The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, journalism schools are bad for journalism

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

We have never been more polarized. Echo chambers promote information that confirms people’s preconceived notions, regardless of whether the facts presented are true. Which is why journalists are so important to a functioning democracy: we need them to cut through rampant misinformation and deliver fact-based reporting.   But do you need journalism schools to do that? Some writers consider j-schools a waste of time: they argue that four years of expensive education would be better used learning on the job, or gaining expertise in a particular subject that you could then report on with some authority.  Others argue the opposite: They say shrinking revenue makes resource-starved media outlets poorly equipped to mentor young journalists the way they used to. If you want a new generation of reporters whose work is rigorous, professional, and trusted by the public, journalism schools are essential.  Arguing in favour of the resolution is Kevin D. Williamson, national correspondent at The Dispatch. Arguing against the resolution is Christina Bellantoni, Professor of Professional Practice of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.   The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths  Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 15+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Producer: Daniel Kitts Editor: Kieran LynchBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You don't help the poor by making everybody poorer. The media has a frame, and the frame is Israel is the oppressor, and the Palestinians are the oppressed. I shouldn't be forced to acknowledge my privilege unless I desire for that to be part of my interaction with somebody else. What I know to be true and what all of my fellow Gen Z know to be true is that this is the most talented generation yet. With respect to every indicia of disadvantage, there is still a racial hierarchy. And though I am, of course, an Anglo. I'm certainly not a Fri-Saxon. Welcome to the Monk Debates.

Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day. Our goal with each and every program of the Monk Debates is to arm you with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Journalism schools are bad for journalism. We've never been more polarized. Echo chambers promote information that confirms people,

people's preconceived notions regardless of the facts presented, which is why journalists are so important to the functioning of our democracy. We need them to cut through rampant misinformation and deliver fact-based reporting. He said there was world peace in 2020. There was very much not. He said he won Wisconsin in 2020. He lost. He said the Democrats rigged the 2020 election a lie. He said people around President Biden cheat on elections. No. He said people's votes tend to disappear. They simply do not.

But do you need journalism schools to do this. Some journalists consider J-Schools a waste of time. They argue that four years of expensive education would be better used learning, reporting on the job, gaining experience in a particular subject matter that they could then report out on with some authority. Others argue the opposite. They say shrinking revenues for news outlets makes resource start. media outlets, poorly equipped to mentor young journalists. If you want a new generation of reporters, supposedly one has to look for those that are

already trained rigorously, professionally, in the ways and means of reporting out factual news and information. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we go deep into these issues by debating the motion, be it resolved, journalism schools, are bad for journalism. arguing in favor of the resolution is Kevin Williamson, national correspondent at the dispatch. Arguing against the resolution is Christina Bellatoni, president of professional practice of journalism at USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Kevin, Christina, welcome to the program. Hello.

Pleasure to be here. Great debate today, topical, be it resolved, journalism schools are bad for journalism. you're arguing in favor of the motion. So as per debate tradition, we're going to let you kick off the program with your opening comments. It was a 23 report from the Progressive Policy Institute that found that there were three administrators for every instructor on U.S. college campuses. 50 years ago, that number was the reverse. There were a lot more teachers than there were admin people. And one of the worst things about university-based journalism education that's provided a conduit for that kind of bureaucratic conformist politicized culture of the campus administration

to reach into newsrooms. And so unsurprisingly, we've seen some parallel developments. One of my least favorite examples of this is that in 2017, the New York Times had more than 100 copy editors on its copy editing desk, at which time it announced a plan to eliminate half of those positions. It has more people in human resources today than it does, has copy editors. It has more people doing non-journalism jobs, and it has people doing journalism jobs. So you see a kind of parallel there. This isn't a matter of resource constraint in spite of what's often claimed. A decade ago, the New York Times company had revenue about $1.5 billion a year.

