Long ago when the world was young and showed promise, I was in charge of CBC's T.V. journalism training.
My job was to coach experienced, working CBC journalists. Take them away from the daily grind for a week or so, help them sharpen their skills.
At the time, the austere and venerable Globe and Mail was hearing vague rumours that maybe the future of journalism might involve more than simply printing stuff on dead trees. So the newspaper, somewhat reluctantly, sent some of its star reporters to CBC for training.
How to write, perform and interview on TV news. That sort of thing.
Among the chosen was one Margaret (Peggy) Wente, who even then questioned accepted wisdom with a wittily skeptical eye and now has her own must-read contrarian column at the Globe.
Wente recently wrote the column Educated for Unemployment aimed at "Dear Class of 2012." In it, in her customarily caustic way, she warns that:
"I hate to say this, but if your degree is in sociology, psych, art history or much else on the soft side, you are a dime a dozen. Have you heard of supply and demand? Sorry! You're on the wrong side of the equation."
Among the "soft side" degrees she lists is our shared -- and very troubled -- profession of journalism. And she has little respect for the Journalism schools that grant those degrees: "What these schools do not provide is jobs in journalism. That's up to the job market, which, you may have noticed, is undergoing an epic tsunami."
Peggy Wente, as she so often is, is right.
Canadian journalism schools pour out thousands of graduates every year.
If they're really lucky, maybe one in ten of these graduates actually get a job in the rapidly shrinking journalism world.
Many of the remainder, I fear, slide into public relations. The exact opposite of journalism.
There's more. Those graduates who do get jobs in newsrooms are desperate to hang on to them.
They hear the ominous, echoing footsteps of all those other journalism graduates living in parental basements, planting trees and pushing booze in bars while hungering for a chance to grab their jobs.
And they fear. Which, in turn, means that far too many of them simply do what they're told. Their first loyalty is to the boss. Now, journalists who do what they're told by bosses aren't journalists. They're employees. They don't buck the corporate system. They're part of it. They have little dedication to balance, fairness and integrity, and scant sense of journalism as a vital cornerstone of democracy.
Instead, they see journalism as just a job. Like selling shoes (not that there's anything wrong with that!).
Their loyalty is not to any higher cause, but to whoever signs the cheque.
At the same time, almost none of these recent graduates are ready for prime time.
It can take years before they truly earn the title of journalists -- by proving that their journalistic judgment and integrity can be consistently trusted; that they're truly servants of the people; that their first loyalty is to the truth and the people's right to know; that they're dedicated guardians of the free marketplace of ideas.
And there's one more problem. News organizations are lining up to save money by getting rid of senior journalists. But they seldom train graduate journalists coming in. They seem to believe that j-schools already do all that.
As a result, the entire culture of newspaper, T.V. and radio newsrooms is changing.
Newsrooms are turning into mere offices.
Staffed by faithful, fearful, obedient and inexperienced employees who do what they're told.
And I'm terribly afraid that without older, trained and seasoned mentor journalists with wide general knowledge and experience -- who truly believe in the honourable profession of journalism and its ethical base -- free and democratic journalism as we know it will slowly disappear.
And all our democracies will be in very grave danger.
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But it is also possible that the so-called journalists of today will be sidelined by the freelance bloggers. Without 'credentials', they'll learn their craft the way countless others did before we decided that every job on earth had to be attached to a university degree: by an on-the-job apprenticeship that can shake out the dross and give us back the free press we so desperately need.
Mind you - as with all historic processes - this doesn't mean we'll see it in a year, or ten or even fifty. Like all evolutions, this doesn't work on a schedule of convenience.
But when I joined the craft at the tender age of 18, I was constantly mentored by senior journalists whose creed was "this newspaper has two elements. Corporate and journalistic. Your only loyalty is to the journalistic side."
Not at all sure that recent J-school grads either learned that at school or, because of the dwindling number of senior journalists, any longer learn it in the newsroom.
Not incidentally, the half dozen journalism profs I know will tell you that they too are deeply concerned about the huge number of grads they turn out who won't ever get to join newsrooms.
They mutter darkly about universities caring too much about getting the fees and not nearly enough about the students' futures.
That was a postscript to my post following; but a postscript to it must also include the whitewash and selljob currently being done to "redeem" Conrad Black, who is one of those who made the system what it is now, and who encouraged the kind of journalism that now endorses his return from criminality to "worthy citizen" etc.....
And you celebrating the "contrarian" Ms Wente for her dismissal of "soft" education and then slagging survival jobs endured by all those who didn't do business or engineering degrees, those who wanted to be EDUCATED BEINGS, is part of the problem. i.e. making such values seem worthy, which they are not.
People "doing as they are told" is, yes, the biggest problem . But part of that lies in the way our economy and society have gone such that higher education now MUST be a business proposition, and job security a grim reality in a world of half-million dollar mortgages and the rising cost of living.....and the exploitation of student life as a money-making arena for the banks vs the European system where higher education is FREE and education in non-business areas is not looked at askance. The preachy contempt in columns like Ms Wente's, or spewing nightly from types like Rex Murphy or any other "pundit", is regularly given column space and airtime over people speaking rational, humane truths....
You are one of the few voices in this rag, or any other, that dare to say such a thing, granted and kudos to you for that. But the horses left the gate a long time ago and the race was fixed to start with.
Reminds me of the possibly apocryphal statement by owner of newspaper: "I own the damned paper, so why can't I tell the journalists what to do?"
Possibly from the notorious Rupert Murdoch.
As to where I was … in the trenches either practicing the craft or teaching traditional journalistic ethics.