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June 8, 2004

The big difference...

Continuing commentary on the new survey of American journalists conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press: Today's topic: Section 4, Values and the Press.

Earning a college degree places one in an elite class in America. While the bachelors degree may seem ubiquitous today, the percentage of Americans with a college degree hovers around 25 percent. At least since Watergate, the institution of American journalism has all but required a college degree of its practitioners. This means that journalists are different from average Americans.

I don't think there's compelling evidence to suggest that earning a college degree makes one more liberal or more conservative. But I do believe (without evidence) that four years of exposure to critical thinking of the academic sort invasively changes, if only in small and subtle ways, the thinking patterns of most students.

Journalism students (those getting a good education) get a grounding in the liberal arts followed by intensive study of professional practice. Even if the art and science of asking questions is not specifically taught, journalism students come to some understanding of how to ask questions and what to ask about.

Learning to ask critical questions is, as Neil Postman claimed, "dangerous." What he meant by this is that teaching students how to ask questions--and that asking questions is good--leads directly to their "questioning of constituted authority." This is exactly what we teach journalism students to do. And it's any authority they learn to question, including government and religion.

Education is a conservative enterprise in the sense that it attempts to reproduce the status quo. But it is also a decidedly liberal enterprise in the sense that, when practiced well, it teaches students to question authority. And this may be the biggest difference indicated by the education statistic cited above.

That many journalists consider themselves politically liberal or moderate (whatever those terms mean) is nearly meaningless to understanding journalistic behavior or the social and political values of individual journalists. I think the education difference between reporters--nearly all with college degrees--and average Americans--only one in four with a college degree--says much about any differences in social values that exist. Further, with education comes socio-economic differences. Reporters make decent salaries. And the higher they move up the ladder of influence, the greater those salaries grow.

Do not suppose that I am making a smarter-than argument here. Education does a lot of things to students, but making them smarter isn't necessarily one of them. I'd say it's far more certain that a college degree makes graduates think they're smarter, and this leads to certain attitudes and values. The economic success that often follows education adds to this illusion. And I have seen this again and again in my former career as a journalist and subsequently as a critic of journalism: Journalists are prone to seeing themselves as smarter than the public--an attitude I find completely unjustified.

So, it is not surprising to me that, for example, such a high percentage of journalists think it is unnecessary to "believe in God" to be moral. By virtue of their college educations, they have been exposed to (or should have been) philosophy, anthropology, and biology. They have (or should have) learned to be skeptical. This is not to say that education drives out God. Instead, I think it expands one's view of the divinely possible and allows one to resist dogma without guilt--that questioning I mentioned.

That's just one example (perhaps the most incendiary). But you may see the same questioning and skepticism at work in the attitudes of journalists toward any given authority. And this skepticism--what Postman called "the principal mind-set associated with the Enlightenment"--is a classically liberal attitude.

Previous entries:

Complex system
To be good
Information utility and the internet

Posted by acline at June 8, 2004 9:34 AM | | Spotlight