arrest, and occasional explanations, right out of the encyclopedia, of a few crucial beliefs. That must change, and it is changing.

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The man in the water did the right thing, gave the ultimate gift, and did not have time to weigh the options. He did the right thing because he already knew and lived by a value system ingrained in his life. His ethic was clear: He valued most highly the lives of his fellow human beings. That value, among others, certainly, became the heart of his ethics.

This podcast discusses media ethics but does not provide dozens and dozens of rules. For the best code, go here:  http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

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By looking over the horizon, I mean to look carefully through the evidence available today, finding the patterns often readily visible, and reporting the consequences, the inferences your examination produces. Go to experts and present what you’ve found and get their considered evaluations, too. While it is unlikely you’ll find patterns experts have not yet seen, it does happen. In either case they will be thrilled to discuss them with the reporter who has revealed a mind behind the face.

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I’m always rather pleased with the competence of news people. They might be idiots, however, and I’m just comfortable talking with them. But today we’re not in good economic times while newspapers and magazines have been in a depression for several years. Their answer to tight money, disappearing advertising, and declining circulations is to buy out the expensive veteran news staff and replace them with younger, greener people. Many medium sized newspapers use nothing but college interns to report on the same complex stories veterans used to cover. The point here is that the competence of the news media just ain’t what it used to be a mere five years ago. While this is great news for college journalism programs, it is bad news for American readers.

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But the declining price spiral tends to feed on itself, and over a few months the robust, healthy economy of old now has pneumonia. Worse, nobody seems to know how to fix it. Now what we have is deflation, and that economic condition is deadly. In my estimate, that’s what we shall soon experience in America, and it won’t be any fun at all. Let us hope that people smarter than me are working on this. Deflation is best remedied in advance, but while that’s true, it’s easier to control inflation than deflation. Deflation leads to despair, economic ruin, bread lines, and depression, aptly named psychologically and economically.

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Good writers teach you how to shape stories. They select verbs with precision. They splash scenes together and make it look easy. I told them to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Read well-written books on history, economics, physics, politics. Read, read, read. Albert Einstein and John Kenneth Galbraith are among the clearest writers I’ve encountered, and if you don’t know who they are, please find out.

Read like an English major.

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