Today, that number is close to $2.5 billion. So it's a question of where the resources are being invested. Education isn't job training. Journalists do need education, but they need education in almost anything other than journalism. They should be studying economic. or history or French literature or foreign language or history or science or something that would actually be useful and give them something to write about when they got out at school. Most of the things that people need to be working journalists are things that practically are

learned through a kind of informal apprenticeship program already. Someone who has spent 30 years interviewing people for reporting jobs and editing jobs and journalism internships and things like that, I have never encountered a journalism major who was prepared to be a working journalist. You can fact check me on this. I may be wrong about this, but I don't think I've ever actually hired one in all those years. I've hired people without college degrees. I've hired people who studied all sorts of strange and different exotic things. Journalism schools don't teach people how to be reporters or editors or photographers, which, by the way, we should note are very different kinds of jobs and the idea that one education program is going to serve all those different sorts of positions is fundamentally erroneous. What it does is teaches them to be members of a certain club. If you look at the university faculty, If you look at the leading newsrooms, if you look at the big foundations and support those, you will find a culture of political homogeneity. So in the journalism faculties, you have about 3% Republicans typically, and the data aren't especially good on that, but that's where it comes back, as opposed to Gallup found in its last survey, 47% of the population, either identified or lean that way. for top editors in America's newsrooms and American newsroom leaders also run about 3%

you see the same thing in the foundation world. I don't particularly care about the prospects of the Republican Party. I don't have a lot of use for those guys. But the fact that you've got such a politically lopsided culture leads me to believe that you've got a kind of bias selection going on there. And this has bad, bad, bad results for journalism. Thank you for that opening statement, Kevin. Okay, Christina, same opportunity for you. You're arguing against our motion today.

So let's have your opening statement, please. When I was 19, I walked into a newsroom trying to get a job. I knew what I wanted to do, and I managed to get a meeting with the editor. And he told me I would never be a journalist without a journalism degree. And I was studying English at UC Berkeley. And I was devastated, changed my major to mass communications, which was the closest I could get to journalism. And was really worried. I would never make it.

Not only was he wrong, but obviously I did okay for myself in this career, in part because I worked the entire time I was in college, all of the training I got was on the job training. I was lucky to have mentors. I was lucky to be able to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes and grow. One of the reasons that a journalism education is still important is because programs need to recognize that that mentorship ability doesn't really exist anywhere. There are so few news outlets that have real programs where you can take young early career people and train them rather than just throw them into something, give them eight beats, and hope that they learn along the way. So obviously, I'm going to talk a lot about our own program. I'm currently the director of the Annenberg Media Center,

which is the home to the Annaburg Media Newsroom, which is all part of one great big classroom where we will work with anyone. They don't have to be in a journalism program, but if you are in a journalism program, you're required to work there to teach you the fundamentals of reporting, writing, fact checking, researching, also understanding a journalist's role in society and the importance of being a critical thinking media consumer. All of those things are at the foundation of our program and of many other programs. I'm also going to talk about the importance of a journalism education in many of these programs across the country, these news rooms that these schools are putting together are the only source of information for the news deserts where they're

located in or they're partnered with professional outlets. They're doing work where other people are not looking. They are doing some of the most critical looks at their own schools and institutions. Many of the problems that Kevin brought up certainly do exist in higher ed. I don't view that as a journalism education problem. We can talk about that in the rebuttals. And then finally, a lot of these journalism schools do critical research that leads to a lot of the really important advances and developments and, yes, innovation, which we will speak about across universities. Thank you for that opening statement, Christina. Okay, chance for rebuttals now. Kevin, let's have your reaction to Christina's opening remarks. Well, as I said before, I don't think that there's any good evidence that this is a

resource constraint problem that newspapers and other media outlets don't have the ability to bring people in and train them, which is in effect what they do. There are a lot of, you know, high-end, particularly media companies in New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, that don't hire a lot of journalism majors that hire people with other kinds of education and teach them on the job. They can do it when they want to. They've got the resources to do it. It's a good time, revenue-wise for a lot of the media businesses, as I pointed out with the Times being an example of that. But there are others as well. As for the research stuff, color me skeptical. I can't think of one important media innovation that's come out of a journalism school in the history

of journalism schools, which is a fairly short history. I mean, we should point out that people have been doing journalism for about 2,000 years in the Western world, and there were no journalism degrees until 1903. Somehow we got by for the first 20 centuries without them. So I think that the of the evidence there that we need this to produce journalists is just nonsensical. There are a lot of news deserts out there, and there are a lot of news deserts because the local newspaper business was destroyed by the incompetent people produced by the journalism schools. Thank you, Kevin, for that rebuttal. Christina, you're going to get a chance now.

