Hard News: Quantum Faster
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Short version of the author's argument: unless you think like us and worship our ideological gods, it doesn't count as thinking. The experience of the "practitioner" is to be especially distrusted.
Shorter version: they didn't ask me.
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Short version of the author's argument: unless you think like us and worship our ideological gods, it doesn't count as thinking. The experience of the "practitioner" is to be especially distrusted. Talk about misrecognising one's particular discourse as a universal one, eh?
What in particular makes you say that? Where is the suggestion that practitioners' experience be distrusted?
What he says about training is that it omits theory (in his specialist definition of looking at how journalism practice supports established power) in favour of practical training. That might be right or wrong, I don't know.
I don't read him as saying that Media7's commentary is untrustworthy, but as saying that like fish who don't see the water they swim in, working journalists don't see how they are part of the very edifice they report on. The fish can still give a great account of being a fish.
(This too may be an unfair criticism he makes, but it's of a different kind to "don't trust them, it's not thinking").
Of course I may be more sympathetic because I have a reflexive belief that if Karl DuFresne is against it, I'm probably for it. But I think your summary really does misrepresent Phelan.
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In fact, we can simplify his conclusion nicely into something that I at least can agree with. Here's my 10% precis of his conclusion:
The academic study of journalism doesn't have much point if its insights don't influence journalists. Current journalist training, which focuses on practice, shies away from looking at the effects which journalistic practice has on society. Academic study should do more than just look at guidelines for practice, but also see how that practice affects democracy and supports a particular political order.
There. I got rid of the pomo name-checking, the academic apparatus, and the scary words, and what's left is quite reasonable. -
Darn you Judd, I was going to try and write a much more jumbled and incoherent comment to that very effect. Still, I'll add my 1 cent on the coattails of The Nailer. I only followed Media Watch for a short time on the wireless in its early days, essentially because I thought the critique was too timid, too episodic, and didn't really go to the heart of how the media work. Arguing that the training of journalists ought to include critical perspectives on the industry doesn't seem outlandish.
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That's more or less how I would summarise it too, Stephen. Journalism students could use some critical thinking, and what we now fence off as media studies, alongside their typing and shorthand. I didn't pick up that Phelan thinks practical skills should be reduced, but it might be that these courses would need to be longer.
Fair enough on that score too. I trained as a journo in 1992 at what was then Wellington Polytech and is now Massey University, I think, which would make it Phelan's school. It was a six month course. There was absolutely nothing about how the practise of conventional journalism relates to power, capitalism and democracy; mind you, there was just one afternoon on reviewing (guest lecturer, Raybon Kan) and one on feature writing. It was still very close to the model Trotter loved -- we were just prepared enough to learn the real basics from some grizzly old chief reporter on a community newspaper or small town daily.
I thought that Phelan's unpicking of the contradictions in Trotter's column was good too -- along the lines of, the anti-market Trotter expects the market to provide. I also agree that Du Fresne was unreasonably hostile to the Prichard press release about Trade Me -- in fact, the whole thing seems to have been an escalating series of over-reactions. Phelan himself might have over-reacted: I'm not as confident as him that you can take Du Fresne as representing the mainstream media response to the academy. There are other views in there. What about someone like Finlay Macdonald? Or Brian Rudman? Both would, I guess, have written more sympathetically about academics.
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One other thing I would say is that far from being hostile to academics, most journalists are very dependent on them. Think of how often you see some university boffin commenting in a news story. Rather than being obscure, these guys are relied on to state the bleedin' obvious, to say things reporters can't say themselves because of the convention of neutrality. Need someone to say that church numbers are declining or less people read newspapers than they used to or people are more tolerant of homosexuality than they used to be? There'll be an -ologist somewhere to flesh out that news story. And the universities like it too.
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what's left is quite reasonable
nice piece of distillation, Mr. Judd.
as a distant observer of nz news media, i don't think it is stretch to say that a lack of self-awareness of perpetuating existing power structures is rife. (sort of remniscent of the unreality of the 2002-2003 lead-up to the invasion of Iraq; the "big lie" m.o.; if you repeat some outrageous lie often enough, eventually it transmogrifies into "accepted fact", etc., etc., or even a Super City. not that i'm implying the herald and dompost are like the nyt and WaPo--that would be silly.)
ffs, people seem to have even started referring to "inside the beltway" like Welly is just a scaled-down version of Rumsfeldland or something.
just my ¥2 worth... -
The academic study of journalism doesn't have much point if its insights don't influence journalists. Current journalist training, which focuses on practice, shies away from looking at the effects which journalistic practice has on society.
