The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

First, some background. I am where I am today because of a series of connections and evolutions of interests dating back to when I first saw Broadcast News at 12 years old. It was that movie, along with Linda Ellerbee's autobiography And so it goes, that inspired a lifelong interest in mass media and journalism. It had quickly become a serious interest, the thing that most captured my attention to ponder and reflect upon, as well as desire to practice within. In high school I joined the high school newspaper and took an elective in television production. When it came time to apply to college, I only applied to schools offering a journalism or mass communications major. Once enrolled it indeed became my major, declared at the first possible opportunity, and along the way I dabbled with writing for the college newspaper, read the news on the college radio station, and interned with a television show and another station's news broadcast, remaining in fact with that newscast for a few years after graduation. It was only because, while in pursuit of my mass communications major, I discovered the complementary interest of information technology that my career path veered toward the tech sector. But where I am now, and what I want to do with my new vocation, all traces back to that middle school discovery.

I mention all this just to establish my ethos on the subject of journalism, because the last time I raised it I found my thesis was shot down in part due to the mistaken belief that I had none.

The thesis I had proposed was one I had based my college applications upon 15 years earlier: that journalism equated with teaching. As I explained to colleges why I wanted to come study there, and what about their curriculum I felt was so important to learn, I tried to demonstrate why I thought the course of study I intended to pursue was so noble. Because to me, there was little more noble than journalism. I cringed as media-bashing became the new national pastime. I lamented all the cynicism surrounding it. Because it seemed to me that everyone was missing the point.

It should be noted that 15 years ago was the first Gulf War, and surrounding that event there had been a tremendous amount of criticism directed towards mainstream media. It's not that I thought there wasn't room for criticism, but I felt that much of the anger was misdirected, where people didn't necessarily understand what "the media" inherently was, or what it was trying to do. Thus I felt that a lot of the criticism threw out the baby with the bathwater, because it overgeneralized "media = bad," without understanding what the inherent value of the media was in order to simply criticize where it was coming up short in realizing it.

That value, to me, was that media - journalism - was teaching. Reporters would learn about the situation, and then convey that knowledge to others. Is that not the essence of teaching, at its most basic? To learn about something, and then share that knowledge with others.

This past weekend I shared this opinion in a conversation with a journalist and professor. And both took issue with it. The professor, it seemed to me, took exception to the characterization of teaching. The journalist meanwhile took exception to the characterization of journalism. I admit, though, that I still do not understand their hang-ups.

Yes, if you lay certain instances of journalism against certain instances of teaching, they won't look the same. What it means to teach a law class, for instance, where the goal is not just to convey data about cases but rather shape students' mental processes is not going to equate to writing the police-blotter column in the local rag. Still, at its fundamental core, the actions are the same. The professor has inhaled some knowledge, and then exhales it through some form of pedagogy to his audience, his students. What the reporter does is the same thing - absorb information, and then share it through some expressive mechanism with their audience.

To the best I could figure out, one of the concerns that was raised was the issue of objectivity. Interestingly, I think the journalist may have felt most strongly that the analogy was poor because while teaching involved an objective retelling of knowledge, journalism did not necessarily. And I think for the professor, the opposite opinion may have been true. But objectivity is a red-herring. After all, what is objectivity? Arguably it's a myth. All knowledge is gained and shared through a filter. Sometimes that filter may have a stronger effect, but there's always a filter. Even something as basic as the language used to absorb the knowledge in the first place is a filter. The cultural orientation of the reteller is a filter. There may be a difference between active filtering and passive, with something like language being passive but something like a persuasive agenda being active, but it makes no difference to the discussion here since both journalists and professors are equally capable of manipulating the redissemination of their information in order to generate certain conclusions in the minds of their audiences.

The other possible objection I was able to infer was that because the form the redisseminations took was so different, that prevented the analogy. Engaging a class over the course of a semester is much different than writing a feature article. And of course it's different than writing an inverted-pyramid hard news article. But the form teaching takes can adjust to the content without it ceasing to still be teaching. A law professor teaches abstract material in a classroom. I teach mechanical skills in a swimming pool. Our pedagogical methods are completely different, but we're still both teaching.

Ultimately the reason the analogy holds is because it comes down to a situation, for both the teacher and the journalist, of "I know something, you don't - let's fix that." And both do.

Edit 11/22: A significant reason for why I think it matters to think about journalism in a more general sense - and less as a specific vocation - is because it matters for issues of things like journalists' privilege. When we discuss whether, say, bloggers should have protection bloggers may well be missing certain key hallmarks of professional journalists, like a salary derived from their reporting efforts. But if we make the comparison more generally, we will see that what amateur journalists do is just as important as what paid journalists do, and when we think about it in terms of that teaching role we will also see why it is so important that they all be able to do it.