You can react to Kevin's opening statement or his remarks in response to your opening statement. Take us away. Yeah, so I'll go at a couple of points. One of the things that you mentioned were the political leanings of journalism professors. I don't have the research in front of me at the 3% number, but I will say that that is across most major universities. There is an issue with people not having a political diversity, diversity of political opinion on college campuses is actually something that we really work hard in our program to make sure

students are exposed to other perspectives than their own, particularly in Los Angeles, which is a bubble and a liberal college campus, which is a bubble. You mentioned the Dallas Morning News in your piece arguing against journalism education. And in fact, my students were the only people that were covering a primary there in the midterm elections in 2022. The Dallas Morning News picked up their reporting, put it on the front page of the Sunday Metro section. And by the way, that race ended up becoming a huge race that they had completely ignored my students covered it with Van Taylor, who ended up stepping down because he had had some personal problems. So that is one of the ways that we recognize that college campuses are not reflective of a greater society,

and that's important to get. I also think there is a lot of myopic thinking and a lot of the newsrooms that you brought up, especially on the East Coast. I spent the majority of my career working in Washington. I understand the Acella quarter and a lot of that group think. Much of it does come out of, you know, the Ivy League education that people have and a lot of people have the same backgrounds. That's not the case in the entire country. And I will say that it is extremely important to recognize that most of these newsrooms do not have formal training programs. They might have a small internship program or a small program where they take, you know, 10, 12 people, most of them with journalism degrees. And then, yes, they provide them some mentorship. But the on-the-job training

that used to exist at the beginning of my career in many years before is just not there. So here's a recent example from our school. Our students, they have a multi-platform newsroom, television, radio, writing, social media, all of the ways that you would get information to your campus community. Outside media was banned from USC's campus, as we saw encampments go up, just as you've seen across the country, with students who have pro-Palestinian views. They were the only people who were able to cover what was going on, both this newsroom and then the independent campus newspaper of the Daily Trojan, which is not formally affiliated with the journalism school. My students went live for two hours as LAPD came in and made 93 arrests on camera.

They were able to witness that. My students covered the pre-dawn raid of this encampment. No one else was allowed in. My students didn't know what to do when the LAPD told them they had to stay. in one area where they couldn't witness the clearing of the encampment. And thank goodness, there was a faculty member there who clearly and loudly advocated to be able to say, no, you are breaking the law. We need to be able to view what is happening over there. That is one of the laws here in Los Angeles. And he modeled for them how you stand steadfast for the rights of the press. That's something you cannot just hire a reporter

and throw them out into a community and expect that they're going to know that. Those are things that you have to go through formal training. Other things that our program will train students in. The foundations, again, how to be a critical media consumer, how to find and verify information. We know research tells us again and again, it's an increasing number, especially with young people, how many people get their news from individuals, right? They go to one television personality or one person that they follow on social media or, you know, in many cases, we've seen an increasing amount of young people saying they get their news from influencers. So if we train people how to find information and how to verify information, how to write

clearly and present facts backed up with research, how to make a compelling argument, how to tell a story using visuals. Those are things that are valuable in a journalism career, but are also valuable in this society. And those are all things that most journalism schools are training people to do. Thank you for that. Roboto, Christina. I'm going to join the conversation now. Now to think of some questions.

