JOURNALISM DEANS NEED TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL

Here’s one of the things that I learned during journalism school at Duquesne University in the early 1970s: Journalism and government do not mix, their relationship should be adversarial, and out of this mutual hostility would arise good journalism and good government.

My classroom lessons were fully reinforced by the unfolding of the Watergate scandal at the same time. The aggressive reporting by Woodstein at The Washington Post helped bring down the corrupt Nixon presidency.

Over the years, I have come to understand and appreciate the concept. It’s when journalism is not in-your-face skeptical of government that the country tends to go badly wrong as it did in the wake of 9/11.

My hunch is the same idea is taught at Texas, Harvard, Maryland, Columbia, Northwestern, Missouri, Syracuse and USC. It’s pretty basic stuff.

Unfortunately, the deans of the J-schools at those prestigious institutions apparently don’t believe it.

In an op-ed piece to the New York Times last week, they call for more federal regulation of broadcasting. They find broadcast reporting lacking today and implicitly argue for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s plan to force TV stations to set aside time and resources to cover local public affairs.

“In broadcasting … we do not believe that the market can be absolutely trusted to provide the local news gathering that the American system needs to function at its best,” the Gang of Eight says.

I’m not sure where the deans stand on newspaper-broadcast crossownership. First, they seem to be arguing against relaxing the rule, saying that TV and radio stations ought to be independent of the local papers. But then they tweak Martin for allowing crossownership only in the top 20 markets. “Don’t small-town news organizations need help, too?” they ask.

Perhaps, the deans need to stop by Journalism 101 for a refresher on clear and concise writing. (Sorry. I was also taught at Duquesne not to stoop to ad hominem attacks, but they are tempting.)

I’m not sure how to make local TV news gutsier and more serious, but I am sure that it is not more government regulation. It doesn’t counterbalance the marketplace forces as the deans believe; it simply adds more weight to the scale against good journalism.

It’s bad enough that news directors and producers have to cope with corporate suits, advertisers and ratings points. Now, the deans would have them cooking up programs and news segments to appease the FCC and every advocacy group in town.

Martin's localism rulemaking will lead inevitably to local news quotas, and those quotas will do as much for journalism as the FCC’s existing children's programming quotas have done for education. Zip.

And the FCC is not the benign force the dean seems to think. Each and every regulation is another chain that government can use to jerk around TV and radio stations and their owners. The regulations also stand as silent reminders for broadcasters not to get out of line.

The deans would never advocate government regulations requiring newspapers to ascertain what people want to read about and to devote a specific number of column inches to certain kinds of stories. They know exactly why that would be wrong.

Yet, they feel no compunction is calling for the imposition of the same regime on broadcasters.

They fall into the same trap that many others do: broadcasting should be regulated because it can be regulated.

By the way, the fact that broadcasting can be regulated is a vestige of a bygone era (the Roosevelt administration, for crying out loud). It should be eliminated.

Local TV news is what it is. It doesn’t fill all the journalistic needs of a community, but neither do newspapers or radio or magazines or the Internet.

TV may come up short in covering local public affairs, but it does a wonderful and indispensable job when wild fires ignite, dikes break and tornadoes approach.

Let’s just consider broadcasting part of the press and leave it alone, just as the Constitution says.

The deans have done much damage. They have put the imprimatur of their great institutions on restoring a regulatory regime that abridges the freedom of broadcasting. The op-ed will comfort FCC officials and other policymakers who may be having qualms about regulating media.

So let us now identify the eight: Roderick P. Hart (Texas), Alex S. Jones (Harvard), Thomas Kunkel (Maryland), Nicholas Lemann (Columbia), John Lavine (Northwestern), Dean Mills (Missouri), David M. Rubin (Syracuse) and Ernest Wilson (USC).

They are all highly accomplished with impeccable credentials, but they are all career academics and newspapermen. Not a one ever had to make a living as a commercial broadcaster. They don’t know what it’s like to be a second-class journalistic citizen.

On this occasion, they have embarrassed themselves and their institutions. Their faculty and students ought to speak out in opposition, if only to put some distance between themselves and the deans.

It would also be helpful if academics elsewhere who believe in unregulated media would also be heard. It would help undo the damage.

“Journalists are instinctively libertarian, at least when it comes to journalism,” the deans say in their introduction. They “like the conversation about journalism and the federal government to begin and end with a robust defense of the First Amendment.”

It’s the one thing they got right. They should have stopped right there.