But he never even attempts to demonstrate that that is in fact the case, beyond saying, effectively, "if the poor dears haven't read Foucault, how can they really know what's going on?"
Do you really think the students at, say, the Christchurch Polytechnic Broadcasting School, spend their whole year learning to work a camera?
Anyway, gotta make tea. I'll be back.
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But he never even attempts to demonstrate that that is in fact the case, beyond saying, effectively, "if the poor dears haven't read Foucault, how can they really know what's going on?"
eh?
nah, he isn't saying that at all. he says journalism courses need to:reflect on, firstly, how knowledge and power are mutually constituted and, secondly, how power relations are articulated through practices of journalistic meaning-making and interpretation
(from Phelan's paper)
anyway, his main method (imho) was to address what du Fresne and Trotter say, surely?
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"if the poor dears haven't read Foucault, how can they really know what's going on?"
Conversely, are you saying we don't need to bother our pretty little heads with important contemporary thinkers because we'll come to the same levels of insight in the course of our forty hour week and by being, you know, doers? That position seems equally worthy of sarcastic mockery to me. Dunno about you, but the stuff in Discipline and Punish wouldn't just have occurred to me, and it's not transmitted by cultural osmosis either. But at any rate what Phelan is saying is not that we shouldn't have practice, but that we should also have some theory. Pretty hard to argue against that, I would have thought. And the corollary of course is that theory is useful, otherwise, why bother with it?
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Thanks all, for such an interesting conversation. Sean Phelan's piece is written for an academic readership and thus has been read out of context by duFresne, basically for cheap sport. As an academic, I can appreciate Sean's ideas but I also think he could have expressed them in a slightly less constipated manner.
In all areas of teaching about the media (NCEA Media Studies; tertiary Media Studies; journalism training), there has always been a tension between a utilitarian, skills-based training, and what might loosely be called a 'critical analysis/understanding' approach. We encounter it in our cross-disciplinary Bachelor of Communication Studies. Management Communication stresses case study, replicating-standard-practice; in Media Studies we stress critical engagement and alternative methods of production. I have no problem with this, as it introduces students to a world of conflicting constructions, competing ways of structuring knowledge and systems of power--and interesting ambiguities.
Personally, I think some journalism courses could do with a bit more theory (aka interrogation of established practice; an open-mindness to contrary thought; better knowledge about audiences). The NZ Broadcasting School at CPIT does this well but other courses, less well. This is not mere conjecture as I have been involved with 5 or 6 different studies of NZ journalists, over the years. I also teach about television news (and favour Galtung & Ruge's ideas about 'news values') -
Actually, if I were going to make an offensive distillation of the piece, it would go like this:
1. Du Fresne is a lap dog of the establishment.
2. Trotter is a mutt, but he still expects to be fed.
3. Journalism schools are dog breeders.
4. Media7 are show judges - accurate and even harsh critics of conformation, agility and obedience, but not really questioning the fundamentals of the dog fancy.
5. Phelan is a snooty cat lover and probably donates to SAFE.That of course strips it of all nuance, but I think it explains why Du Fresne is very offended and Russell somewhat touchy. If you want the nuance though, then you have to put back all the exquisitely defined words and laborious qualifications that clutter it up so much.
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It was a six month course.
How can you learn to be a journalist in 6 months?
How can you learn to be anything in six months?
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How can you learn to be a journalist in 6 months?
it wasn't intended to turn out trained journalists. just people ready to be trained on the job. any longer and they might have started to read Foucault.
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SSC deputy stands down
By TOM PULLAR-STRECKER - The Dominion Post
Last updated 16:44 02/04/2009Deputy State Services Commissioner Laurence Millar has resigned after being criticised by an independent review of the commission's dealings with a privately-owned consulting firm.
The inquiry was announced in December, after The Dominion Post told the commission it intended to publish allegations about its handling of contracts worth $7.5 million that were awarded to a consulting firm, Voco.
These were to design and provide advice on a $28m Government Shared Network, a telecommunications network linking government agencies that the Government has since announced will be scrapped.
Dr Millar, who also holds the title of government chief information officer, did not disclose a prior association with Voco. There were ''numerous irregularities'' in the way the contracts were awarded.
Disclosure: I worked for SSC, under Millar, at the time of the inception of the GSN. I am unsurprised by the result of the review.
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What's so great about Foucault? I've seen his pendulum in Paris. It didn't make me feel any more able to criticise journalists. However I am convinced that the Earth does actually rotate about an axis. Perhaps some journalists and academics do as well.