Yeah, go right ahead. I'm sorry. I don't think you are actually modeling what it's like to stand up for the press. As you said for yourself, the media was shut off the campus. The university acquiesced to a campaign to use violence and intimidation to keep reporters from doing their job. And now you want us to believe that you are the ones who are actually teaching people how to stand up for the rights of the press. That's really, really hard to swallow. I don't know where you get the word violence.

I didn't say anything about violence. I'm not seeking for the university. I am arguing why a journalism education remains. But the media was kept off the campus by what? By the university, not me. It was a university decision. All right, pardon me, then I stand corrected. So the university decided that reporters couldn't do their jobs,

and now you expect to be interested with future reporters that do their jobs. And student press were the only ones who were able to document and bear witness to what was happening on their campus. And why was it reporters weren't allowed to come do their jobs? You can ask the university that. That has nothing to do with this conversation. Well, it has everything to do with the conversation because we're talking about the environment in which these lessons are taught. We're talking about the people who make decisions every day about how these programs get shaped and who runs them. I'm one of them. I've served on the curriculum committee. I'm the director of the new room. And we go out there and we teach students how to cover and how to do what they're doing and how to do it right and how to be fair and how to make sure that they are talking to every person reflected in the situation.

that is on-the-job training that they can do as young people, whether they go into a journalism career or not. These are valuable skills that they are getting in a journalism program. That has nothing to do with the university is, in my opinion, bad decision to close its campus doors. That is not what we're discussing here. Thank you for that, Christina. And Kevin, we always appreciate the back and forth. The best debates are the ones where the moderator is conspicuously absent. But let's Let me step in just for a moment to think up some questions that are top of mind for audience members listening to this excellent debate.

Again, our resolution today, be it resolved, journalism schools are bad for journalism. And Kevin, let me come to you first because you brought up an issue of kind of ideological bias. And I think on many people's minds, that is a concern. They're concerned that the news organizations that they read and watch are not, in a sense, reflective of the diversity of opinion in society. And I guess I want to hear a bit more, Kevin, of why? you think that's a particular problem for journalism schools? I mean, isn't that just a particular

problem with universities? We're not debating universities today. We're debating journalism schools. So I think the audience would like to hear a little bit more from you to give that onus, that reason why there's something particularly wrong when it comes to the ideological composition of journalism and how it's taught in America today. Well, I don't think the fact that the arrest of the university is as bad means that it's not a problem for the journalism schools. But the journalism schools produce people who are supposed to work as journalists, which, as my interlocketer says, are people who are supposed to be thinking critically about things, particularly about how the media presents things. And this homogeneity really keeps people

from doing that. I've used the example of the Washington Post story, which I've written about at length and people can go look at, but you see it in other sorts of places, too. The fact that people spend all of their time around people who think like them, who went to the same schools they did, who belong to the same political parties they do, really has a stultifying effect on American journalism. And I think you can see it all over the place. You know, a few years ago, the editor at the New York Times said, we don't really have anyone here who understands religion, which must have come as a real blow to his religion editor and his religion reporters and the rest of his staff tasked with writing about that. But he wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong about

the fact that you have this very socially homogenous group of people who just simply don't understand a lot of the people they're supposed to be covering. And a lot of this talk about diversity is, I think, not really entirely honest or in good faith. If it were, you would probably see different results. But also, I mean, we're talking about me to take the example of USC in his journalism school, 10% of the board members have the same last name, Annenberg. What's that? An accident? No, it's a self-perpetuating social club. That has nothing to do with what this argument is supposed to be about. Are the foundations of journalism education still relevant in today's society? And the answer is yes, it's not just about job training. It is about the skill sets that can benefit people in a wide variety of careers. You know, you can talk about the New York Times all you want. You've also just spent a bunch of times saying that these training programs that supposedly are still robust don't look at journalism degrees. So which is it? You know, that is not. You know, that is not. You know, that is not about a journalism education. If you have some specific examples where you say a journalism

education is giving students a myopic perspective or leading to a lack of diversity in newsroom, please present that. What we see in our newsroom where dozens of languages are spoken, where students are really reflective of the world population, and they learn from one another from a very wide variety of backgrounds. You know, we can have students who, you know, Yes, they might be privileged, and we also have students who are first-generation college students, many of them, again, from all over the world. They are out there working with one another, solving real-world coverage questions. You know, throw out coverage of our own campus.

We cover the South L.A. community just off of campus. We cover everything that happens in Los Angeles, from sports and entertainment to politics, just nominated for a big award for covering the Republican presidential debate in Simi Valley, with students talking to people about why they were there and reflecting what they wanted to see out of the presidential candidates last September. So these students are doing real-world work with real-world impact with the guidance of faculty. And we talk to them about the value of outside perspectives that are not the same as your own. That is embedded into the core of our curriculum.

And again, many other journalism schools are doing that as well. in addition to covering their communities and providing the only news that people that live in those communities are receiving is coming from student journalists through a journalism program. We have students who are innovating each and every day to figure out how to reach audiences in new ways, especially when, you know, old people like us are still consuming traditional media and they're starting to consume media in other places, whether it's vertical video or from an influencer or from a source they don't even know. So all of those things are coming out of a journalism education, which I believe will lead to a better society, a better informed society. And again, an actual very diverse set of people that are going into news. The New York Times, The Washington Post, there's still excellent institutions in my opinion. But we're seeing students leave the newsroom and form their own companies, start news nonprofits, really look at partnerships with big institutions that are trying to cover their communities. and also going into advocacy journalism, which has fallen in both categories, progressive and conservative.

Kevin, let's hear a little bit more for you to respond to some of those points by arguing, in a sense, the essence of our resolution today, which is journalism school is bad for journalism. And what Christina seems to be describing is, you know, a good faith effort to try to equip young people with certain attitudes and skills that conceivably could help them in the role of journal. in their future role as a journalist. You know, why shouldn't we just take that as it is? It's an effort. It may bear fruit. Sometimes it may not, but it's a good faith effort to do something constructive

for journalism as a profession and an industry. Give us the argument why you think this is actually bad. It's not simply, I don't know, neglectful or some other attitude or chance. It's actually negative for journalism. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm, I'm willing to concede entirely the good faith aspect of it because I do think that there is a strong habit of indoctrination that goes on in these schools and the programs. For instance, I was looking at the diversity requirements and such in some of these programs, including the one at USC. And they're all pretty ideological, you know, putting forward a point of view that insists that race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, gender expression, and those things are really the central.

things in life would need to be talked about and not, of course, these other things that we've seen where the journalism schools, like the campuses and the newspapers, are extremely, extremely homogenous. And, pardon me. Where is that in our curriculum? What is that that you're reading from? I was on the webpage for your journalism program talking about, I mean, I can send you a link the programs. And I also think you probably don't take them academically all that seriously because these are some of the very few classes you can take on a past, fail basis, at least if I'm reading your website correctly. Now, there's another Annenberg School, the one at Penn, which I have a lot more familiarity with because I was a Newspirited in Philadelphia for a long time. And I interviewed, I don't know, probably three dozen kids from that school for positions over the years.

I never met one who could explain to me things like how property taxes get calculated or what an arraignment is. They had big ideas about these sort of, you know, social justice things or they wanted to talk about global warming. and these are all big issues, but they didn't understand kind of the basic things of how this stuff works. And so there's a competency issue, I think. I'm not sure you actually are teaching the things that are necessary to go out there and do what really constituted journalism for a long time. But also there is something else going on there, which I think is perpetuation of a certain set of social and political views. And I think that shows up in the output. I mean, if you have another explanation for why there is this great, enormous,

statistically unlikely political homogeneity in American newsrooms, I'd love to hear what the explanation might be. I mean, it's not the fault of journalism schools, but that to me seems like a very different argument. You know, you can have an argument against, you know, big college institutions. That's not what we're talking about. So let me tell you a little bit about our curriculum. For example, in a required course, which is part of a journalism undergraduate degree called reporting and writing one. It is not taken pass fail. It is very clearly taken for a letter grade. Students learn how to cover court hearings. Students learn about the FOIA process. Students learn about how to read a police report. Students learn the fundamentals of AP style and why stylistic is important when you