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What's so great about Foucault?
The pronunciation? Otherwise ... not so much...
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What's so great about Foucault?
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Kyle -- you're exactly right. You can't learn to be a journalist in six months. We were trained in just the absolute basics, so that if you turned up for your first day at the Levin Chronicle and the chief reporter said, there's a cat stuck up a tree and we need 300 words by lunchtime, you'd have a rough idea of what to do.
That was 17 years ago. I'm sure -- well, I'd hope -- the course has got a bit more thoughtful now. It's not necessarily about reading Foucault, but some sense of different perspectives on how journalism works would have been useful. Even some basic history. Who was Woodward? Who was Bernstein? Who is Pat Booth? We got none of that. But it's probably telling that most of those who have gone on to make a career of it -- about four or five out of 30 -- came into it with a BA at least.
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Dunno about you, but the stuff in Discipline and Punish wouldn't just have occurred to me, and it's not transmitted by cultural osmosis either.
But you might say the same of classics, or physics. Or Hayek, for that matter. What's postmodernism's special claim on journalism training?
But at any rate what Phelan is saying is not that we shouldn't have practice, but that we should also have some theory. Pretty hard to argue against that, I would have thought. And the corollary of course is that theory is useful, otherwise, why bother with it?
Surely, if he's saying that, shouldn't he at least have a try at quantifying the level and character of theory actually already present in training courses?
There have been genuine concerns about the ill-equipping of young people for journalism in some courses. I know of one talented educator who simply wanted to teach journalism, but could only do that on condition that he pursued academic "research", so that the institution concerned could style itself as a university. He left.
It's probably imprudent to go into detail, but my direct experience with po-mo sorts in communications courses has not been productive either. I have encountered people who didn't serve their students well.
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What's postmodernism's special claim on journalism training?
It has quite a few special claims in terms of illuminating how integral to the articulation of power journalism is. But it doesn't have to be postmodernism, or Foucault - there are a lot of theorists that can be usefully brought to bear, I would have thought. Anything to raise, if only occasionally, the level of media scrutiny and critique outside of the self-contained world of academia in this otherwise fine country.
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I don't see anything wrong with the academic study of journalism, provided it isn't presented as leading to a career as anything other than an academic.
Come to that, all courses that purport to lead to "media" type jobs should have a health warning:
Half the bright young things in NZ want to work in media/arts/culture, just like you. There are bugger all jobs, and this course probably won't help you to get one. You might want to get a job addressing envelopes and making tea at a newspaper - that probably won't get you your desired job either, but it'll at least pay you some dollars. -
Anyway, it's not just boofheads like du Fresne saying so. Chris Bourke posted this in the comments:
Phelan's academic claptrap is a scourge upon journalism and writing. This kind of incoherent posturing also does academia no favours. It may pass 'peer review' - of course - but would it pass any kind of relevancy audit? Thanks for your hard work translating it; it should become a web viral classic and hopefully have an effect. Is there any single good thing that has emerged since theorists invaded journalism training?
Chris is an intelligent guy. He's not alone in thinking what he does.
Someone later justifies Phelan's writing as necessarily "complex" because of its subject matter, but it still appears to me that's indulging two pages of argument over 20.
It sometimes seems to me that this kind of writing, which purports to employ a wide and sophisticated vocabulary, actually tends to revolve around a very restricted set of jargon-words that serve more as a signal to others in the club than to convey real meaning. I do know what "liminal" means, but Phelan's use of it is really quite pretentious.
At any rate, the very last thing we would want young people in communications jobs to do is emulate such a style.
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It sometimes seems to me that this kind of writing, which purports to employ a wide and sophisticated vocabulary, actually tends to revolve around a very restricted set of jargon-words that serve more as a signal to others in the club than to convey real meaning.
The audience matters. In an academic context, like a court room, no unsupported claim or vague usage goes unchallenged. Those words do serve as a signal, but they have an actual function too. When I write for programmers and I use words like "orthogonal" and "idempotent" these are signals that I am a big nerd, and those words could be replaced by simpler phrases, but those words also encapsulate precise and narrow meanings which I want to employ.
I have no doubt that Phelan could produce a punchy two-page version for a different audience. You might as well ask why your mortage agreement doesn't say "give us the money every month or we'll sell your house" - after all, that's all it means, yes?
the very last thing we would want young people in communications jobs to do is emulate such a style.
No doubt Paul Litterick will correct me, but I bet that art schools have valuable staff members who nonetheless cannot produce compelling works of art themselves.
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