look at a news outlet and how news outlets vary on that style. They look about critical mistakes that news outlets have made over the past and have discussed over the years. They read about the consequences of being a subject of journalism. We recognize that a journalism education, you might have a student that goes on to become an influencer, goes on to become a sideline reporter for ESPN, or goes on to be a New Yorker, researcher, right? There's a wide variety of things that you can do with this degree. And I'm also not offended if people take this degree, which I find to be a valuable one, and don't do journalism. I'm not there educating students in these practices to be able to say you must go get a journalism job. We recognize about the economy of the media right now. That's one reason why we're

seeing so many students go out and innovate and do interesting work with these foundational skills that they come through our program to do. If you're enjoying the Monk Debates podcast, come over to our website at triple w monkdebates.com. That's MUNK DebateswithanS.com and check out our free Monk membership. As a complimentary monk member, you get all kinds of great perks and benefits, access to our weekly email, summarizing our best debates, and ticketing privileges at our main stage debates, special news information, and offers all courtesy of the monk debates. You can grab your complimentary monk membership again right now at triple w monkdebates.com. Simply look to the top navigation on the website and follow the links.

Thanks in advance for joining our community. Okay, I'm conscious of our time as we head towards the end of this debate, Kevin. Talk to us a little bit about the state that we find the media in today. Why wouldn't it be a good thing to have more people coming out of journalism schools to try to deal with all the problems that we know the media is facing news deserts, the lack of substantive in-depth reporting on our democratic institutions and how our political institutions work or don't. Why not just take it for what it is? More is better. There's a problem out there. It may not fix it all, but more hands at the wheel is better than less. Yeah, I don't think more is

necessarily better. I think the people coming out of the journalism schools are a big part of the problem. They're the way these businesses are organized the way they are. They're the reason. and the product is not better than the product is. I think that they do not learn how to be good journalists in journalism school. And I think that the state of the American media is all the evidence you really need of that. I mean, if we were producing generations and generations of people who were extraordinarily good at this, we would have extraordinarily good journalism. I'm not sure that that's actually the case.

I'm not sure that many people would look at their local newspaper today and say, wow, that's a lot better than it was 20 years ago or 30 years ago or 50 years ago. And this isn't just, well, the Internet came along and now we can't do journalism anymore, if anything, that should have made it easier to do things because we leave newspapers of the need to put printing and distribution at the center of their business models, which, of course, is very expensive and difficult to do. It's much easier to run a website and to distribute news digitally than it is to put it on paper. So, yeah, I think they're a huge part of the problem.

I think there are a reason for the growth in administrative blow. in media companies. I think they are a reason for the basic uninterestingness of American newspapers, particularly, where you've got people who kind of all agree about everything, who think about things the same way, writing predictable stories. You know, this is not true on the op-ed pages necessarily. There's a fair bit of political diversity in the op-ed pages of the major newspapers. Now, some of its diversity of mediocrity, like the Washington Post, has a very, very bad op-ed section, but it's got different kinds of badness in it. And so that's, I suppose, fine. The New York Times op-ed section isn't great either in spite of my friend David French being there.

But on the news pages and in the management where this stuff really matters a great deal, you've got just a tremendous, tremendous amount of group think. And again, I use the example of that that Washington Post series, because it's one that's very much up of mind right now, where you took a piece that was obviously conceived with an agreed-upon political point of view. This is the policy we would prefer. We're going to shape the story. story around supporting this policy. And they produced a bunch of journalism that was inaccurate, that was willfully misleading in places, that was bad on physics and things that are quantifiable, verifiable, questions of fact. This was pointed out to them again and again by me and by others.

They completely ignored it, never corrected it, won't appeal a surprise for it. And that's what American journalism looks like. Christina, a final question for you before we go to closing statements. there was a previous era, we know it well in journalism, leading up to Second World War and afterwards, where journalists were primarily people without college degrees. They were people that grew up in the towns and cities that they covered. They took pride in their blue-collar roots. Would you acknowledge that the profession really has changed and that it's become a white-collar profession, it's become a profession that seems to demand a college education? at least the vast number of its practitioners have college educations. Is that really good for journalism? Is that good for the diversity of news for the consumer? When we start to see, as we have now by the second decade of the 21st century, these class divides showing up inside your profession, inside journalism.

Yeah. So I don't disagree with you. These things have changed, and particularly on the East Coast and these major power centers, the newspapers that you are talking about, right? The Washington Post, the New York Times. I will tell you right now, my journalism school graduates are not in charge there. They are lucky to get one of the few internships or reporting fellowships for a year. We're talking about people who are older than me, who are in charge, who, yes, many of them come from those same backgrounds. They are not the working-class journalists of your.

We're in a different cycle now. Eventually, those people are going to take buyouts or retire or move forward. The journalism generation that we are training and that are coming up and doing, again, their own work, their own nonprofits, their own incubators, their own fundraising for, you know, ways to cover things. I have a student, he's going to be a junior and he started a college newsletter company where they try to educate college students about what's happening on their campus

and the communities around them. It's already got like seven papers, extraordinary student. That came out of his education and then he took it to the next level. These students are not myopic by any means. They are coming from a huge variety of backgrounds and they're helping each other learn about the world

based on who they are and where they are coming from. That is in part because we are one of the best journalism schools in the country and we attract people from all over. It's not just one area of thinking. And I just think while focusing on these newsrooms on the East Coast, you're leaving out a whole bunch of other stuff. University of Kansas bought a rural newspaper to be able to cover what is happening in Indora, Kansas, because that area is a news desert. And now the students are providing the most important set of news for that community. You know, those are things that have nothing to do with like group think or, you know, lack of political diversity.

I've always argued I've been a political reporter for my entire career. that you need to have people who understands the entire country and not just, you know, the 47% of the world, right? You have to have people that come from rural backgrounds, from religious backgrounds, from military backgrounds, and on and on. That is all really important. And so one of the things that we train people on young people, 20-year-olds, again, are recognizing that those perspectives exist and going to places to find them and not just popping in and putting a microphone on their face and saying, can you comment, but helping understand the community and get to know it. That's one of the reasons we have rural reporting initiatives and on and on.

It's one thing to say that stuff is important, but it is not the case. That diversity just simply doesn't exist in American newsrooms at almost any level. And I'm not talking about American newsrooms. I'm talking about a journalism education where we are training. Journalism school didn't start yesterday. You know, we've already had journalism graduates for you know, 120 years now going into these roles and this is what they have produced. So yes, maybe the students you're working with right now are going to set the world on fire two years from now. I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on that. But we have a long body of experience and evidence of dealing with people who have formal journalism educations and they

aren't very good at their jobs. Steve Hay is my boss at the dispatch except. Well, let's go to closing statements in this debate today, be it resolved journalism school. are bad for journalism. Christina, let's get your closing remarks. What's the key point or idea that you want to leave our audience with at the end of this terrific debate? Yeah, so one thing,

Kevin in his open room remarks, talked about hiring people and hiring people without journalism degrees and intentionally making sure they have other backgrounds. All of the people that I've hired across my career,

I'm not looking at what they majored in. I'm having a conversation with them. I'm assessing whether they can help cover our newsroom fairly, cover the newsrooms community fairly, and that they are bringing the best of themselves to the table, and do they have experience, right? What is that experience? Our journalism program, many other journalism programs, were providing them that experience that they're not able to just go out and get at a small town paper or a mid-sized paper like you used to just a few decades ago. So that is one important point. And I also, I would like to talk about two particular people who

came out of our program. I'm going to start with Sasha Urban, who graduated now three and a half years ago when USC got into some trouble because it had covered up and had not done anything about a campus doctor that had been abusing people. Our student went and dug deeper and deeper and and covered years of abuse from a campus doctor. He used our newsroom and the skills that he had learned in it to publish a deep investigative piece for BuzzFeed, L.A.ist, and the Annenberg Media Newsroom, all co-published at the same time, really scrutinizing the campus and its own university and what it had not done to protect these young people. Extraordinary journalism that would not have been possible without the journalism program. And then I'm also extremely proud of Rachel Scott of ABC News.

She's one of our most prominent alum out there working every day, making us proud on Capitol Hill. But I'll tell you, a very, very proud moment was when she directly challenged Vladimir Putin and asked him, you know, what was he so afraid of and why all of his political opponents were having bad things happening to them. And she learned that in our program. And then she went out there and she worked her butt off. And again, she is one shining example of things that journalism education is producing of people that journalism education is putting out there into the world. And I happen to think that's a good thing. and I will always advocate for that. Thank you, Christina.

Okay, as per debate convention, we give the person arguing for the motion the last word. Let's have your final remarks, Kevin, in support of the resolution, be it resolved journalism schools are bad for journalism. The late 1990s, I guess it was. I went to a conference that was put on by the student media body at my university, which I'm not a college graduate, by the way, I'll point out. Not everyone who goes to journalism actually is,

but I had to go to college for a while at the University of Texas. And it was the, I believe, the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the student newspaper there. Student newspapers are great, by the way. Keep the student newspapers, lose the journalism programs. I think that would be fine. But if you go to conferences a lot, you know, whether they're political meetings or other sorts of things, you meet a lot of crackpots. And this one particular crackpot was going on and on and on at this particular conference

about George W. Bush, who at the time was governor of Texas and was thought to be likely to run for president. And this guy had this really well-worked-out conspiracy theory whereby Bush was going to take control of the government and suspend the Constitution and institute a kind of Taliban-style government in the United States, but one that would be obviously Christian rather than Islamic. And again, if you go to conferences, you meet people like this all the time who are kind of crazy and crackpots, you know, have funny ideas about things. And so it wasn't that surprising, except that was Walter Cronkite. and he was the most trusted man in America. Now, he was partly retired at that point, but he was still working as a correspondent for CBS News, and, of course, was a very cherished and valuable supposedly figure

in the journalism program there. That's the kind of culture journalism schools produced, where this sort of thing is taken is just entirely normal. No one had a word to say about it. Everyone thought it was just fine, hunky-dory, and okay. When I was a student at that university and running the student newspaper, We had Liz Carpenter one time who came down and actually tried to get us to change our coverage of Bill Clinton, who was coming to speak on campus at that point.

This was a figure in the journalism school, someone who'd been a reporter for, I guess, the Dallas Morning News and then went to work for the Johnson administration. Which, by the way, any reporter that goes and covers a political convention and then goes to work for the candidate in that campaign the next day, that's kind of a weird thing to do. But that's, again, the sort of thing that seems to be taken is just entirely normal. respectable in the way our journalism schools work. So I think that this kind of overpowering political commitment keeps people from doing good journalism. It teaches them to be public relations people, which is something very, very different. I don't think journalism schools are giving people the skills they need to be good reporters and editors. Maybe photographers, I've seen some good photographers come out of some of these programs, but certainly not reporters and editors. And I think they are

giving them something else, which is political indoctrination and a set of ideological commitments that are ultimately bad for journalism. Thank you, Kevin, for that closing statement. And thank you both for engaging in this topic. With such civility and substance, it was appreciated by our membership. I think we all learned something, and that's the point of these debates, after all, to listen to each other, to open our minds up to opposing points of view and to take them into account.

So on behalf of both your efforts to contribute to our mission to improve the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. Thank you so much for coming on the program today. My pleasure. Thanks. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Kevin and Christina. You certainly gave us a lot to think about.

If you have questions or feedback on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. Thank you for lending your time and attention to our efforts to bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffith. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. The Monk Debates podcast is produced by Ricky Gerowitz and Daniel Kitts. Karen Lynch is the editor.

Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to leave a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.